Cannoneer,

I recommend that you find William Hammond's "The Press in Vietnam as Agent of Defeat: A Critical Examination." It provides a look at the argument that the media was responsible for a major portion of our defeat in Vietnam and decouples causation.

A more recent look at war and the media can be found in a not too old article in Parameters, http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/P...mer/darley.pdf. I've excerpted a portion of the article that addresses a small portion of Hammond's argument.

William Hammond, regarded by many as the premier authority on military and media relations during the VietnamWar, also concluded that there was little evidence to support a causal relationship between the tone of editorial reporting and the general public opinion. However, he does suggest that there was evidence to support a causal relationship between the factual content of information communicated through the media and shifts in public opinion, often in ways critics of the media might not expect. For example, he notes the following with regard to public opinion polls taken during and immediately following the Tet Offensive in January 1968, widely and wrongly asserted by many to have been a decisive turning point marking the final irrevocable downturn in public support for continuation of the war:

Whatever the pessimism of the press, however, the majority of Americans went their own way. Queried by the Gallup Poll on whether they considered the war a mistake, 45 percent responded “yes,” the same percentage as in December 1965; 43 percent said “no,” a drop of 3 points; and 12 percent had no opinion. Even more telling, the number of those who considered themselves “hawks” on the war rose 4 percentage points between December and February, while those who saw themselves as “doves” fell by the same percentage. The number of those expressing confidence in the government’s military policies in South Vietnam rose from 61 to 74 percent. Queried by Louis Harris on whether a bombing halt would hasten the chances for peace, 71 percent of respondents favored continuing the bombing, a rise of 8 points over the previous October, while the number of those favoring a halt fell from 26 to 18 percent.3
Thus, if Hammond’s interpretation of polling is a correct analysis of US domestic public opinion through the first part of 1968, the factual content
of media reports, in most cases accompanied by editorial content opposing
the war, evoked in a significant segment of the US public a desire for
more—not less—aggressive and decisive action to finish the war on terms favorable to the United States. Hammond goes on to note the following:

If Americans were unwilling to repudiate the war, they nonetheless appearedincreasingly dissatisfied with their President. Willing to back any decision he made, they saw little forward motion on his part. . . . The air of indecision that hung about his policies as a result took a toll on his standing in the polls, where disapproval of his handling of the war rose from 47 to 63 percent by the end of February. . . . If the gloomy reporting of the press had little effect on American public opinion, it nonetheless reinforced doubts already circulating within the Johnson Administration.