After the Tet Offensive, influential news magazines and newspapers, including the "Wall Street Journal", "Time" and "The New York Times", increasingly began to characterize the war as a stalemate. What shocked and dismayed the American public was the realization that either it had been lied to or that the American military command had been dangerously overoptimistic in its appraisal of the situation in Vietnam. The public could not understand how such an attack was possible after being told for several years that victory was just around the corner. The Tet Offensive came to embody the growing credibility gap at the heart of U.S. government statements. These realizations and changing attitudes forced the American public (and politicians) to face hard realities and to reexamine their position in Southeast Asia. Moreover, the U.S. media coverage made it even more clear that an overall victory in Vietnam was not imminent. It also massively weakened the domestic support for the Johnson administration at the time. The days of an open-ended commitment to the conflict were over.