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2009-07-21 Home Front: Culture Wars
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The Cronkite Tragedy: How a great newsman helped undermine his professions ethos.
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James Taranto, "Best of the Web Today" @ WSJ
Walter Cronkite will be remembered for two things: a career that spanned six decades, during which he personified the 20th-century journalistic ideal of the newsman as an objective and authoritative purveyor of facts; and an incident in which he departed from that ideal, with far-reaching consequences for the country and the news business....
...in his own mind--and in the minds of many of his critics and admirers alike--the most important moment in his career came when he departed from the newsmans role to play editorialist. The occasion was a just-completed reporting trip to Vietnam, where he had reported on the Tet Offensive:
On his return, Mr. Cronkite presented a withering assessment of the prospects for a U.S. victory, one of the few moments during 19 years in the anchors chair when he swerved from his just-the-facts approach. It was said that President Lyndon B. Johnson remarked, If Ive lost Cronkite, Ive lost America.
At a 2006 news conference, Mr. Cronkite said, The editorializing that I did on the Tet Offensive in Vietnam and I think helped speed the end of that war, that was--that Im proudest of.
But Cronkites editorializing made him into part of the story. And Vietnam was not just any story; it was the central political and cultural conflict in America for several years beginning in the late 1960s. By taking sides, Cronkite compromised his role as a newsman. In the early 70s, on his own networks top-rated show, he was called commie Cronkite. To be sure, viewers were meant to take Archie Bunker for a fool, but the makers of All in the Family understood that their colleague in the news division had become a combatant in the culture wars.
Judged on his whole career, Cronkites reputation for integrity and trustworthiness was well-deserved. He was a great newsman. But his greatness, paradoxically, made the effect of his lapse much more damaging. It sowed confusion among younger reporters about the difference between reporting and commentary....No one doubts that Cronkite was sincere in his opinion about Vietnam, and the argument over its merits is beyond the scope of todays column. As a reporter, however, he had a duty to stick to the facts and leave opinions to others.
He almost always lived up to that duty, but the one time he manifestly fell short, it ended up having great and baneful consequences. Do you remember a few years ago when one of the networks declared the conflict in Iraq to be a civil war? Neither does anyone else. It was a transparent attempt to do to Iraq what Cronkite had done to Vietnam. It failed because viewers no longer trust newsmen the way they did in 1968. And it is a vicious circle: Without the authority that derives from that trust, reporters get careless about objectivity, weakening the audiences trust even further.
The glory of Walter Cronkites career is that he did more than anyone to earn his viewers trust and establish his professions authority. The tragedy is that he also did more than anyone else to undermine them. 
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Posted by Mike 2009-07-21 08:49||
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