Walter's Choice --Cronkite's Lesson for Today's Journalists

I have to start with a confession -- I did not grow up in a Walter Cronkite household. I'm not sure why -- I was just a kid and didn't have control of the remote...I mean, knob...back then. One fact that's been buried in many of the obits that marked the news legend's passing on Friday at age 92 is that during the 1960s, NBC's Huntley-Brinkley Report -- which is what we watched -- had higher ratings, and it was was with them, and not "Uncle Walter," that I watched Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon and learned that Martin Luther King had been assassinated. Then, a few months before I graduated from college and became a full-time journalist myself, Cronkite left the stage for his retirement. That was 28 years ago.

But today, as we mourn Cronkite's death and celebrate his remarkable life, I would have to say that no other newsman has had as great an impact on me, and on what I have come to believe about the role that journalists must play in American life. It was only years after the fact that I learned more about -- and came to grasp the remarkable significance of -- what should be held up this week as the crowning moment of Cronkite's career. It took place on Feb. 27, 1968, when Cronkite -- after days of agonizing about how to balance his roles as a leading journalist and as an American citizen -- aired an editorial calling for a negotiated end to the war in Vietnam, an action that he realized posed enormous risk to his career as a newsman.

It was not a choice he made lightly, but only after traveling to Vietnam in person and balancing what he saw and heard on the front lines with the official government spin. In taking the courageous and difficult stand, he undoubtedly -- as my friend Greg Mitchell noted the other night -- saved many lives. But he also offered a roadmap for saving American journalism -- a lesson that was sadly lost on most of the profession when it most needed to be heard, on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the time that the nation so desperately needed another Walter Cronkite, but there was no one of his stature to be found.

Cronkite was very much a product of his generation, the so-called "Greatest Generation" that faced dual challenges in the Great Depression and World War II that still tower over any crisis that followed. It was a special time to become a journalist, as new technology -- culminating in the rise of television -- could reach millions of people at one time, placing a greater premium on accuracy and fairness than ever before.

But at the same time, the unprecedented events of the mid-20th Century, especially the rise of totalitarianism and fascism in Europe and the war and genocide that followed, made Cronkite's generation keenly aware of the thin line between "the way it is" -- his signature nightly sign-off -- and the dystopian way that things could be. In fact, one of Cronkite's most memorable assignments as a newspaperman for United Press was covering the Nuremberg trial of Nazi war criminals, where -- he wrote decades later -- he'd argue over nightly drinks with his journalist colleagues of the importance of holding top officials accountable for their actions.

Twenty years later, Cronkite was the anchorman for CBS News, and the big story was the war in Vietnam; for several years, the veteran newscaster was no different from most of his colleagues, reporting the story from the framework that had been laid out by Lyndon Johnson 's White House and the Pentagon, that the conflict was a winnable war, necessary to prevent a string of vital nations from flipping Communist like a set of dominoes. But as the U.S. death toll rose sharply in early 1968's Tet Offensive, Cronkite's instincts told him it was critical that he see for himself what was really happening halfway around the world, and that he report his findings honestly to the American people.

And what Cronkite found in early 1968 shocked him, as best recounted by another greatly missed journalist of that era, the late David Halberstam, in his book "The Powers That Be." Early in his trip, Cronkite went to the South Vietnamese city of Hue, which U.S. generals assured the newsman had been "pacified," only to find himself in the middle of a deadly firefight, finally airlifted out of the city with the body bags containing 12 young American GIs. Halberstam wrote that Cronkite was "moved by what he had seen, the immediacy and potency of it all, the destruction and the loss and the killing, and the fact that it was begetting so many lies, first by the command here in Saigon and then by the Administration in Washington."

Halberstam told of a conversation that Cronkite held on a hotel rooftop, as artillery fire pounded in the background, with a young CBS correspondent Jack Laurence, that...

...he understood how restless and frustrated a young man could become with the bureaucracy of journalism and what seemed like the insensitivity of editors; he had undergone similar frustrations in World War II, the difficulty of communicating with older man thousands of miles away who were not witnessing what he was witnessing. Laurence was touched. He was left with the strong impression that Cronkite had been moved by the war and by what he had seen.

So for a man who cherished his objectivity above all, Walter Cronkite did something unique. He shed it, and became a personal journalist. He had already talked it over with his superiors in New York and they all knew the risks involved, that it was likely to be a blow to the reputation for impartiality that he and CBS had worked so hard to build, that it was advocacy journalism and thus a very different and dangerous role...It was not something that he wanted to do, but it was something he felt he had to do.

The impact of one lone journalist's decision was monumental. At the end of his special report that aired on CBS, Cronkite told viewers that "[w]e have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders, both in Vietnam and Washington, to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds." Then he explained that it seemed certain that "the bloody experience in Vietnam is to end in a stalemate," ending his editorial this way:

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, if unsatisfactory, conclusion. . . . [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 Walter Cronkite, good night.

President Johnson famously told aides that "if I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America." A month later. LBJ stunned America with the news that he would not seek another term and peace talks began shortly after that. There was no Hollywood ending -- U.S. combat dragged on for five long years, but the fulcrum had tipped with Cronkite, as the main focus turned to ending the war rather than expanding it. A few years later, Cronkite saw a similar gathering threat to the American body politic in the Watergate scandal, and CBS was alone in devoting two lengthy reports to that abuse of power, well ahead of the competition. Cronkite never lost his journalist's instincts for thorough reporting, but he also understood something very important, much as his CBS predecessor Edward R. Murrow had shown with Joe McCarthy a generation earlier.

Cronkite understood that the ultimate role that journalism can be forced to play in democracy is, quite simply, to fight to preserve democracy itself, and that the greatest threat to our republic was when elected leaders choose to lie to the American people. That didn't mean abandoning the core principles of journalism -- aggressive fact finding, which includes first-hand observation and talking to all sides, as Cronkite did on his trip to Vietnam, or an innate sense of fairness and justice. But he knew that journalism was more than rote stenography --parroting the untruths that LBJ and the Pentagon said about the war and finding a political opponent to quote deep down in the story for "balance." He knew there could be a time when the only way to inform the American people of a higher truth was to step outside the straight jacket of objectivity.

To turn a famous phrase on its head, Cronkite realized there are times when a true journalist does yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater...when there is an actual fire. It is not an easy call to make, but Cronkite did the right thing, displaying real courage years before his colleague Dan Rather turned "courage" into a weird catch phrase. Because of what Cronkite did in 1968, some people who would have perished were able to get out alive.

Walter Cronkite lived on for a long time, long enough to see the consequences when there was no one with his bravery and his journalistic principles in a similar position of influence. And so when a new generation of American leaders lied yet again to the citizens, about non-existent weapons of mass destruction and phony ties between al-Qaeda and Iraq, none of the nation's most powerful journalists left the cocktail-party cozy confines of the Beltway to "pull a Cronkite" to uncover the real facts, let alone try to speak the broader truths to the American public (and the handful of grunts who did try were shunted aside).

This time, lives would be needlessly lost, because no top journalist would speak up with the simple American virtue that Cronkite displayed in 1968. In the two days since we learned of Cronkite's death, so much has been written about the man, about his rare tone of authority, about the avuncularity and comfort offered to couch potatoes by their "Uncle Walter," about the incredible events that he reported from moon walks to the Kennedy assassination. All those things are true, but they also tend to miss how he was willing to risk all of that because he felt his responsibility to his country and to the truth was more important than his career. That he could make such a choice was the true meaning of Walter Cronkite.

The good news here is that, in my opinion, all is not lost. The failure of journalism in the 2002-03 run-up to the Iraq War may have been a bottom. In the years since then, we've paid a little more attention to the people who got it right like Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, we've seen conventional journalists radicalized into truth-to-power speakers like MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, we've been blessed with exciting young talent like Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi, and we've seen journalists using media that didn't exist in Cronkite's day -- bloggers like Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo -- using the Internet to create a whole new way of story-telling with the goal of a broader reality.

Our world is very different from 1968, and it's not clear if any one newsperson could have the amount of influence that Cronkite could have for one night (or whether that would even be desirable). But on many canvasses, great and small, where journalists are engaged in a quest for real truth and not an artificially manufactured one, the spirit of Walter Cronkite is still very much alive today.

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Comments

[Jerry Rubin]

The problem is not that Cronkite spoke the truth to power then, rather it was not echoed loud enough or often enough in the years following. We lost more US soldiers when Nixon

[weishi]

Very insightful article. Cronkite's ability to see truths through the mist of ambiguous and misleading information is what set him apart. His willingness to present those truths is what made him so trusted by the American public. That trust, through honesty and integrity, is why his opinion mattered.

Journalism need not be impartial if it is bias toward the truth. The power of Walter Cronkite's journalism came from a sense that he was having a conversation with you, and honest conversation involves honest opinion.

Your last paragraph however, sums up the difficulties of your profession in this day and age, and for those reasons, we will probably never see the likes of Walter Cronkite again.

[Scent]

When I see what journalists wirte today I always wonder what people like Cronkite or especially Murrow would think of what has become of their jobs.

Today journalism is a business. And in business You make money, no matter what kind of business You are in.

To be of any value whatsoever to the people journalism has to be free. But the so called free market makes those we trust to bring us truth dependent on the very people they should watch closely and criticise for every decision they make that hurts this planet and its population.

I am not saying that journalists don't WANT to bring us truth and real news. I am saying that under current climate and laws they don't.

And I don't have to be Murrow to see that that is no accident.

[langej]

Wlater Cronkite was a good journalist and a great TV anchor.

However, to say that his Vietnam piece was "a lesson that was sadly lost on most of the profession when it most needed to be heard, on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq" is totally unfair. His piece was not on the "eve of the invasion" of Vietnam - it was done 5 or 6 years later, when it was clear that we were not winning. Most coverage of Iraq has followed this formula to a T: first support, then report, then (after 5 years) when it seems we are not winning - start editorializing: saying it is time to get out.

[Lightfoot Letters]

"the spirit of Walter Cronkite is still very much alive today." Exactly where did you find this 'spirit' of honest straight foward reporting. Today, most journalists tell stories, not report facts.

[babalucci]

I've been grappling with the question of whether the media has progressed in positive ways. My first thought was that Cronkite was the "most trusted" because there weren't so many other anchors. Then I wondered if it was because of the various crises and the need for a calm voice. But also, I felt a bit of guilt for having turned off CNN and CBS news because I'd rather get my news from MSNBC. I want a news anchor who calls out abuses of the constitution. Not one who, for objectivity's sake, tells both sides as if they are both based on logic, reality, and morality.

If objectivity is the goal for journalists, and yet there is a clear moral side to the issue, is objectivity in service of the people? Should objectivity earn you trust? I don't have time to investigate the health care issue thoroughly or to find out if our past administration committed war crimes. I need others, whom I trust, to do it. And they are the voices I want to hear.

The greater problem today is that we can always find someone who agrees with us and turn off those who see it differently. In Cronkite's day, the networks reported the same news. How might our country have handled Vietnam, Civil Rights, or Watergate if we'd had an Oblermann or Maddow in our living rooms? There would have also been the Becks, O'Reillys, Hannitys, Limbaughs.

Today, we need a more intelligent audience.

[Rainydaye]

Yeah, wouldn't it be loverly......to have a more intelligent audience. For two week we've had second by second coverage of Michael Jackson and the rest of the world news disappeared into Limbo.
I had these same musings about objectivity and journalists. It was a different world in Cronkite's time. They seem to just report the news and there wasn't much pontificating. Of course, news was not covered 24/7. Unfortunately, many people get their "news" from opinionists and entertainers like Rush and the gang. There should be a clear delineation of what is news and what is opinion.
I'm a liberal but I don't want to have a news channel that panders to me. I believe news should be presently objectively, neither to the right or to the left.
I am truly in awe when I listen to Fox News constantly say they are the "fair and balanced" news when they are anything but. And obviously what has happened is that they have said enough to make themselves believed by many.

[cwcarman]

Cronkite was one of many great journalist in an era when news was subsidized by networks as a public service. Today, it is all business and reporting quality has declined comensurately. Worse than that, is the ambivalence of the American people about history and current events. They care only about their own sphere of existence with little thought focused on the whole.

[bltmn]

I think you're correct to a point. A significant portion of the American public has always been either ambivalent toward current events, or have simply been kept busy by more immediate concerns.

What's changed is that the idea of Advocacy has virtually disappeared. Advocacy has been replaced by Marketing. The most capable among us, and the media in particular, have stopped acting in the common good and are instead pandering to the lowest common denominator.

[BritPatJax]

In point of fact, what had happened as always happens is that he had become big enough and powerful enough to be his 'own man'. You all know what happened when Dan Rather tried to do the same? Cronkite had survived wars. He was 'bulletproof' , almost untouchable. No journalist has been allowed by the White House to become the equivalent, since then and they were nothing short of subservient in the last eight years. It took a BBC reporter to take Bush to task and what he got in return was an immature Bush derision about being bald. Check out Nick Robinson. Cronkite almost was a 'statesman'. There will never again be the like. It would be too risky?

[bltmn]

That's a very interesting take on it. Once the powers that be understood the power wielded by a journalist of Cronkite's stature, they took steps to ensure no one could achieve that stature again.

[bltmn]

I certainly can't argue against the widely expressed view that the journalists of today pale in comparison to Cronkite and his contemporaries. From my layman's perspective, however, it seems to me that this is really only the tip of the iceberg. The ownership and management of any media outlet must be as committed to quality journalism as the journalists themselves. Cronkite made his famous editorial on Vietnam with the support of his superiors. Likewise, there would have been no Woodward and Bernstein without Ben Bradlee and Katherine Graham.

I wonder how many Cronkites there are out there whose voices and careers have been stifled by editors and executives with agendas other than the truth. That's the problem.

[progressiveconnie]

GOOD MORNING!!! MY FELLOW HOMO SAPIENS WHICH MEANS THE SPECIES WHO IS WISE.
I wonder how many Americans remember Walter Cronkite???!!! who was America's greatest journalist, reporter and newscaster.
And all those that do remember Walter Cronkite will remember that this man personified truth telling, honesty, integrity, common sense and intelligence.
How sad to realize that his passing also represents the passing over the past few decades of almost everything he once represented and in its place an Owellian world of spin, deception, pettiness, silliness and irrelevancies has been created and as a result the American people are the most ill informed, uninformed, misled and unenlightened people in the free world because of the total control of the corrupt corporations over the mass news media.

[NMckinney]

The ad agency I work for did some spots for the University of Texas featuring Walter Cronkite as the voice over. It's always moving to hear his voice. For those interested, you can see them here: http://www.youtube.com/IdeaCityWest6th

[writerroz]

Too bad and so sad that CBS of today, with corporate, conservative ownership has not retained it's lesson that should have been learned from Walter Cronkite. We had CBS just a few years ago, and my memory may not be serving me right now, but I know it was Conservative CBS that chastized a news anchor for reporting on seeing proof of Bush's ducking out of the Air National Guard after getting in in the first place to avoid going to Vietnam because Daddy Bush had connections and money. I'm not sure, but my memory is telling me it was Walter Cronkite who was ordered to refute the truth of the story; however it was CBS who did this deed. When records of time in military are missing or destroyed, it means those records are not fit to be seen.

If our news media had held strong and had been the kind of person that Walter Cronkite was, W. Bush would not have survived investigations of his military service when campaigning for President. And if News mMedia had been strong like Cronkite in 2000, we would not have been stuck with even four years of W. Bush. Definitely, the major media outlets are guilty as Hell for eight years of Bush & Cheney.

[fairandjust]

Nice Writing Will Bunch.

Thanks for linking to one of the Best stories "Bill Moyers' "Buying the War" Exposes the Media's Failure to do Their Job." This needs to be re-read and watched over and over again - so hopefully others will learn what some of us already knew - The Big Lie about the Iraq War.
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/btw/watch.html

Mr. Cronkite showed much integrity and was very courageous. Wish we could see more examples of that Journalsm now - even if it is about the Now Past Crimes of the Bush/Cheney Years.

[Cosatjockomo]

Cronkite's shift to an advocacy view point, editorialization, came on the heals of years of trusted unbiased reporting. Todays journalists completely lack that foundation of credibility and they are rightly dismissed as simple paid advocates who cannot be trusted to give an HONEST opinion.

[JustMyWords]

Not to mention that Cronkite never muddled the waters between his advocacy and his reporting. His opinions were always offered as just that - opinions. He didn't pretend that his opinions were objective fact.

[arcsound]

Reading these comments, it seems that WC was as not as unbiased as I remember him to be. None the less, I am sure he was much less partisan than the current crop of "journalists", whom almost exclusively tend to be left-leaning, and more importantly, do not hide their bias, especially the NPR variety. Unlike the conservative pundits whom are mostly confined to AM talk radio, and whom declare their bias openly, today's journalists aid and abet the Democrats by selectively reporting the news and executing their interviews in a positive or negative light, depending on the politics of the interviewee. I don't remember WC behaving this way.