Just now I was over at TPM Cafe where they had a quote from the late David Halberstam that seems very apropos here. I offer it in the spirit of correcting the tone of my previous comment.

In Vietnam, the journalists were accused of minimizing the success that the Americans were grinding out, of downplaying the effectiveness of the overall American operation, and of seizing on small defeats to undermine the war effort. The irony of this, in retrospect, I believe, is that our reporting overestimated the strength of the Americans-which was military-and underestimated the long-range military importance of the political superiority of the other side.
...
The best of the military men there knew what was happening, knew that it was not going well, that we had not dented the other side's dynamic, and that we were fighting the birthrate of the country. What we reporters wrote then and what the senior military men would later write in their memoirs were strikingly similar.