10 January LA Times commentary - The Media Aren't the Enemy in Iraq by Max Boot.

... Administration spokesmen and many soldiers have been saying for years that things aren't so bad in Iraq. "If you just watched what's happening every time there's a bomb going off in Baghdad, you'd think the whole country's aflame," Donald Rumsfeld declared for the umpteenth time just before leaving office. "But you fly over it, and that's just simply not the case." ....

James Q. Wilson, a longtime professor at Harvard, UCLA and Pepperdine, published a scathing essay in the autumn issue of the Manhattan Institute's City Journal in which he complained that "positive stories about progress in Iraq were just a small fraction of all the broadcasts." He went on to draw an analogy with the Tet offensive in 1968, which the press widely reported as an American failure even though it was a military defeat for North Vietnam...

Actually, it's not at all clear that the Vietnam War was lost in the media. Reporters were initially gung-ho about the war; they went into opposition only after it became clear that the military and the Johnson administration had no plan for victory.

In any case, the Tet analogy is dubious, because it is hard to find any signs of U.S. progress in the Iraq conflict comparable to the devastation the Viet Cong suffered in 1968...