Cronkite was a key figure in many ways, but foremost among them, perhaps, was the fact that he cleared the way for the mainstream media and the Establishment to join what Lionel Trilling called “the adversary culture.” Cronkite, the gravelly voice of accepted American wisdom, whose comportment suggested he kept his money in bonds and would never even have considered exceeding the speed limit, devastated President Lyndon Johnson in the wake of the 1968 Tet Offensive by declaring that the United States “was mired in stalemate” in Vietnam—when Johnson knew that Tet had been a military triumph.
“If I’ve lost Cronkite,” Johnson was reputed to have said, “I’ve lost middle America,” and shortly thereafter he announced he would not run for reelection. This was a mark of Johnson’s own poor political instincts—a president who thought a rich and powerful anchorman living the high life in New York city was the voice of the silent majority was a man out of touch with reality—but it was a leading indicator of how the media were changing. Cronkite didn’t know what he was talking about when it came to Tet, as the late Peter Braestrup demonstrated in his colossal expose of the scandalous media coverage of the battle, Big Story. But he knew that among the people who mattered to him, and who were the leading edge of ideological fashion, Tet was a failure failure because the war in Vietnam was bad, and he took to the airwaves to say so.
Well rest in peace, I guess, since you didn't know shit about war.
The good news the Podman reports is that the internets helped bring down Cronkite's clown successor.
When Rather attempted, in 2004, to bring down a president in the midst of a close reelection bid with a report based on obviously forged papers—a greater journalistic sin than Cronkite’s, by far—he was undone in 12 hours by a lawyer in Atlanta commenting on a blog and a jazz musician in Los Angeles with a blog who demonstrated the papers in question had been produced at least a decade after the report claimed they had. Had there been an Internet in 1968, and military bloggers aplenty, Cronkite’s false conclusion about Tet would have been challenged immediately; we would not have had to wait for Braestrup to publish his enormous book nine years later
Also he points out that the audience for the Cronkite-Rather brand of TV news flatulence has shrunk greatly which is good news.
When Richard John Neuhaus died, and Rod Dreher wrote something unflattering about him before he was buried in the earth, you jumped all over Dreher, decrying his tastelessness and lack of respect for the newly departed.
ReplyDeleteYet when Cronkite dies, and Podhoretz writes something unflattering about him before he is even buried in the earth, you cite the post approvingly and add a flippant, disparaging comment of your own. Consistency?
I was less than a year old when the Tet Offensive took place and J-Pod was six. So it goes without saying that neither of us talked to Walter Cronkite about the speech he made at the time. Everything Podhoretz writes is well-known history.
ReplyDeleteNeuhaus didn't make a point of lighting into Dreher on national TV. (would that he did)
ReplyDeletedo better next time, Andy. if this is the best you can do, why bother?