The Great State of Journalism; or, All the Personal Liberties Money Can Buy

There have been two noteworthy developments in elite journalism in the past week or so, which I think are significant more for the reactions they inspired than for their actual importance.

First, the Trump regime assumed control of press access to White House events.  The White House Correspondents' Association announced that "it would no longer coordinate shared coverage of President Donald Trump in an escalating dispute over press access to official events."  "The 'WHCA cannot ensure that the reports filed by government-selected poolers will be held to the same standards that we have had in place for decades,'" announced the WHCA President, Eugene Daniels.

This change should certainly be borne in mind by all consumers of news, but how much of a change is it, really?  The standards of White House press coverage have always been low.  The questions asked by reporters have generally been embarrassingly low in quality, with a few notable exceptions, and those exceptions were usually met with evasive, stonewalling answers.  Reporters who failed to conform with the ritual could be excluded, and it wasn't clear whether the WHCA or the White House excluded them.  Despite the pretense that the press and the government are adversaries rather than collaborators, as the WHCA's announcement tacitly admits, it didn't matter. 

I remembered that the White House press corps complained that Barack Obama wasn't holding press conferences in 2010, and that too was supposedly a threat to press freedom.  I disagreed then, and I disagree now.  The press could, in principle, refuse to play along, refuse to participate in the ritual dance between reporter and subject.  In practice that would never happen, because there will always be scabs who will show up to stroke the President's or other official's ego by asking sycophantic questions.

If Obama is too long ago, the Biden-Harris administration also showed the futility of most press conferences.  Biden also was elusive, and when asked, his spokespeople simply repeated the propaganda line they'd been given.  Kamala Harris also evaded substantive questions during her failed presidential campaign.  For what it's worth, Donald Trump has been much more available to the press than his predecessors, but few outside his cult are satisfied with the results.

The media don't really need the President's presence.  I always mention the great independent reporter I. F. Stone in this connection: when he was excluded from the Washington press corps during the Truman administration, he continued working independently as an investigative reporter on his own one-person newsletter, I. F. Stone's Weekly.  Some of his stories shook up US government claims; imagine what the huge media institutions could do if they devoted their resources to that kind of work, instead of cultivating connections with government insiders.  In fact, they sometimes do.  They don't need access. As Stone said:

I made no claims to 'inside stuff'. I tried to give information which could be documented, so [that] the reader could check it for himself ... Reporters tend to be absorbed by the bureaucracies they cover; they take on the habits, attitudes, and even accents of the military or the diplomatic corps. Should a reporter resist the pressure, there are many ways to get rid of him. ... But a reporter covering the whole capital on his own – particularly if he is his own employer – is immune from these [political] pressures.

The second journalism story involved Amazon founder and now owner of the Washington Post Jeff Bezos, who announced last Wednesday that the Post Opinion Page will henceforth "be writing every day in support and defence of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets."

He added the opinion section would cover other topics, but “viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others”.

“There was a time when a newspaper, especially one that was a local monopoly, might have seen it as a service to bring to the reader's doorstep every morning a broad-based opinion section that sought to cover all views,” Bezos wrote. “Today, the internet does that job.”

Seventy-five thousand digital subscribers have reportedly canceled their subscriptions to the Post in protest of Bezos's move.  There was a similar backlash last year when he announced that the paper would no longer endorse presidential candidates.  He claimed that endorsements "create a perception of bias," though his intervention to kill a planned editorial endorsement of Kamala Harris did just that.  Does it matter, though?  These moves aren't going to make most people suddenly trust elite corporate media, or any media.  From what I can tell, distrust of news media isn't based on any informed or rational evaluations anyway.  Media consumers tell pollsters that they value "accuracy above all else," but how do they know what's accurate?

Bezos has a point, though it doesn't make him look any better.  In the days when even smaller cities had more than one newspaper, it was normal for editorials to reflect the owners' political bias, and objectivity was always a mirage.  That didn't change as the news industry became increasingly monopolized, and while Bezos's invocation of the Internet is in typical bad faith, there are more alternatives available than ever before.  Even if Washington DC had several major newspapers, someone who wanted to be well-informed should look beyond the local product.  In the past, such a person would at least look to the New York Times as well as the Post.  There were daily radio and TV news programs, weekly news magazines, and other sources.  Tearing one's hair over the misbehavior of one newspaper owner is as disingenuous as gnashing one's teeth over the loss of access to inside sources.  But that's what passes for responsible commentary, then and now.

And There's Hamburger All Over the Highway in Mystic, Connecticut

Today turned out to be an unproductive mess too.  But James Fallows had a good article about "false equivalence," the refusal of corporate ("mainstream") media to "take sides" -- that is, recognize and report who did what in certain conflicts.  Aside from his discussion, he included this:

A reader with a political-literary-legal background suggests the way our current mentality might apply to headlines from yesteryear:
 JFK, Oswald Differences Lead to Violence
      Fateful Lincoln, Booth Collision Repeated

Animosity Flares Between Jap Planes and Shore Batteries at Pearl Harbor
    Both Sides Unleash Firepower [See photo]

Rights Marchers Clash with Fire Hoses and Dogs
    Standoff as Marchers Doused and Canines are Photographed

Astronauts, Moon Meet at Last
   Historic Moment as Lunar Soil Makes Contact with Human Boot

Which reminds me of the late Alexander Cockburn's merciless parody of PBS' fair and balanced news analysis from 1982.

hunter-gault: A few critics of slavery argue that it should be abolished outright. One of them is Mr. Wilberforce. Mr. Wilberforce, why abolish slavery?
wilberforce: It is immoral for one man .?.?.
macneil: Mr. Wilberforce, we’re running out of time, I’m afraid. Let me very quickly get some other points of view. Mr. Ginn, you think slavery is good?
ginn: Yes.
macneil: And you, Mr. Halfmeasure, think it should be regulated.
halfmeasure: Yes.
macneil: Well, I’ve got you to disagree, haven’t I? (Laughter) That’s all we’ve got time for tonight. Good night, Jim.
lehrer: Good night, Robin.

---

Please, Sir, May I Have Another Question?: An Object Lesson

Now that I've read Steven Maras's Objectivity in Journalism (Polity Press, 2013), I still don't know what objectivity in journalism is.  But neither does he, nor apparently can anyone else make up their minds on a definition.  I suspect, and the book largely confirms, that "objectivity" is one of what I call totem words: words that connote something good, to be waved around like a flag to show that one is one of the Good Guys.  (Other examples are "meritocracy," "democracy," "freedom," "equality," and so on.)

Objectivity in Journalism is part of a series on "Key Concepts in Journalism," but I wonder about its intended audience.  I'd guess journalism students, probably undergraduates, but I can't imagine them getting much from Maras's treatment.  He covers a wide range of concerns, such as the history of the concept of objectivity, its different definitions and rationales, and its variations in different countries (most of the examples come from the United States and to a lesser extent England).  This is valuable and well done but he tends to rush along so that nothing really gets discussed.  I wondered if he simply meant his readers to read the material he quotes and references, some of which sounds quite interesting, and that would probably be a good idea because Maras himself seems to have no opinions of his own.  Maybe he is just trying to provide an example of objectivity in action, merely reporting the views of his sources, but that doesn't work very well, and actually undermines the case for objectivity he seems to want to make.

As the word is used, "objectivity" can indicate an ideal for journalists to aspire to, a goal for them to try to reach, or an actual achievement of modern professional journalists.  Not only do different writers disagree which it is, the same writers tend to equivocate, using it in one sense here, and in another sense there. Even those who see it as an ideal or a goal are not sure what it entails.  Some writers pile up defining components -- accuracy, freedom from bias, balance, impartiality, impersonality -- which may or not be desirable, but I'm not sure they add up to objectivity, except perhaps by postulation.  (As so often with definitions, the discussants are not sure whether the meaning of a concept is inherent in the word, and so can be discovered by somehow unpacking it, or whether it's a more or less empty container in which anything can be stored.  In practice it works out to be some of both, so that one reads one's own ideas into the word, and gets them back endowed with its authority.)

So, for instance, Maras quotes the philosopher Judith Lichtenberg, who,

[i]n her essay ‘In Defense of Objectivity’, ... focuses on a particular confusion in critiques of objectivity: ‘We are told by some that journalism isn’t objective; by others that it cannot be objective; and by still others that it shouldn’t be objective’. Objectivity is thus impossible on the one hand, and undesirable on the other. Both propositions cannot be correct [103].

Erm, well, I don't think so, especially since it appears to be different writers who raise these different objections.  The case against objectivity may not be coherent, but individual authors may not be contradicting themselves; but then as Maras shows, the case for objectivity is just as confused.  We are told by some that journalism is objective, for example, but that it shouldn't be. Even so, it isn't confused to say that X is impossible, but would be undesirable even if it weren't.

Advocates of journalistic objectivity disagree among themselves over what they're advocating.  Does objectivity mean no more than "passive" reporting of whatever a source says, an approach often derogated as mere stenography?  The possibility of a human agent, however well trained, simply recording whatever happens in front of him, has been taken apart so often and so thoroughly that it's hard to believe anyone still takes it seriously.  But some do.  Notoriously, in January 2012 the New York Times public editor (or ombudsman) Arthur J. Brisbane asked (via) for "reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge 'facts' that are asserted by newsmakers they write about ... And if so, how can The Times do this in a way that is objective and fair?  Is it possible to be objective and fair when the reporter is choosing to correct one fact over another?"  This set off a wave of debate in the media, much of it highly critical, and Maras discusses it too, mainly summarizing some of the reaction and using it to introduce "many of the themes of this chapter: enhanced feedback, transparency in deliberation, the problematic nature of consistent and total objectivity" (174).  Here he begs the question, assuming that "consistent and total objectivity" consists of stenography, parroting the assertions of "newsmakers."  (Analogously, Chris Hayes assumed that a standardized test is an accurate and "objective" measure of academic merit.)

Brisbane asserted that "Op-Ed columnists have the freedom to call out what they think are lies" (173), but as FAIR pointed out, this isn't true: "During the 2000 presidential election season, [Paul] Krugman said the Times 'barred him from using the word "lying"' when writing about George W. Bush (Washington Post, 1/22/03)."  FAIR went on to suggest that "sports reporters would [not] be so baffled by the idea that facts matter"; if a professional basketball player were falsify his game stats, for example, sportswriters wouldn't let the misrepresentations stand.

I would point out that "newsmakers" aren't always American politicians or corporate elites.  When foreign newsmakers like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Saddam Hussein, or Osama Bin Laden make statements of fact that aren't factual, American media feel no obligation to let them go unchallenged.  (And not only foreigners: today I passed in front of a TV tuned to CNN, which was quoting and analyzing an online chat with American NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden: the commentator didn't seem to give any credence at all to Snowden's statements.  ("Mr. Snowden is trying for humor here," she sniffed.  Is that objectivity?)  If Iranian or Iraqi media quoted them without comment and justified themselves on the grounds of "objectivity," I doubt American journalists would agree.  Such media elsewhere in the world would be dismissed as supine state media functioning as conduits for propaganda -- which seems unfair, since such behavior is defended in the New York Times as appropriate for American media; but if the shoe fits ... (And yet, state media around the world make obeisance to the ideal of objectivity; see Maras's quotation of Xinhua News Agency on page 202. Surely they wouldn't say it if they didn't mean it!)  Brisbane's attitude toward "facts" also seems odd: far from the tough-minded devotion to sacred facts journalists like to claim, Brisbane seems to regard facts as slippery and difficult to establish.  But though the latter position is probably more defensible, it would also require journalists to be more scrupulous about what they accept as facts.

Maras devotes several pages to the BBC's emergence as a major player in British news coverage during the General Strike of 1926, which disabled the print media.

Seizing the opportunity, the BBC Director-General John Reigh and the BBC Chairman prior to the incorporation (and Vice-Chairman afterwards), Lord Gainford, defined an alternative path, and maintained press freedom by committing to impartiality. Impartiality, activated as a principle to get around political and commercial sensitivities, arose in the context of the general strike as a way to ensure the Government applied to censorship pressure; but it also meant, in the view of some researchers, that the BBC censored itself by refusing to report anything which might help the strikers [217].

I imagine Pravda had that much "press freedom" and "impartiality."

Even if impartiality was compromised in this way – or as Tracey puts it, defined constitutionally rather than politically ... – at least the information was objective and factual: ‘a conscious decision was made to distinguish between agency copy and government copy; and many of the items broadcast were accurate reports of verifiable events’ [218].

Again, any supine state media could make the same boast.  I can't detect any irony in Maras's discussion here; he seems to be working with a definition of "objective" that means basically stenography of government sources.  In which case objectivity is certainly possible, but is it desirable?

Maras uses Brisbane's query to kick off his chapter "Is objectivity changing in an era of 24/7 news?" -- a question to which his answer appears to be "Yes."  He gives sympathetic space to journalists who argue that because of Bosnia, it's time to abandon outmoded twentieth-century objectivity and return to yellow journalism of the "Huns Kill Babies!" (and the closely related"Kuwaiti incubators") variety.  This goes with the time-honored belief that it's okay to be rational about trivial matters, but when things get serious one must run around in circles screaming in panic: "We've got to do something!"  Again, the question is begged whether the media ever were particularly objective, even by their own confused standards.

For example, CNN's Christiane Amanpour:

I have come to believe that objectivity means giving all sides a fair hearing, but not treating all sides equally. Once you treat all sides the same in a case like Bosnia, you are drawing a moral equivalence between victim and aggressor. And from there it is a short distance to becoming an accessory to all manners of evil; in Bosnia’s case, genocide. So objectivity must go hand in hand with morality [quoted by Maras, 74].

And then former BBC reporter (later Member of Parliament) Martin Bell:

In proposing an alternative journalism – one that is both balanced and principled – I am not so much calling for a change as describing one that has already taken place. It had to. How else, for instance, were we to report on genocide? Were we to observe it from afar, pass by on the other side, and declare that it was none of our business? It was all our business, perhaps especially ours because we were the independent witnesses. And if genocide would not move us, nothing would move us, and what would that then say of us? [quoted by Maras, 126-7].

I'd begin by asking about criteria for genocide.  The numbers of people killed in Bosnia, though large, didn't approach in scale the numbers of people killed in other massacres that didn't disturb Western observers nearly as much: Suharto's killing of from 500,000 to 2 million of his fellow Indonesians, Suharto's 1975 invasion of East Timor, US/UN sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s which killed around a million Iraqis ("we think the price is worth it," the American Secretary of State told television viewers) followed by vast numbers of deaths in Bush's 2003 invasion, the war against Latin American Indians by US-supported military dictatorships in the 1980s, and so on.  These killings not only didn't get much attention in mainstream media (except for the 1965 Indonesian massacres, which were celebrated), they were either approved and supported by or directly carried out by the US and its clients.  Even when they are acknowledged, perhaps as tragic blunders by well-meaning humanitarians, they are still minimized.

Then I'd ask what what these "caring" journalists propose to do to stop or prevent the genocides they've discovered.  In Bosnia, the NATO invasion increased the number of atrocities, and this is not unusual.  So did the NATO invasion of Libya, which was also justified by touting the plight of Libyans under Qadafy's brutal heel, though it killed unknown numbers of civilians and replaced Qadafy with squabbling warlords not noticeably concerned about human rights.  We're now seeing pious concern about government atrocities (which are real, I'm not denying that) in Syria with calls to arm the rebels or create a no-fly-zone, which worked so well in Libya if all you want to do is remove a tyrant and kill more innocent people.

The next question would be what all this has to do with "objectivity."  If Amanpour or Bell want me to believe that Western media coverage of these atrocities was governed by objectivity, however defined, rather than compliance with state policy and interests, they need to do more than wave around the word "genocide."  They should also have some accountability for the results of their crusades.

Maras goes on to discuss "warbloggers" as a new phenomenon and a hopeful corrective to misguided objectivity.  I gather he's never heard of journalists like Edward R. Murrow or William Shirer, who worked from war zones seventy years ago; or Richard Dudman, who wrote of his experience as a prisoner of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia forty years ago.  (Murrow also recorded material for broadcast while flying with Allied bombing missions.)  He doesn't mention embedded journalists during the US invasion of Afghanistan, which especially is relevant to his subject.  (Nor does he mention Judith Miller, whose mendacious advocacy of Bush's war for the New York Times eventually got her into trouble -- but only after the damage was done.)  He writes, "In 2004, the network [Al-Jazeera] was accused of cooperating with insurgents [184]."  Couldn’t embedded American journalists be accused of cooperating with invaders and aggressors?  (Non-embedded journalists sometimes "became targets of US forces.")  One defender of embedding wrote, "One reporter was seen holding a blood-plasma bag during a battlefield transfusion. Not to've done so would've been barbaric; yet that was not watching and reporting with detached objectivity."  That's a straw-man idea of what journalistic objectivity means, and probably a false objection -- how would holding a blood-plasma bag interfere with observing and reporting? -- but even if you buy it, it's an argument against embedding journalists with combat troops.

"Objectivity is changing in the era of 24/7 news and on-line journalism in numerous ways," Maras concludes that chapter, though on his own showing, objectivity has been changing ever since it was first invoked as a journalistic ideal. Earlier he discusses empiricist theories that "assume the reporter to be a tabula rasa or blank slate of knowledge" (87), and quotes a writer who argues that "What objectivity requires is an active mind that uses its mental powers in ways that reduce the distortions of reports caused by wishful thinking, bad reasoning, petty feelings and personal interests" (100).  I agree with the latter view, and it occurred to me that though this kind of "naive empiricism" has been debunked many times, there are people who talk as though they believe that human beings are naturally objective, that we would naturally (instinctually?) see the Truth if only the world (our parents, "Society") didn't put blinders on us, of bias, superstition, ignorance and the like.  I think that's obviously false, and that distortions of perspective arise naturally and inevitably from the fact that we are bodies occupying space and so can't see from everywhere at once.  Though many anti-blank slate thinkers admit all this, once they'd done so they tend to minimize or ignore how difficult it is to see past our limitations.

This shows up, for example, in the admission (which Maras also makes) that reporters are not objective, any more than they are rational or know the truth by instinct: they must undergo training and constantly monitor themselves to produce professional work.  It would seem, then, that it is the result that is "objective."  But it's still not clear what "objective" means in that context, and the many meanings the word has in use don't help.  Anyone who wants to use it should first specify the meaning he or she has in mind, and then it becomes possible to ask whether they are living up to their own standard.  It appears to me that the word "objective" itself gets in the way.

Actually, They Do Make Ignoramuses (Ignorami?) Like They Used To

My friend the ambivalent Obama supporter sent me a link to this article which linked to this blog post by one Larry Kramer -- not the bloated and inflamed asshole famed for his public temper tantrums, but a corporate-media guy with the same name.

The article, by one Alex Wexprin, declares

In a nutshell, Kramer argues that today’s busy media consumer, lacking the time to dig in to issues themselves, instead relies on cognitive shortcuts to familiarize themselves with what the “correct” opinions are, based on their preexisting ideology.

Wexprin quotes Kramer approvingly -- "We are creating a less-informed but more opinionated public" -- while disagreeing with him tangentially.

First: the problem of opinion fragmentation and people going to outlets that reinforce their existing beliefs is hardly a new phenomenon. If the problem has gotten worse over the last few years, it is more likely to be due to the Internet than an ideological shift in TV news. ...

[Second]: most people in this country do not watch cable news.

The trouble is, neither Wexprin nor Kramer provides any evidence that "the problem has gotten worse over the last few years." "In the past," Kramer declares, "many of those people would have spent the time with a more objective outlet, like CNN or the New York Times, done more research of the candidate, and made up their own minds. Now, it’s just faster to have someone do that for you." Calling CNN and the Times "objective" is funny enough, but when did most people do "more research" and "make up their own minds"?

Americans don't seem to me to be any less-informed than they were when I was in high school forty years ago, before the Internet or cable news, but they were very ill-informed then. Almost twenty years ago, just after the first Gulf War, a "study, conducted by the University of Massachusetts' Center for Studies in Communication, found that the more people watched TV during the Gulf crisis, the less they knew about the underlying issues, and the more likely they were to support the war." Fox News didn't exist then, but CNN did, and dutifully misled its audience.

Kramer writes that "In an effort to appear totally unbiased, CNN ridded itself of opinion or emotion." When was this, I wonder? Was it before or after Lou Dobbs quit? Before or after "new CNN chairman Walter Isaacson met with top Republican lawmakers in Washington, D.C. to discuss how to improve relations between the cable news network and conservative Republicans"?

I'm not sure where my peers and their parents went for their misinformation in the 60s, but there was the Reader's Digest, a reliable fount of right-wing propaganda with an enormous circulation, and there were plenty of right-wing radio commentators even before the Fairness Doctrine was abolished. It was as if there was a sewer in which their blatantly racist, hysterically anti-communist material marinated until it was ready to dump into receptive ears. Morris Kominsky's book The Hoaxers: Plain Liars, Fancy Liars, and Damned Liars (Branden Press, 1970) was a debunking of a lot of this stew. The three big broadcast networks varied slightly in their politics, with ABC notoriously the farthest right of the three in the late 60s, but if you wanted accurate information about US foreign policy, business and the economy, or social issues, you didn't rely on them, "objective" though they were supposed to be.

Rereading FAIR's account of the University of Massachusetts study of Gulf War Coverage, though, I find myself wondering.

While most respondents had difficulty answering questions about the Middle East and U.S. foreign policy, 81 percent of the sample could identify the missile used to shoot down the Iraqi Scuds as the Patriot. That media consumers know facts relating to successful U.S. weapons but not about inconsistencies in U.S. foreign policy, the researchers argued, "suggests that the public are not generally ignorant—rather, they are selectively misinformed."

Were media consumers more knowledgeable about the names of US missiles than about the circumstances leading up to the war only because of skewed media coverage, or might it have been partly because such trivia, like the names of professional athletes, their records and their rankings, were what most media consumers considered important, interesting, and therefore memorable? The first Gulf War was notorious for the way it was covered as if it were the Superbowl, but that was also, probably, the best way to sell it, and I can't think of many people I know who were interested in knowing anything else about it.

That's Not the Way It Is, Actually

Walter Cronkite, the doyen of broadcast news anchormen, has died at the age of 92. The response has been predictable, from eulogy among liberals to vituperation on the farther right, conveniently summarized by Roy Edroso. You can also find denunciations of "Che" Cronkite the far-left "surrendercrat" in comments at the liberal sites. (I take it that the "-crat" in "surrendercrat" is meant to imply that Cronkite was a card-carrying Democrat, though in fact he wasn't -- according to the New York Times obit, he was so friendly with Dwight Eisenhower that John Kennedy, no liberal himself, took for granted that Cronkite must be a Republican.)

Me, I'm somewhere between these extremes. I was eleven years old in 1962, when Cronkite became the face of CBS Evening News. I think I remember when the program was expanded from fifteen minutes to half an hour each night. I barely remember the man himself, though; he was so bland, so white-bread, that he was virtually invisible, which I suppose was his intention: to be "balanced," "objective," as a newsman should. His closing line for each broadcast, "That's the way it is," summed up that ethos neatly. Eric Sevareid, the program's resident pundit from 1964 to 1977, was more memorable, just because he was so annoying.

It was only later that I began to have any opinion on Cronkite's news coverage. Roy Edroso is vexed with a rightblogger who prefers "to have a big, giant, sloppy mish-mash of information available for the public to pick through than a carefully managed stream of news being spoon-fed to us by talking heads on television who became so trusted nobody dared question them." I'm inclined to agree with the rightblogger there, though the right generally prefers a managed stream of news, passing along the Republican line, that (trusted or not) nobody dares question; it's only when a Democrat is in the White House that the right wants a thousand flowers to bloom, news- and opinion-wise. But Edroso feels differently:

While I enjoy the big scrum as much as the next guy, as my coverage ceaselessly shows, it is also full of bullshit, and there are disadvantages as well as advantages to the caveat lector approach, particularly considering the dangerously elevated public relations and permanent campaign components of the blogosphere.

I can agree with Edroso too. I would only submit that the corporate media also exhibit "dangerously elevated public relations and permanent campaign components" (not to mention plenty of bullshit) and Cronkite was no exception. There's a tendency among liberals to lament the decadent state of the corporate media nowadays, and to cite Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow as exemplars of how serious news coverage should be done. But the news in the 60s was really just as corrupt and subservient to government and corporate agendas as it is now, and the range of information available from corporate outlets was as limited. I had to go to alternative sources, mostly in print because it's less capital-intensive than TV broadcasting, for other views.

The main focus of both the adulation and the condemnation appears to be Cronkite's editorial comment on the war in Vietnam on February 27, 1968, in the wake of the Tet Offensive, a nationwide campaign by Vietnamese insurgents that began on the Vietnamese lunar new year. Cronkite had just returned from a visit to South Vietnam, where he witnessed the collapse of the consensus that we could see the light at the end of the tunnel, and the commies were on the run. Wikipedia sums up the result nicely: "Although the offensive was a military disaster for the communists, it had a profound effect on the American administration and shocked the American public, which had been led to believe by its political and military leaders that the communists were, due to previous defeats, incapable of launching such a massive effort." Cronkite remarked:

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. On the off chance that military and political analysts are right, in the next few months we must test the enemy's intentions, in case this is indeed his last big gasp before negotiations. But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.

This is hardly a radical assessment; it's well within the mainstream of official American opinion about the war, beginning with the limiting of viewpoints to "optimists" who believed the US could win to the "pessimists" who believed it couldn't, at least not at an acceptable cost to us. It's why President Johnson reacted to the broadcast by saying that he'd lost Middle America -- because Cronkite said what other middle Americans believed, not because he told them what to think. There's also the characterization of the US as "honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy" -- in fact, the war in Vietnam was anti-democratic at its root, a refusal to allow the Vietnamese to determine their own government. It also ran roughshod over American public opinion, which had rejected the re-imposition of French colonial rule over Indochina after World War II, in 1945. 

Yes, 1945. In September and October of that year, eight troopships were diverted from their task of bringing American troops home from Europe to transport US-armed French soldiers and Foreign Legionnaires from France to recolonize Vietnam. The enlisted seamen on those ships immediately began organized protests. On arriving in Vietnam, the entire crews of the first four troopships met in Saigon and drew up a resolution condemning the US government for using American ships to transport an invasion army "to subjugate the native population" of Vietnam.

After the French finally gave up in 1954, the US took on the white man's burden, imposing a dictator on the South in violation of the international agreements -- a dictator we finally removed in 1963, when he showed insufficient dedication to our aims. The coup that killed Ngo Dinh Diem, a few weeks before the assassination of John Kennedy, disproves the standard claim that the US was in Vietnam only because our "allies" there asked for our help against Communist aggression. In reality, when our ally could no longer carry out his expected duties, we tossed him aside.

Cronkite had already shown his willingness to go along with government propaganda on Vietnam when he filed a report in 1965 lauding then-dictator Nguyen Cao Ky. In his biography of the maverick journalist I. F. Stone, D. D. Guttenplan describes Cronkite hailing Ky as "a hero to the Vietnamese people" who "doesn't even go out to lunch but, like an American businessman, eats off the corner of his desk". Stone reported that "the playboy Air Force general" Ky considered Adolf Hitler to be his only hero (American Radical, page 443-444). Cronkite's personal reaction to the Tet Offensive was to shout "What the hell is going on? I thought we were winning this war!" (op. cit., 420). It's worth comparing Cronkite's 2004 take on the Gulf of Tonkin incidents, used by President Johnson to justify US escalation in Vietnam, with I. F. Stone's take, written in August 1964, showing what a journalist not subservient to the government and armed with healthy skepticism could know. In 2004 Cronkite was still calling the Tonkin Gulf incidents a "misunderstanding that became the tipping point for the entire Vietnam War," even though he showed that Johnson and McNamara understood very well what they were doing. As Stone wondered in 1964, "Who was Johnson trying to impress? Ho Chi Minh? Or Barry Goldwater?" (P.S. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, the answer to that question would be that he was trying to impress Walter Cronkite.)

This rightblogger criticizes Cronkite's 1968 broadcast without quite explaining why he was wrong. In this commentary, he writes, Cronkite

overtly and figuratively stepped out from behind the microphone to add his personal commentary to the news. We had not seen this before. By doing so, Cronkite issued an implicit license to his journalistic colleagues to interject personal opinions into their factual reporting of the news. The difference is that Cronkite clearly labeled it as personal opinion, while many MSM news personalities today weave their opinions into reporting. His sentiment registered with many, perhaps most, of his viewers that night. He changed opinions by offering his own. But in hindsight, his analysis was wrong – dead wrong for some.

On the contrary, journalists often put personal opinions, as well as other value judgments, into their factual reporting of the news. When I hear old broadcasts by the likes of Edward O. Murrow, for example, I'm struck by how much commentary is woven into his supposedly factual reporting, such as his broadcasts from England during World War II. And as the writer concedes, Cronkite explicitly distinguished his editorial remarks that night from straight journalism.

The blogger goes on to complain:

Many of those of us who served in Vietnam do not look upon its ending as reflecting “honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy.” A compelling case can be made that we should never have sent troops to Vietnam in the first place. But we did. And then, after nearly 60,000 U.S. deaths and countless Vietnamese casualties, we bugged out. There’s no way to put an honorable face on that unavoidable truth.

It's not clear what this has to do with Cronkite's commentary. If Cronkite ever said that the US war in Vietnam ended honorably, the blogger doesn't offer any quotations. Cronkite called for the US to negotiate in good faith, which it never did; at most this means he was too optimistic about the outcome. As influential as he may have been, he didn't decide how US policy in Vietnam was going to play out during the decade after that broadcast, and that appears to be the blogger's complaint.

Nor does the blogger explain how the US might have achieved an honorable end. He complains that the US abandoned our South Vietnamese allies, "cut off their military aid, and watched while they suffered the consequences when the North Vietnamese blatantly ignored the negotiated resolution (they never intended to honor) that Cronkite advocated." The US had been violating negotiated resolutions in Vietnam at least since we undermined the 1954 Geneva Accords (we never intended to honor), and did so right through 1973, when the Nixon administration began violating the January Paris agreements (we never intended to honor). Under those circumstances the Vietnamese were no longer bound by the agreements anyway, and began fighting back -- not only the Northerners, but Southerners who opposed the Saigon regime. But you wouldn't have learned that from Walter Cronkite either.

True to form, in 2006 Uncle Walt was saying that the war in Iraq was unwinnable and we could and should leave honorably, though a year later he was at least admitting that it had been "illegal from the start." That's progress of a kind, I guess.

"College students nowadays get their information from blogs and Comedy Central, not CBS," writes a pundit at the New York Times. She says that like it's a bad thing. The Times also quotes the current president of CBS News to the effect that "Viewers and Web readers now ... 'are so used to being assaulted by so many streams of media that it’s hard for them to imagine that there were only three or four ways to get news and information on TV.'" But the news I got from CBS, NBC, and ABC in the sixties and seventies was blinkered, biased, and often inaccurate. The crazed, paranoid leftists who criticized those institutions usually turned out to be right.

Even now, the range of news and information in the corporate media is severely limited. More voices are better as far as I'm concerned, but you still have to treat them critically. "Objectivity" is like a rainbow -- it can perhaps be approached but never attained, and in human affairs it may not even be desirable. Better to recognize that people have their interests and biases, instead of trying to find the kindly, calm, avuncular anchorperson who will spoon-feed you the truth each night for half an hour. The encomia to Cronkite kept mentioning the time he wiped away a tear while announcing the death of John F. Kennedy, as though pretending not to feel emotion 99% of the time were some kind of ideal, and the occasional lapse was proof of the robot's inner humanity. The adulation of Cronkite has more to do with nostalgia, and perhaps childish fantasies of a good daddy figure, than with whatever virtues he had as a newsman.