I know Russia had false propaganda campaigns aimed against the US, but has a similar thing been done in the US? I'm looking for examples of an exaggeration of a US victory. A time when the government censored the truth to keep the public calm.
Such as the Cuban missile crisis, it is not well known that the missiles in Cuba were removed by Russia only under the terms that the US would also remove their missiles in Turkey. Most assume that the US came out as the victor in the situation, while in reality, it was a mutual agreement between the two nations.
What I'm looking for is maybe a newspaper or some sort of example of the sort published around the cold war era that hides the truth from the American people by lying about an American victory. if necessary it could be from almost any period in time, and from any country, but my focus is on the cold war.
I posted this before on r/coldwar but received no answer
As far as I am aware there was never a domestic news source owned and operated by the federal government for the purposes of manipulating or censoring news for the purpose you ask.
The opposite is in fact true, publicly funded media like NPR and PBS only receive indirect funding from the government through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting that is appropriated years in advance.
During the Cold War the US began funding, and continues to fund, Voice of America and other news organizations like Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
VOA is [required by law] (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_of_America) to, "serve as a consistently reliable and authoritative source of news" and "be accurate, objective and comprehensive"
RRE/RL has no such requirement but neither VOA nor RFE/RL are designed to be for a domestic audience.
During WWII the government censored the press on issues regarding the war, but the government did not create it's own publication for a civilian audience.
Government control of the news was comprehensive. All news about the war had to pass through the Office of War Information (OWI). A “Code of Wartime Practices for the American Press” was issued on Jan 15, 1942 giving strict instructions on proper handling of news. The code was voluntarily adopted by all of the major news organizations and implemented by the more than 1,600 members of the press accredited by the armed forces during the war.
Fewer reporters were embedded during the Korean and Vietnam wars, and censorship was harder to enforce. The media is one of the reasons the American public turned against the Vietnam War including and especially a 1968 editorial comment made by [Walter Cronkite] (http://npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106775685).
If you're asking, has the US government lied or misled or misrepresented itself in the effort to look better... the answer is obviously yes. I mean, a million times over. Cuban Missile Crisis is one nice example but there are a million examples one could look at, large and small.
If you're asking, has the US government deliberately altered the press in a heavy-handed way... because the press has relatively strong freedoms in the United States it is quite hard to impose direct government censorship. During times of war this has been sometimes done, either in a heavy-handed way (the Espionage Act in World War I was actively used to crush newspapers that opposed US entry into the war) or a more "voluntary" way (in WWII there was voluntary press censorship that didn't always work, but more often than not the press cooperated with requests).
Anyway, this has a "fishing" quality to it, but there are a million examples one could pick from. The easiest and most blatant approach is how the Johnson administration handled the Vietnam War — they went out of their way to make it look like everything was going swimmingly when in fact things were quite grim.