Days after its sister newscast NBC Nightly News bemoaned tariffs hitting Chinese slave labor-linked shopping apps Temu and Shein, NBC’s Today sent Beijing-based correspondent Janis Mackey Frayer to gallivant around Vietnam for the communist regime’s propaganda parade marking the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, a shameful scar on the country that’d be repeated in 2021 with Afghanistan.
The networks have done this in the past, but there was no mention of the millions dead at the hands communist dictator Ho Chi Minh — either in camps, executions, or while at sea trying to flee — after the U.S. evacuated remaining forces and personnel when the North Vietnamese army crashed through the gates of the South Vietnamese presidential palace on April 30, 1975.
Instead, it was mostly hunky dory. Co-host Craig Melvin had the first of two teases: “Coming up on a very busy Wednesday morning, we’re going to look back on the fall of Saigon and the end of the Vietnam War some 50 years later. A live report from Ho Chi Minh City just ahead.”
Co-host Savannah Guthrie had the other, saying in-between a soundbite from a 1975 news report: “Plus, 50 years later, we look back at the fall of Saigon…The historic milestone marking the end of the Vietnam War, and we are there live.”
Later, Melvin tossed to Frayer like this was something to celebrate: “Meanwhile this morning, Vietnam is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the end of the war and they’re celebrating with a military parade and a focus on a peaceful future. The fall of Saigon marked the end of a Vietnam that was divided between the Communist north and U.S.-allied south.”
Frayer kept the triumphant mood going:
It was here on April 30, 1975 that North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops rolled into this city as the last Americans were being air-lifted out and the Vietnam war came to an end. 50 years after the fall of Saigon, a victory parade where spectators waited overnight to witness history. Every year, Liberation Day — as it’s called here — is marked with celebration and this is their biggest yet to commemorate not only the communists’ victory in Vietnam, but America’s defeat. The events included helicopters and jets over the palace where, 50 years ago, a tank smashing the gate ended the war that killed millions of Vietnamese and 50,000 U.S. troops. For the U.S., the fighting came down to a last desperate airlift from the U.S. Embassy here.
She then met with a South Vietnamese Army veteran who doubled as a U.S. interpreter, saying he “wasn’t able to escape” after the war and “now blind.” No word on why he’s blind or what his life was like in the 50 years since!
The only thing we did learn? That he requested Frayer and the NBC crew bring him a can of Coca-Cola because he had not had one in 40 years.
Once she admitted the country is “still changing” since “most of the country’s population born after the fighting stopped,” Frayer saved the only negative comments for….the United States of America:
FRAYER: After serving here in the 1970s, reconciliation lured U.S. veteran Matthew Keenan to come back. He volunteers at a center for victims of Agent Orange, a chemical sprayed by U.S. forces here that he believes caused his own cancer.
MATTHEW KEENAN: They cannot explain why they have a problem they can’t explain about toxic chemicals. I can, and I do that for them.
Only towards the end did Frayer arrive at a more apt view: “While old wounds still linger, today Vietnam and Americans here are no longer enemies. The war pushing further into history.”
Back live, she gushed that “[t]here were several U.S. veterans who were are the parade today, as well as journalists who covered the war back in the day and there were U.S. diplomats spotted on this stage” despite the Trump administration’s ask they not go.
Whether it was the AP falsely claiming Ho Chi Minh was inspired by Thomas Jefferson in leading Vietnam (with an iron fist), taxpayer-funded NPR touting a Time magazine war correspondent being a communist spy, the broadcast networks fawning over Barack Obama’s 2016 visit, or the endless lionizing of the era’s (liberal) legacy journalists (like here and here), the liberal media will always have a soft spot for the war that tore America apart.
To see the relevant NBC transcript from April 30, click here.
