W. Joseph Campbell

Posts Tagged ‘Cronkite Moment’

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Chris Matthews invokes the ‘if I’ve lost Cronkite’ myth in NYT review

In Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Media myths, New York Times, Quotes, Reviews on July 9, 2012 at 7:29 am

The New York Times lined up Chris Matthews, voluble host of cable television’s Hardball program, to review Douglas Brinkley’s Cronkite, the new biography about legendary CBS News anchorman Walter Cronkite.

LBJ wasn’t watching Cronkite’s report

Matthews turned in a fluffy review, published yesterday, that invoked one the American journalism’s best-known media myths — the claim that President Lyndon B. Johnson was dramatically moved by Cronkite’s on-air assessment about the war in  Vietnam.

“Cronkite never shied away from telling hard truths,” Matthews writes in his review. “Recall his half-hour ‘Report From Vietnam’ on Feb. 27, 1968, in which he declared the Vietnam War a ‘stalemate.’ It was a verdict the veteran war correspondent didn’t relish delivering, but Cronkite, who had recently returned from reporting on the Tet offensive, now believed that the war was unwinnable and indefensible.”

Matthews then repeats Brinkley’s thinly supported claim that Cronkite’s “stalemate” pronouncement had “seismic” effects.

Matthews adds, presumably as evidence of such an effect: “President Johnson reportedly said, ‘If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost the country.'”

But as I discuss in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, there’s no persuasive evidence that Johnson ever uttered such a remark.

Indeed, the president’s purported comment is defined by what I call acute version variability. That is, there is no agreed-upon version of what Johnson supposedly said in reacting to Cronkite’s “stalemate” assessment.

Other versions include:

“If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.”

“If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost the war.”

“If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost the American people.”

“If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost the nation.”

And so on. (The Richmond Dispatch in a review published yesterday of Cronkite said Johnson exclaimed: “My God, if I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost the country.”)

As I’ve noted previously at Media Myth Alert, if anyone’s words should be captured with precision, they ought to be the president’s. Especially on matters as critical as support for war policy. The wide variance as to what Johnson supposedly said is, then, a marker of a media myth.

Even more injurious to the case that Cronkite’s pronouncement was of great significance is that Johnson didn’t see the program when it was broadcast.

The president was not at the White House on February 27, 1968; nor was he in front of a television set when Cronkite’s program aired.

And about the time Cronkite intoned his “stalemate” assessment, Johnson was offering light-hearted remarks in Austin, Texas, at the 51st birthday party of Texas Governor John Connally (see photo, above).

“Today you are 51, John,” the president said. “That is the magic number that every man of politics prays for — a simple majority.”

I further note in Getting It Wrong that there is no compelling evidence that Johnson saw the Cronkite program later, on videotape.

Even if he had, Cronkite’s characterization of the was as a “stalemate” would have come as old news to the president. What Cronkite said about Vietnam on February 27, 1968, hardly earth-shaking, stunning, or original.

In no way did it alter the course of the war or influence American policy.

If anything, Cronkite’s observation about a “stalemate” was a rehash of what other news organizations, such as the New York Times, had been saying for months.

For example, the Times said in a news analysis published July 4, 1967:

“Many officers believe that despite the commitment of 466,000 United States troops now in South Vietnam … the military situation there has developed into a virtual stalemate.”

And in a report from Saigon that appeared on August 7, 1967, the Times noted:

“‘Stalemate’ is a fighting word in Washington. President Johnson rejects it as a description of the situation in Vietnam. But it is the word used by almost all Americans here, except the top officials, to characterize what is happening.”

So why bother calling out Matthews for casually invoking the central component of the mythical “Cronkite Moment”?

Doing so serves to highlight how insidious the myth has become, how blithely it is marshalled to support the notion that courageous and motivated journalists can do marvelous things.

Doing so also demonstrates anew that not even prominent and presumably fact-checked news organizations such as the Times are resistant to the intrusion of hoary media myths.

And doing so indicates that at least some high-profile contemporary journalists possess a shaky command of the history of their field.

WJC

Many thanks to Instapundit
Glenn Reynolds for linking to this post

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‘Getting It Wrong’ receives major shout-out in ‘New Yorker’

In Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Media myths, Murrow-McCarthy myth, Reviews on July 5, 2012 at 1:30 pm

The “critic at large” essay in the latest number of the New Yorker includes references to my myth-busting latest book, Getting It Wrong.

Cronkite: His ‘moment’ wasn’t so special

The essay by Louis Menand is largely a searching review of Cronkite, the recent, so-so biography about legendary CBS News anchorman, Walter Cronkite.

Menand calls the book “long and hastily written.”

He discusses in detail the so-called “Cronkite Moment” of February 27, 1968, when Cronkite’s on-air assessment that the Vietnam War was stalemated supposedly was so powerful that it influenced American war policy and moved American public opinion. The Cronkite biography says as much.

But Menand scoffs at the notion the “Cronkite Moment” was very important at all, writing:

“The trouble with this inspiring little story is that most of it is either invented or disputed.”

He specifically refers to Getting It Wrong in dismissing the supposed effects of Cronkite’s pronouncement about the war — notably, that Cronkite’s assessment prompted President Lyndon B. Johnson to declare something to the effect of, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.”

Menand notes that Johnson did not see the Cronkite report about Vietnam when it aired, pointing out that the president was in Austin, Texas, “attending a birthday celebration for Governor John Connally. … There is no solid evidence that Johnson ever saw the show on tape, either, though the White House did tape it.”

Further drawing on Getting It Wrong, which includes a chapter debunking the mythical “Cronkite Moment,” Menand writes that even after Cronkite “stalemate” assessment, “Johnson’s speeches on Vietnam … were as hawkish as ever.

“Not only is there little evidence that the broadcast had an effect on Johnson; there is little evidence that it had an effect on public opinion.” And that’s certainly true.

Menand also notes that the author of the Cronkite biography, Douglas Brinkley, “implies that it was Cronkite’s commentary that emboldened the [Wall Street] Journal to criticize the war, but the Journal editorial appeared four days before the broadcast.”

The Journal’s editorial of February 23, 1968, said “everyone had better be prepared for the bitter taste of a defeat [in Vietnam] beyond America’s power to prevent.”

The editorial was strong stuff. And it undeniably preceded Cronkite’s on-air assessment which, given the times, was tepid and unoriginal. Leading U.S. news organizations such as the New York Times, had taken to calling the war a “stalemate” months before Cronkite’s program.

As Menand observes: “In 1968, you did not need an anchorman to know which way the wind blew” on Vietnam.

Menand’s essay also challenges the notion that Cronkite was “the most trusted man in America,” dissecting a 1972 survey that rated the anchorman more trustworthy than the leading national politicians of the time. Not much of a comparison, that. As media critic Jack Shafer wrote in 2009, shortly after Cronkite’s death, the anchorman’s score in the survey “seemed impressive until you considered the skunks polled alongside him.”

Menand touches on Edward R. Murrow’s famous program in 1954 that addressed the smears and bullying tactics of the red-baiting U.S. senator, Joseph R. McCarthy. Menand notes that Getting It Wrong describes how Murrow’s televised assessment of McCarthy came “very late in the day.” By 1954, Menand writes, “McCarthy had been hunting witches for four years….”

He also offers a thoughtful and telling assessment about why media myths take hold.

“Journalism and history,” Menand writes, “are about getting things right. But the past has many uses, and one of them is to inspire the present. … More honorably, if not necessarily more accurately, we imagine our predecessors as nobler and braver than our small selves — as men and women who stuck up for principle and, by their righteousness, moved the world.”

That’s well said, and offers revealing insight about the tenacity of such myths as the “Cronkite Moment.”

WJC

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Further reason to pan Aaron Sorkin’s ‘Newsroom’: It embraces media myths

In Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Media myths, Murrow-McCarthy myth, Reviews on June 26, 2012 at 6:19 am

Aaron Sorkin’s preachy new HBO series, The Newsroom, has, deservedly, received some harsh reviews.

Among the most delicious of those critiques was the New Yorker’s observation that The Newsroom is “so naïve it’s cynical.” And the New York Times said that “at its worst, the show chokes on its own sanctimony.”

Naïve and sanctimonious: Two solid reasons to avoid The Newsroom, which presumes to offer a behind-the-scenes dramatization of a high-pressure cable news program.

Another reason to pan the show is its embrace of hoary media myths.

The embrace of myth came late in the first episode on Sunday, when Sam Waterston, who plays cable news chief Charlie Skinner, offers advice to Will McAvoy, the prickly and thoroughly unlikable anchorman played by Jeff Daniels.

“Anchors having an opinion isn’t a new phenomenon,” Waterston/Skinner tells Daniels/McAvoy. “Murrow had one, and that was the end of McCarthy. Cronkite had one, and that was the end of Vietnam.”

The references were to Edward R. Murrow, whose 30-minute program on CBS about Senator Joseph R. McCarthy in 1954 is often but erroneously credited with bringing down the Red-baiting senator, and to Walter Cronkite’s 30-minute report about Vietnam in 1968 which is often but erroneously described as a turning point in America’s war in Southeast Asia.

Both tales are media-driven myths — compelling and prominent stories about the news media that are widely believed and often retold but which, under scrutiny, dissolve as improbable or wildly exaggerated.

The Murrow and the Cronkite anecdotes are both addressed in my 2010 mythbusting book, Getting It Wrong.

I note in the book how Murrow was very late in confronting the McCarthy menace, doing so only months and years after other journalists had repeatedly directed attention to the senator’s bullying tactics and his ready use of the smear.

Among those journalists was Drew Pearson, an aggressive, Washington-based syndicated columnist who became a persistent and searching critic of McCarthy days after the senator launched his communists-in-government witch-hunt in February 1950.

That was four years before Murrow’s program.

Pearson’s scathing columns so angered McCarthy that the senator assaulted Pearson following a dinner party at the hush-hush Sulgrave Club in Washington in December 1950.

“Accounts differ about what happened,” I write in Getting It Wrong. “Pearson said McCarthy pinned his arms to one side and kneed him twice in the groin. McCarthy said he slapped Pearson, hard, with his open hand. A third account, offered by a radio broadcaster friendly to McCarthy, said the senator slugged Pearson, a blow so powerful that it lifted Pearson three feet into the air.”

That encounter certainly would be fodder for cable TV.

In any event, by March 1954, when Murrow turned his attention to McCarthy, the senator’s character and tactics were quite well-known.

“To be sure,” I write in Getting It Wrong, “it wasn’t as if Americans in early 1954 were hoping for someone to step up and expose McCarthy, or waiting for a white knight like Murrow to tell them about the toxic threat the senator posed.”

Thanks to the work of Pearson and other journalists, Americans knew.

Cronkite’s report about Vietnam aired on February 27, 1968, and closed with the CBS News anchorman asserting that the U.S. military was “mired in stalemate” and that negotiations might prove to be the way out of the morass.

Those observations were supposedly so powerful and insightful that they have come to be known as the “Cronkite Moment.”

In fact, though, Cronkite’s observations were scarcely novel or revealing. By the time his report aired, “stalemate” had been used by U.S. news organizations for months to characterize the war in Vietnam.

Not only that, but U.S. public opinion had grown dubious about the war long before the presumptive “Cronkite Moment.”

Cronkite’s commentary did little to turn Americans, or the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson, against the war.

Cronkite often said as much, likening the program’s effect on policymakers to that of a straw. (Late in his life, though, Cronkite came to embrace the purported potency of his 1968 commentary.)

So why bother about — and why blog about — the embrace of media myth on Sorkin’s tiresome, eyeroll-inducing show?

A couple of reasons present themselves.

The blithe, casual reference on The Newsroom to Murrow and Cronkite helps insinuate the media myths in popular consciousness.  It reinforces their tenacity.

Embracing the myths serves also to promote the “golden age” fallacy, the appealing but exaggerated belief that there really was a time when American broadcast news produced giants — hallowed figures of the likes of Murrow and Cronkite who, in the contemporary media landscape, are nowhere to be found.

It is an enticing notion. But it’s flawed and misleading — and vastly overstates the contributions, and opinions, of Murrow and Cronkite.

WJC

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A glowing, hagiographic treatment of the ‘Cronkite Moment’

In Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Media myths on May 31, 2012 at 8:41 am

The evidence that the mythical “Cronkite Moment” was of minor consequence is compelling and multidimensional.

The “Cronkite Moment” was the televised report in February 1968 when CBS News anchorman Walter Cronkite said the U.S. war effort in Vietnam was “mired in stalemate.” Legend has it that President Lyndon B. Johnson was profoundly moved by Cronkite’s assessment.

Among the elements of the minor-consequence brief are these:

  • Cronkite said nothing about the war that hadn’t been said by leading journalists many times before. By early 1968, “stalemate” was a decidedly unoriginal way of characterizing the conflict.
  • Public opinion had begun shifting against the war months before Cronkite’s commentary. Indeed, Cronkite followed rather than led the changing views about Vietnam.
  • Johnson did not see the Cronkite program when it aired on February 27, 1968, and remained publicly hawkish about the war in the days afterward.
  • Cronkite, until late in his life, pooh-poohed the notion his pronouncement had much effect on Johnson, likening its impact to that of a straw.

But little in the minor-consequence brief has kept historian Douglas Brinkley from offering in his new book about Cronkite a glowing, hagiographic interpretation of the “Cronkite Moment.”

Brinkley’s hefty biography is eager to find exceptionality in the “Cronkite Moment,” asserting that it “guaranteed” Cronkite’s “status as a legend.”

Brinkley, however, offers more assertion than compelling evidence in writing that the “aftershock” of Cronkite’s report about Vietnam “was seismic” and in declaring that the report “signaled a major shift in the public’s view of the war.”

As evidence of the purported “seismic” effect, Brinkley claims that Cronkite’s assessment “opened the door for NBC News’ Frank McGee to take a similar stand in a documentary on Vietnam that aired two weeks later.”

But as I point out in my 2010 book, Getting It Wrong, Cronkite’s “stalemate” characterization was “far less emphatic” McGee’s on-air remarks on March 10, 1968. “The war,” McGee declared on that occasion, “is being lost by the administration’s definition.”

So McGee’s interpretation wasn’t  “similar” to Cronkite’s at all; he didn’t hedge and invoke the safe characterization of “stalemate.” McGee said the war was being lost.

Brinkley also writes in discussing the supposed “seismic” effect: “Even the conservative Wall Street Journal editorial page said, ‘The whole Vietnam effort may be doomed.'”

The Journal certainly said so — four days before Cronkite’s broadcast. To invoke the Journal’s editorial as evidence of the “seismic” effect of the “Cronkite Moment” is misleading, to say the least.

Brinkley’s writes that “Cronkite had grabbed America’s attention about Vietnam in a way that would have been impossible for Johnson” to have missed. But, again, supporting evidence is thin.

Did opinion polls at the time suggest that “Cronkite had grabbed America’s attention about Vietnam”?

Brinkley offers no such evidence.

Public opinion polling about the war did show that Americans had begun turning against the war by fall 1967, well before the “Cronkite Moment.”

Specifically, Gallup surveys found in October 1967 that a plurality of Americans (47%) said sending U.S. forces to Vietnam had been a mistake. That question was often asked by Gallup and was a sort of proxy for gauging popular sentiment about the war.

In August-September 1965, only 24 percent of Gallup’s respondents said it was a mistake to send troops. Thereafter, as I discuss in Getting It Wrong, the percentage of respondents saying the U.S. military presence in Vietnam was a mistake increased steadily, reaching a plurality in October 1967.

That moment was 3½ months before the communist Tet offensive across South Vietnam, an extensive and coordinated series of attacks that prompted Cronkite to pay a reporting trip to southeast Asia in early February 1968.

Brinkley, moreover, dismisses as insignificant the pronounced version variability that characterizes Lyndon Johnson’s supposed reaction to Cronkite’s report about Vietnam.

Depending on the source, the president is said to have said in reacting to Cronkite’s assessment:

“If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.”

Or, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost the war.”

Or, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost the American people.”

Or, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost the country.”

Or, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost the nation.”

Or, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost America.”

Or, “Well, that’s the end of the war.”

Brinkley doesn’t interpret these varying versions indicating the apocryphal quality of Johnson’s purported reaction. He waves it off, writing:

“It doesn’t make any real difference.”

Oh, but it does.

As I discuss in Getting It Wrong, “version variability” of such dimension “signals implausibility.

“It is a marker of a media-driven myth.”

Indeed, if anyone’s words should be captured with precision, they  should be the president’s. Especially on matters as important as shifting popular support for war policy.

It is quite interesting that Cronkite never spoke with Johnson about the purported “Cronkite Moment” and, as Brinkley notes, the president had nothing to say about it in his memoir.

There’s little contemporaneous evidence that the “Cronkite Moment” was profoundly shocking or moving. Or seismic. But there are plenty of claims to its significance, years after the fact.

The “Cronkite Moment” took on importance not in 1968 but by 1979, when David Halberstam wrote in The Powers That Be that Cronkite’s report “was the first time in American history a war had been declared over by an anchorman.” Which was nonsense, of course.

But Halberstam’s over-the-top characterization signaled how the “Cronkite Moment” was becoming a memorable and supposedly revealing example about how journalists can have powerful and immediate effects, how they can bring to bear decisive impacts on major issues facing the country.

Even Cronkite embraced the presumptive power of the “Cronkite Moment.” It took him a while, though.

In his 1997 memoir, Cronkite characterized the program in modest terms, saying that his “stalemate” assessment was, for Johnson, “just one more straw in the increasing burden of Vietnam.” He repeated the analogy in the years immediately afterward, saying on a CNN program in 1999, for example:

“I think our broadcast simply was another straw on the back of a crippled camel.”

But in the years before his death in 2009, Cronkite claimed greater significance for the program. For example, he told Esquire magazine in an interview in 2006:

“To be honest, I was rather amazed that my reporting from Vietnam had such an effect on history.”

WJC

Many thanks to Instapundit
Glenn Reynolds for linking to this post

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Kurtz invokes ‘if I’ve lost Cronkite’ myth in reviewing new Cronkite biography

In Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Media myths on May 21, 2012 at 3:50 pm

Media critic Howard Kurtz invokes one of American journalism’s most tenacious media myths in a review today about the forthcoming biography of Walter Cronkite, the CBS News anchorman from 1962-81.

Out soon

Kurtz writes in the review, which is posted at the Daily Beast:

“As everyone from presidents to astronauts catered to him, Cronkite used that access to drive unflinching coverage of civil rights, corruption, and especially the morass of Vietnam — when his own reporting led him to declare that ill-fated conflict a stalemate. When LBJ said that ‘if I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost the country,’ he was acknowledging that a single newsman had the power to change a national narrative.”

It’s highly arguable whether Cronkite “had the power to change a national narrative.”

But first, that mythical “I’ve lost Cronkite” quotation.

As I discuss in my latest my book, Getting It Wrong, there is no compelling, first-hand evidence that LBJ — President Lyndon B. Johnson — ever uttered the comment about losing Cronkite.  (Douglas Brinkley, author of the Cronkite biography, writes in the latest issue of American Heritage magazine that Johnson “probably didn’t” make such a statement. The evidence is far more persuasive than “probably didn’t,” though.)

Legend has it that Johnson said something of the sort in reacting to Cronkite’s special televised report about Vietnam, which aired February 27, 1968. At the close of the broadcast, Cronkite declared the U.S. war effort was “mired in stalemate.”

Johnson, supposedly, watched the program at the White House. Upon hearing Cronkite’s assessment, the president snapped off the television set and declared to an aide or aides:

“If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.”

Or, as Kurtz writes, the president said: “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost the country.”

Or: “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost the war.”

Or: “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost the American people.”

Or something to that effect. Versions vary (and version variability of such magnitude is a signal of a media myth).

The power of that broadcast stems from the immediate and visceral effect the anchorman’s critique supposedly had on the president.

It is, though, exceedingly unlikely that Johnson had any reaction of the sort. After all, as I discuss in Getting It Wrong, the president wasn’t in front of a television set that night.

He was on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin, attending the 51st birthday party of Governor John Connally.

About the time the anchorman intoned his “mired in stalemate” comment, Johnson wasn’t lamenting any loss of support from Cronkite. Johnson was making light of Connally’s age, saying:

“Today you are 51, John. That is the magic number that every man of politics prays for — a simple majority.”

So it’s difficult to fathom how Johnson could have had much moved by a television program he didn’t see. Or ever discussed with Cronkite.

I further note in Getting It Wrong that Johnson’s supposedly “self-pitying reaction to Cronkite’s on-air assessment clashes sharply” with his contemporaneous characterizations of the war.

“Hours before the Cronkite program,” I write, “Johnson delivered a little-recalled but rousing speech on Vietnam, a speech cast in Churchillian terms. It seems inconceivable that Johnson’s views would have pivoted so swiftly and dramatically, upon hearing the opinion of a television news anchor, even one as esteemed as Cronkite.”

In that speech, Johnson declared:

“Persevere in Vietnam we will, and we must.” The militancy of the president’s remarks render the purported despairing comment about having “lost Cronkite” all the more improbable.

Even if Johnson later heard — or heard about— Cronkite’s “stalemate” assessment, it would have come as no epiphany. “Stalemate,” after all, had been bruited for months in Washington policy circles and in South Vietnam.

Indeed, less than three weeks before Cronkite’s televised commentary, the New York Times declared in an editorial:

“Politically as well as militarily, stalemate increasingly appears as the unavoidable outcome of the Vietnam struggle.”

The phrasing seemed to anticipate Cronkite’s on-air assessment, in which he declared:

“To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion.”

In any case, Johnson didn’t turn dovish in the days following Cronkite’s report. Not long after the program, the president delivered a lectern-thumping speech in Minnesota in which he urged a “total national effort to win the war” in Vietnam.

“We love nothing more than peace,” Johnson said on that occasion, “but we hate nothing worse than surrender and cowardice.”

So publicly, at least, Johnson remained hawkish in the immediate aftermath of the Cronkite program.

And as for Kurtz’s claim that Cronkite possessed singular power “to change a national narrative”? Cronkite, himself, didn’t much buy into that notion, not in the context of his 1968 report on Vietnam.

For example, Cronkite said in 1997 in promoting his memoir that the program’s effect on Johnson was akin to “a very small straw on a very heavy load he was already carrying.” Hardly narrative-changing.

(In the years just before his death in 2009, Cronkite did begin to embrace the purported impact of his 1968 program.)

In any event, public opinion polls indicated that Americans were turning against the Vietnam War by autumn 1967, well before the Cronkite report.

As Daniel C. Hallin memorably wrote in the former Media Studies Journal in 1998:

“Lyndon Johnson had essentially lost Mr. Average Citizen months before Cronkite’s broadcast.”

WJC

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Cronkite biographer on the ‘Cronkite Moment’: A bit muddled

In Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Media myths on May 20, 2012 at 8:53 am

Historian Douglas Brinkley will be out soon with an 800-page biography of Walter Cronkite, the prominent CBS News anchorman from 1962-1981.

In a cover story in the latest issue of American Heritage, Brinkley indicates how his biography will treat the mythical “Cronkite Moment” of 1968, when the anchorman’s televised “mired in stalemate” assessment about the Vietnam War supposedly sent shock waves through the administration of President Lyndon Johnson.

Judging from the American Heritage article, Brinkley’s take on the “Cronkite Moment” is a bit muddled.

And even somewhat misleading.

Brinkley writes, for example, that Cronkite’s opinion about the war “was widely quoted in the press …. Even the conservative Wall Street Journal’s editorial page said, ‘The whole Vietnam effort may be doomed.'”

But the Journal took no leads from Cronkite. It published its “may be doomed” editorial four days before the Cronkite program.

The editorial appeared February 23, 1968, and said “everyone had better be prepared for the bitter taste of a defeat beyond America’s power to prevent.”

Strong stuff.

Far stronger than the fairly tepid “Cronkite Moment” commentary, which the anchorman offered on February 27, 1968, near the close of a 30-minute special program, “Report from Vietnam.”

Cronkite declared that night: “To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism.

“To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion.”

Brinkley’s article notes that Cronkite’s “calling the war a ‘stalemate’ was a middling position in 1968.” Indeed, it was hardly novel. As I point out in my latest book, Getting It Wrong:

“By late February 1968 … Cronkite’s ‘mired in stalemate’ assessment was neither notable nor extraordinary.” I point out that “nearly seven months before the program, the New York Times correspondent R.W. Apple Jr. had cited ‘disinterested observers’ in reporting that the war in Vietnam ‘is not going well.’ Victory, Apple wrote, ‘is not close at hand. It may be beyond reach.’

“Apple’s analysis was published on the Times’ front page, beneath the headline: ‘Vietnam: The Signs of Stalemate.'”

The Times’ analysis also noted: “‘Stalemate’ is a fighting word in Washington. President Johnson rejects it as a description of the situation in Vietnam. But it is the word used by almost all Americans here, except the top officials, to characterize what is happening” in the war.

While Brinkley concedes the unremarkable character of “mired in stalemate,” he nonetheless writes that “Cronkite’s ‘Report from Vietnam’ represented a turning point.”

To support that claim, Brinkley turns to the exaggerated assertion in David Halberstam’s The Powers That Be, that the Cronkite program marked “the first time in American history that a war had been declared over by a commentator.” (In my edition of Halberstam’s book, the closing portion of that sentence reads: “the first time in American history a war had been declared over by an anchorman.”)

Of course, though, the war dragged on for years.

In no way was the “Cronkite Moment” anything approaching a turning point. American public opinion notably had clearly begun shifting against the war by fall 1967, months before the Cronkite report on Vietnam.

And as journalist Don Oberdorfer noted in December 1967, the “summer and fall of 1967 [had] been a time of switching, when millions of American voters — along with many religious leaders, editorial writers and elected officials — appeared to be changing their views about the war.”

So if anything, Cronkite’s program trailed the shifts in American public opinion.

It is often said that Cronkite’s “stalemate” assessment exerted a powerful effect on Johnson, that the president exclaimed upon hearing the anchorman’s interpretation:

“If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America” (or, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost the war”; or, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost the country”; or something to that effect).

But it’s quite clear Johnson did not see the Cronkite report when it was shown on CBS and there is no certain evidence that he ever saw it later, on videotape.

The night of the Cronkite program, the president was on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin, at birthday party for Governor John Connally, a longtime political ally.

About the time Cronkite was intoning his “mired in stalemate” assessment, Johnson was offering light-hearted remarks about Connally’s age, saying: “Today you are 51, John. That is the magic number that every man of politics prays for — a simple majority.”

Even so, Brinkley’s article speculates that “Johnson must have known that the Cronkite broadcast — while stating the obvious — had done him major political damage.”

But Cronkite for many years rejected the notion that his “Report from Vietnam” had had much effect on Johnson. Indeed, Brinkley’s article quotes Cronkite as saying as much:

“‘No one has claimed, and I certainly don’t believe, that our broadcast changed his mind about anything. I do believe it may have been the back-breaking piece of straw that was heaped on the heavy load he was already carrying.'”

But even the “piece of straw” metaphor seems to overstate the effects of a program the president did not see, and never discussed with Cronkite.

Brinkley’s article does include intriguing references to Cronkite’s having
“given speeches promoting Johnson’s Great Society domestic policies, including Medicaid-Medicare, wilderness preservation, civil rights, and a hopper full of antipoverty measures.”

I was unaware that Cronkite had been such an open advocate of Johnson’s domestic policy initiatives.

WJC

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CBS marks a Cronkite anniversary, invokes a tenacious media myth

In Anniversaries, Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Media myths on April 17, 2012 at 3:23 pm

CBS News yesterday marked what has to be among the more obscure anniversaries in broadcast journalism — the 50th anniversary of the debut of Walter Cronkite’s old evening news show.

Cronkite in Vietnam, 1968

And in a flattering writeup recalling the occasion, CBS invoked a prominent media-driven myth — the notion that Cronkite’s on-air assessment in 1968 about the war in Vietnam exerted enormous influence. Until late in his life, not even Cronkite believed that was the case.

Even so, the CBS article declared:

“Cronkite’s intense focus on objectivity gave his rare dose of opinion — especially his 1968 assessment of the war in Vietnam — an enormous weight.”

The writeup quoted an executive producer, Susan Zirinsky, as saying:

“Lyndon Johnson remarked, because he looked at that broadcast, and he said, ‘If I’ve lost Walter Cronkite, I’ve lost the country.'”

President Lyndon Johnson’s purported comment lies at the heart of this tenacious media myth — one of the 10 I address and debunk in my latest book, Getting It Wrong.

Interestingly, the comment so often attributed to Johnson has been described in so many ways. That is, there is no single version of what the president supposedly said in reacting to Cronkite’s assessment that the war was stalemated.

There’s the version Zirinsky invoked: “‘If I’ve lost Walter Cronkite, I’ve lost the country.”

More common is: “If I’ve lost Walter Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.”

Another variant has the president saying: “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost the war.”

And so on.

As I point out in Getting It Wrong, “Version variability of that magnitude signals of implausibility. It is a marker of a media-driven myth.”

And it’s highly likely that Johnson said nothing of the sort.

He did not, after all, not see Cronkite’s report about Vietnam when it aired on CBS on February 27, 1968. The president that night was not in front of a television set when, near the close of the program, Cronkite declared that the U.S. military was “mired in stalemate” in Vietnam.

Johnson: Not in front of a TV

Johnson at that moment was at a black-tie birthday party for Texas Governor John Connally. The president poked fun at Connally, who was marking his 51st birthday.

“Today you are 51, John,” the president said. “That is the magic number that every man of politics prays for — a simple majority.”

It is difficult to fathom how Johnson could have been much moved by a program he did not see. And the power of what often is called the “Cronkite Moment” stems from the supposedly immediate and visceral effect the anchorman’s assessment had on the president.

But what Cronkite had to say on air that night was hardly earth-shaking, hardly stunning or novel.

If anything, Cronkite’s observation about “stalemate” was a rehash of what other news organizations, such as the New York Times, had been saying for months.

For example in August 1967, the Times inserted “stalemate” into the headline over a front-page news analysis about the war. The Times headline read:

“Vietnam: The Signs of Stalemate.”

The newspaper’s analysis was filed from the South Vietnamese capital, Saigon, and noted:

“‘Stalemate’ is a fighting word in Washington. President Johnson rejects it as a description of the situation in Vietnam. But it is the word used by almost all Americans here, except the top officials, to characterize what is happening” in the war.

Before that, on July 4, 1967, the Times published a news analysis that said of the war effort:

“Many officers believe that despite the commitment of 466,000 United States troops now in South Vietnam … the military situation there has developed into a virtual stalemate.”

So in the context of the war in Vietnam, “stalemate” was hardly new by the time Cronkite turned to the word.

WJC

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Wasn’t so special: Revisiting the ‘Cronkite Moment,’ 44 years on

In Anniversaries, Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Media myths on February 27, 2012 at 12:59 am

A legendary moment in network news came 44 years ago tonight, when CBS News anchorman Walter Cronkite pronounced at the close of special report that the U.S. military was “mired in stalemate” in Vietnam and said negotiations might offer a way out.

Johnson: Not in front of a TV

Cronkite’s report aired February 27, 1968, and examined the Tet offensive that communist forces had launched across South Vietnam four weeks earlier.

At the White House that night, President Lyndon B. Johnson supposedly watched the Cronkite report. Upon hearing the popular anchorman’s downbeat assessment, Johnson realized his war policy was a shambles. The report was, the story goes, an epiphany for the president.

Johnson snapped off the television set and said to an aide or aides:

“If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.”

Or something to that effect.

The report was so singularly and unexpectedly decisive that it has come to be celebrated as the “Cronkite Moment,” a totem of courage and insight, a revered model for broadcast journalism.

Except the “Cronkite Moment” wasn’t so special. Cronkite’s assessment about the war wasn’t novel or particularly insightful.

It was, if anything, a rehash of what other news organizations had been saying for weeks and months. “Stalemate” was much in the news back then.

The New York Times, for example, wrote “stalemate” into the headline over a news analysis about the war that was published on its front page in August 1967 — nearly seven months before Cronkite’s televised report. The Times headline read:

“Vietnam: The Signs of Stalemate.”

The Times analysis, which was filed from the South Vietnamese capital, Saigon, noted:

“‘Stalemate’ is a fighting word in Washington. President Johnson rejects it as a description of the situation in Vietnam. But it is the word used by almost all Americans here, except the top officials, to characterize what is happening” in the war.

So “stalemate” had been often invoked, and much-debated, by the time Cronkite turned to the word.

Even more damaging to the purported exceptionality of the “Cronkite Moment” was that Johnson did not see the Cronkite report when it aired.

As such, the president could not have had the abrupt, visceral reaction that endows the purported “Cronkite Moment” with special power and resonance.

As I discuss in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, Johnson wasn’t at the White House on February 27, 1968; he wasn’t in front of a television set, either, when Cronkite intoned his “mired in stalemate” assessment.

The president was in Austin, Texas, attending the 51st birthday party of a political ally, Governor John Connally. About the time Cronkite made his on-air editorial comment, Johnson was making light of Connally’s age, saying:

“Today you are 51, John. That is the magic number that every man of politics prays for— a simple majority.”

As I also discuss in Getting It Wrong, there is no persuasive evidence that Johnson later saw Cronkite’s report on videotape.

Even if he had, it would have made no difference to his thinking about Vietnam.

Not long after the Cronkite report, Johnson delivered a rousing speech in Minneapolis, urging “a total national effort” to win the war in Vietnam. The speech was given March 18, 1968, and in it, the president declared:

“We love nothing more than peace, but we hate nothing worse than surrender and cowardice.”

Johnson, who died in 1973, did not mention the purported “Cronkite Moment” in his memoir, The Vantage Point.

For his part, Cronkite often described the program in modest terms, likening its effect on U.S. policy to a straw on a camel’s back. He turned to that analogy in writing his memoir, for example.

But in the years immediately before his death in 2009, Cronkite began to interpret the program in a somewhat grander light. He came to embrace the presumptive power of the “Cronkite Moment.”

In an interview with Esquire in 2006, for example, he said:

“To be honest, I was rather amazed that my reporting from Vietnam had such an effect on history.”

Interestingly, Cronkite also said he had never discussed the program and his famous editorial comment with Johnson.

According to a report in the Austin American-Statesman, Cronkite said in a teleconference call with a journalism class at Southwest Texas State University in 1997 that Johnson “never brought it up and I certainly never did.”

WJC

Many thanks to Instapundit
Glenn Reynolds for linking to this post.

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Just what we need: Barbra Streisand, media critic

In Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Media myths, Murrow-McCarthy myth on February 5, 2012 at 9:25 am

Celebrities and movie stars rarely make thoughtful, searching media critics, as Barbra Streisand demonstrated in a tedious and predictable essay the other day at Huffington Post.

The actress indulged a bit in the golden age fallacy, recalling broadcast journalists Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite as exemplary newsmen whose talents these days are sorely missed.

“Americans,” Streisand wrote, “are busy, working hard to support and provide for their families. They don’t have time to parcel out fact from fiction. They depend on the Fourth Estate to guide them and to hold individuals running for office, especially the highest office in our country, accountable.”

The claim that Americans “depend on the Fourth Estate to guide them” is surely overstated, given evidence that many Americans go newsless and ignore media content altogether.

Streisand went on, extolling media icons of the past:

Murrow

“Journalists like Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow knew it was their duty to know the facts and disseminate them to the public. That responsibility in today’s media world seems to be diminishing.”

Murrow, who came to fame on CBS radio in the 1940s and on CBS television in 1950s, was no white knight, though. He hardly was above the political fray.

As I note in my media mythbusting book, Getting It Wrong, Murrow privately donated time and expertise in acquainting Adlai Stevenson, the 1956 Democratic presidential candidate, with television.

I cite A.M. Sperber, one of Murrow’s leading biographers, who wrote that Murrow agreed “to help the Democrats” in offering Stevenson tips on “the finer points of speaking to the camera.”

Sperber, who characterized Murrow’s move “a radical departure from his usual practice,” said Stevenson “barely endured” the tutoring.

What’s more, Murrow is the subject of one of American journalism’s more savory and tenacious myths — that he stood up to the red-baiting senator, Joseph R. McCarthy, when no other journalist would, or dared.

Which is nonsense.

As I discuss in Getting It Wrong, Murrow was quite late in confronting McCarthy, doing so long after a number of journalists – including the muckraking columnist Drew Pearson– had become persistent and searching critics of the senator, his record, and his tactics.

Cronkite, the famous CBS News anchorman from 1963 to 1981, likewise is the subject of a durable media-driven myth — that his editorializing about the war in Vietnam in February 1968 forced President Lyndon B. Johnson to realize the folly of his policy.

Legend has it that Johnson was watching at the White House when Cronkite pronounced the U.S. military “mired in stalemate” in Vietnam. Cronkite also suggested the negotiations might offer a way out of the morass.

Upon hearing Cronkite’s downbeat assessment, Johnson supposedly leaned over and snapped off the television set, telling an aide or aides, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.”

Or something to that effect. Versions vary, markedly.

But as I discuss in Getting It Wrong, Johnson did not see the program in which Cronkite made his editorial comment.

Johnson in Austin: Didn't see Cronkite show

Johnson at the time was in Austin, Texas, attending the 51st birthday party of Governor John Connally, a longtime political ally. About the time Cronkite was intoning “mired in stalemate,” Johnson was joking about Connally’s age, saying:

“Today you are 51, John. That is the magic number that every man of politics prays for—a simple majority.”

It’s illogical to argue that Johnson could have been much moved by a television report he hadn’t seen.

Granted, Cronkite’s editorial comment about Vietnam — tepid though it was — represented something of a departure for the avuncular anchorman. He usually tried to play it straight, because he had to.

As media critic Jack Shafer pointed out shortly after Cronkite’s death in 2009, the anchorman’s impartiality was partly a function of the federal “Fairness Doctrine,” which sought to encourage balanced reporting on the air.

Shafer wrote that “between 1949 and 1987 — which come pretty close to bookending Cronkite’s TV career — news broadcasters were governed by the federal ‘Fairness Doctrine.’ The doctrine required broadcast station licensees to address controversial issues of public importance but also to allow contrasting points of view to be included in the discussion.

“One way around the Fairness Doctrine was to tamp down controversy,” which he notes, the three U.S. television networks of the time “often did.”

So, no: Murrow and Cronkite weren’t exactly paragons of play-it-straight journalism. Pining for them while deploring today’s freewheeling media landscape is neither very sophisticated nor very useful.

Nor even fair to the historical record.

WJC

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‘Getting It Wrong’ goes on ‘One Hour of Hope’

In Anniversaries, Cinematic treatments, Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Jessica Lynch, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on January 10, 2012 at 12:15 pm

I recently was on “One Hour of Hope,” a satirically named radio show in Gainesville, Florida, to speak about several of the media-driven myths debunked in my latest book, Getting It Wrong.

Among them are the heroic-journalist trope of Watergate, the so-called “Cronkite Moment” of 1968, and the battlefield derring-do misattributed to Jessica Lynch early in the Iraq War.

The host of “One Hour of Hope,” Doug Clifford, noted at the outset of the interview that 2012 marks the 40th anniversary of the Watergate scandal’s signal crime, the breakin in June 1972 at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee.

I am sure the anniversary will give rise  to a resurgence of the heroic-journalist interpretation of Watergate, which holds that the dogged investigative reporting of Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncovered the scandal and brought about President Richard M. Nixon’s resignation in August 1974.

That media myth has become the dominant narrative of Watergate, I noted during the radio interview, which aired on WSKY-FM.

The persistence of that misreading narrative, I said, can be traced to All the President’s Men, Woodward and Bernstein’s 1974 book about their Watergate reporting, and especially to the 1976 movie by the same title.

The movie, by focusing on the exploits of Woodward and Bernstein, projects the notion that the reporters, with help from a the stealthy, high-level source code-named “Deep Throat,” unearthed the evidence that forced Nixon to quit.

That, I said, is a very simplistic interpretation, “a serious misreading of history” that ignores the far more powerful forces and factors that combined to uncover evidence of Nixon’s culpability.

Those forces, I noted, were typically subpoena-wielding and included committees of both houses of Congress, the Justice Department, the FBI, and a federal judge in Washington named John Sirica.

(Interestingly, the Washington Post, in its obituary of Sirica, said the judge’s “persistence in searching for the facts while presiding over the Watergate cases led to President Nixon’s resignation.”)

The myth of the “Cronkite Moment” represents another serious misreading of history, I said.

Clifford summarized the purported “Cronkite Moment,” that President Lyndon Johnson, in reaction to the CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite’s pessimistic assessment of the Vietnam War, said, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost America.”

I noted that versions of what the president said vary markedly and also include:

  • “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.”
  • “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost the country.”
  • “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost the war.”

(Version variability of such magnitude, I write in Getting It Wrong, is a revealing marker of a media-driven myth.)

I noted in the interview that there’s no evidence Johnson saw Cronkite’s television report about Vietnam when it aired February 27, 1968. At the time, the president was attending a birthday party for Governor John Connally on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin.

Nor is there any credible evidence that Cronkite’s reporting about Vietnam influenced  Johnson’s decision, announced in late March 1968, not to seek reelection.

Clifford asked about reporting of the Jessica Lynch case, and I said the bogus tale of her battlefield heroics was largely due to “sloppy reporting by the Washington Post.”

I described the newspaper’s electrifying report, published April 3, 2003, that cited otherwise unidentified “U.S. officials” in saying Lynch had fought fiercely in the ambush of Army unit in Iraq, that she had kept firing at Iraqi attackers even as she suffered gunshot and stab wounds.

But none of that proved true. Lynch fired not a shot in the attack. She was wounded not in the firefight with the Iraqis but in the crash of her Humvee as it tried to flee the ambush.

I also noted in the interview how a “false narrative that the military made up the story” has come to define the Lynch tale.

One of the reporters on the Post’s botched story, I pointed out, has said that the Pentagon wasn’t the newspaper’s source, and also has said that far “from promoting stories about Lynch, the military didn’t like the story.”

The false narrative, I added, has had the additional effect of obscuring recognition of the heroics of Donald Walters, a cook-sergeant who apparently performed the heroics deeds wrongly attributed to Lynch.

Walters laid down covering fire as Lynch and others in their unit sought to escape. He was captured when he ran out of ammunition, and soon afterward executed.

Clifford said his show’s title, “One Hour of Hope,” is a satiric gesture; his once-weekly, 60-minute program leans left while much of the rest of the station’s talk-show content is conservative in political orientation.

WJC

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