Peter Braestrup

Who was Peter Braestrup?

Peter Braestrup was a correspondent for The New York Times and The Washington Post, founding editor of the Wilson Quarterly, and later senior editor and director of communications for the Library of Congress. Retiring from journalism in 1973, he founded the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars' Wilson Quarterly, and in 1989 moved to the Library of Congress.

Braestrup's 1977 Freedom House-sponsored book, the two-volume Big Story, criticised US media coverage of the Vietnam War's 1968 Tet Offensive. The book, which argued that the media coverage of the offensive was excessively negative and helped lose the war, "is regularly cited by historians, without qualification, as the standard work on media reporting of the Tet offensive". Notably, his conclusions are heavily criticised by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman who state "they [media reports] were generally less alarmist [than government reports].....The manner in which the media covered events had little effect on public opinion, except perhaps to enhance its aggressiveness" in their book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media.