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WAS THE WALTER CRONKITE PHENOMENON GOOD FOR DEMOCRACY?
Walter Cronkite was a figure of quasi-religious stature for an older generation of journalists, not simply because he was a good reporter, but because of the trust he engendered in his audience and, if we're being honest, the outsize influence his views had on the country. Still, there's something that bugs me about Cronkite worship, and I think it has a great deal to do with this anecdote, after Cronkite basically said the Vietnam war couldn't be won:
In a famous reaction, President Lyndon B. Johnson told his aides, "If I've lost Walter Cronkite, I've lost middle America." Subsequently, he decided not to run for reelection.
I say this as someone who wasn't alive during the Vietnam War, but who doesn't harbor any misplaced sentimentality about our ability to succeed there: I don't think it's a good thing for any one human being in a democracy to have that kind of influence. I think it's overstating things to suggest that Johnson failed to run just because of Cronkite, or that Cronkite single-handedly changed public opinion on the war, but think ultimately democracy suffers when one person has the kind of power being alluded to here, even if it's somewhat overstated.
The line is that Cronkite was admired as much for his honesty as for his influence. But given the press' inability to take a similarly adversarial relationship with the Bush administration over the last eight years, I think the truth is that most journalists who revere Cronkite wish they had his ratings and his stature, and could care less about replicating his honesty; after all, Cronkite was a dyed- in-the-wool liberal, and we don't take those very seriously these days. Watching the coverage of his death, I can't help but feel like reporters are admiring Cronkite the phenomenon, not Cronkite the reporter. Honestly, I think it's probably for the best that people are more skeptical of reporters than they once were. Our job is to find, verify, and publish the facts, not to be loved for it. Trust is a means to an end, not an end in itself.
-- A. Serwer
COMMENTS (7)
Adam:
Respectfully, you can't have it both ways. If you have totally honest believable members of the media, then they will have influence. Cronkite, while by today's standards, is sadly an anachronism, but was percieved by most of the American public as totally trusworthy.
Thus, he had credibility. Had he ever been called out as a hack or liar, his credibility would have been shattered. And his only agenda seemed to be 'the truth'.
If he really did have that much influence with the viewers and readers, it because of that perception of telling the truth.
If we had a media figure like that today, they would be trusted too. Not like Cronkite was, those days are gone forever. And not in the ideological "I believe everything Rush says" blindness either. But trusted news folks are believed. Christiane Amanpour come to mind in that regard.
Posted by: Stephen Anderson | July 20, 2009 5:44 PM
What that commentary did was give credibility to all those who were protesting the war. Suddenly they weren't just punk hippies.
Posted by: Linkmeister | July 20, 2009 6:11 PM
@Linkmeister, sadly what it did was probably just elongate the war which continued for 7 more years. I know counterfactuals are debatable by their very nature, but somehow I believe that a second (third? 2.5th?) term LBJ would have finished wrapping up the Vietnam fiasco. Instead, we got Nixon, and seemingly because of Cronkite. Oh the irony.
Posted by: Abhinav | July 20, 2009 8:46 PM
You misunderstand Johnson's comment. He didn't mean that Cronkite was influential with middle America. He meant that Cronkite was typical of middle America. In the current jargon, Cronkite was a lagging indicator.
Posted by: Bloix | July 20, 2009 9:01 PM
I have been waiting for someone to note (and no one has, as far as I have seen) the context for Cronkite's view of the Vietnam War's unwinnability.
After the Tet Offensive in January, 1968, when the North Vietnamess were able to get all the way to the doorstep of the American Embassy in South Vietnam, despite persistent public pronouncements that the war was nearly won, there were really only two choices left. Either the U.S. government was lying, and the strength of the North Vietnamese army was much greater than the U.S. had been admitting in public for quite some time, or the U.S. government was culpably, embarrassingly, misinformed as to the strength of the enemy.
Walter Cronkite did not walk on to a pristine battlefield and pronounce a neutral judgment. He noted aloud, at a crucial time, when it still had the potential to make a difference, that this particular emperor had no clothes. LBJ's acknowledgement of the pronouncement's power had little to do with W. Cronkite's disproportionate influence over a democratic electorate, and much to do with his own realization that no one believed what his administration had to say about the status of the war effort any longer.
Cronkite did what a good journalist should. He had the power a good journalist should have, the power to say aloud what the electorate knows to be true.
Posted by: Ohioian | July 20, 2009 9:54 PM
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Posted by: wholesale jewelry | July 21, 2009 5:27 AM
Ohioian speaks the truth: Cronkite was only "say(ing) aloud what the electorate knows to be true."
Posted by: Gerald Scorse | July 21, 2009 8:51 AM