Exactly fifty years ago, on Jan. 30, 1968, Americans turned on their evening television news shows and received their second shock of the week. Barely seven days earlier, the North Koreans had hijacked the USS Pueblo. Now, North Vietnam and the Viet Cong had launched a surprise attack — the Tet Offensive.

In this time period, Americans had no idea that news hosts were giving the news their own biased, liberal slants. CBS’ Walter Cronkite bemoaned the first reports out of the conflict, saying the American and South Vietnamese war efforts were doomed and thus succeeded in handing a huge psychological victory to America’s and South Vietnam’s enemies. In 1968, without any conservative media to tell the other side, the ultimate fact that Tet turned out to be a huge military defeat for the Viet Cong and North Vietnam never made it into the American psyche. Liberals in the media of 1968 had succeeded with their own version of the Fake News of the future Trump era.