Home » Cronkite, opinion journalism, and a changing press: Part I (“to tell a conflicted people a higher truth”)

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Cronkite, opinion journalism, and a changing press: Part I (“to tell a conflicted people a higher truth”) — 13 Comments

  1. I recall reading in school about a similar battle in WWII – The Battle of the Bulge. A side knew it had based a point where it could not win a war of attrition and its only hope was a swift knock-out blow.

    My textbooks through high-school stressed how close we came to loosing, how strong the push was and desperate we were, and many other similar things. At the very least they sure seemed to paint a strong picture of it. I suspect that many historians *still* push that line and will until that event is far enough in the past that they can objectively look at it instead of push a narrative.

    Later, once in college, I became interested in military strategy and tactics. The Battle of the Bulge was a big battle and is often talked about. However the military strategist knew *exactly* what it was – a desperation move hoping not to win through military might but through bravado and destroying enemy morale. They knew, at the moment the German’s did that, that we had won.

    Sadly people like Cronkite never knew or understood that – indeed he is *exactly* the type that strategy is aimed at. The NV were in the process of deciding what to give up in a surrender when that came over the air – they knew they had won at that point and I’m certain every military strategist we had simply hung their head down in knowledge of what just occured. They had to do nothing more than keep some pressure on us to keep it in the news (indeed, if you look at casualty figures – especially casualties as a percentage of forces – you can clearly see that as a dividing line).

    We are even more populated with that type of people now, had Bush Jr not been one to simply not give a damn about what people thought of him we would have Iraq in total chaos now for much the same reason. Since then our enemies have learned that type of attack is fairly easy to win against us and they have been waging a continuous battle for decades now.

  2. Cronkite enjoyed a certain naivete in the American public at the time he pronounced the Vietnam war to be lost. There is no other explaination for how his words had such an impact.

    Every journalist since then has done their best to emulate that moment in journalism history – regardless of whether Cronkite was accurate or not.

    The truth, even according to North Vietnamese records that became public over the decades after the war was over, was that Tet was an unmitigated disaster for the North Vietnamese.

    They lost so many men and so much of their war making capability, that they were bled white on the battlefield and had nothing really left with which to aggressively push militarily against the South Vietnamese government.

    But never fear – Cronkite managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory on behalf of the North Vietnamese communists.

    And he’s never looked back nor considered that, perhaps, just perhaps, he had been wrong.

    He’s never considered that perhaps, just perhaps, his words had a role in guaranteeing the widespread death and destruction that followed the collapse of South Vietnam years later when the North once again had rebuilt and launched another attack – though this time a dem congress withheld the aid promised them when the US military pulled out years earlier.

    Beyond that, you are entirely correct Neo in your estimation that the current sorry state of journalism can trace it’s roots to his broadcast.

    Not exactly a legacy most sane people would be proud of….

  3. There was a very good documentry done on the Military Channel by the BBC about the Tet offensive and how the American forces won every major battle including the week long battle at Hue where the Marines took the city back block by block sometimes in hand to hand combat. The two advisors in the documentry both agreed that the US had broken the back of the North Vietnamese and if it hadn’t been for Conkite and the CBS report turning public opinion the US Military could’ve mopped up and moved on Hanoi but Johnson on advise from MacNamara told the troops to hold. Soon after that the withdrawl began. At the Paris Peace Table it was agreed the the US would withdraw all troops with the proviso that if the NV crossed into South Viet Nam the US Forces would return. The NV did cross but the Democratic Congress voted to with hold funds from the military for any action against the NV. As a result it is estimated 1,000,000 South Vietnamese were slaughtered. I often wondered how this knowledge weighed on Cronkites concscience, or if for him it was a case of “You cannot make an omlette without breaking a few eggs”

  4. We have the messengers sculpting public opinion and elected officials pandering to that opinion.

    Whose leading who and what ever happened to ELECTED LEADERSHIP?

  5. An interesting point about censorship in WW2 compared to Vietnam, and the change in the candor of the military info given Cronkite. If you know that every word can be potentially quoted, you are going to be much less candid.

  6. on how the press came to consider its function to be changing popular opinion rather than informing the public

    The press should be not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, but also a collective organizer of the masses.
    Vladimir Lenin

    Print is the sharpest and the strongest weapon of our party.
    Joseph Stalin

    The writer is the engineer of the human soul.
    Joseph Stalin

    all these other explanations seek to paint the situaion as a natural movement in history, but that is only possible if your ignorant or refuse to include the manipulators in the history.

    in fact, if you manipulate history, you HAVE to ahve a group of peopel whose political job is to describe whats happening in terms that excise those actions…

    all one has to do is go to the source..
    but no one here in the west has read the source..
    here are some quotes from long ago..
    and they tell you where our philosophy of actions come from..

    The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.
    Vladimir Lenin

    There are no morals in politics; there is only expedience. A scoundrel may be of use to us just because he is a scoundrel.
    Vladimir Lenin

    Our program necessarily includes the propaganda of atheism.
    Vladimir Lenin

    [edited for length by neo-neocon]

  7. In listening to the (videotaped) Cronkite editorial about the Vietnam War, it always struck me how excessive some of his claims were:

    “And with each escalation, the world comes closer to the brink of cosmic disaster.”

    Isnt this every bit, if not more, hyperbolic than any “Mission Accomplished” sign ever was? Is it really credible that the Soviet Union or Communist China would actually launch a nuclear war in response to an American escalation in Vietnam?? It seems Brezhnev’s low-key response to Nixon’s 1972 bombing escalation would disprove Cronkite’s excessive claim. In any case, there certainly didnt seem to be any such qualms on the Soviet side when they invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, in the very same year as the Tet offensive. (Nor when they invaded Hungary in 1956, or Afghanistan in 1979.)

    It seems that this fear of meeting strength with strength, the so-called “Vietnam syndrome,” was one of the detriments the opponents of the Vietnam war added to the American psyche. This “fear itself” permeated every post-Vietnam American cold war decision, such as whether to send aid to El Salvador or put missiles in Western Europe.

  8. Another interesting point is that I was raised on these stories (the press blowing Vietnam)… I’m 38. It definitely had something to do with my turning a tin ear to reports from Iraq. I just knew they were playing the same game so I didn’t believe them. I think a lot of others are in the same boat… which is why we wouldn’t give up despite all the bad news from Iraq….

  9. No civilian did more to lose the Viet Nam war. I have never heard of any regret on Cronkite’s part and it seems to me he’s gotten more smug about it ever since — you know, revolutionized television journalism and all that. If his name is brought up to my Viet Nam-era veteran friends, they have much to say about him, some creative and all unflattering. I’m with them. The less Cronkite has to say, the better.

  10. What gets around goes around or something…

    Walter C and his screed marked the beginning of the end for the MSM as it existed. He won a Pyrrhic Victory: a tactical victory but a strategic defeat for the Media.

    This was the start of a long downhill decent for Big Media. The crack in the wall that left the water erode away support.

    And so it goes…

  11. The actual facts about the military situation from MACV’s standpoint and Hanoi’s standpoint surfaced long before Cronkite gave that 2002 interview. The facts are not in dispute, even by former North Vietnamese Communist military leaders. That Cronkite has chosen to ignore the reality and never revisit his views is very telling. Also, it has since come out – out of his own mouth – that Cronkite was and is a committed socialist. Given that fact, it is no surprise that his bias affected his decision at that moment back in 1968 and his subsequent reflections.

    But, yes, Cronkite was one of the first of our “talking head” journalists to come out of the closet as against his own country.

    Some even think he was a socialist early in his career. This is not at all unremarkable for those who were young people during the 1930’s and even before. The Communists had made great inroads into our society long before WWII. Their ideas and values were extremely attractive for many in the FDR generation.

    Two people who were hooked into Marxism/socialism even before WWII: Obonga’s grandparents.

    Twenty years ago I began to do family genealogy in earnest. I got to talk with many people my parents’ age and older, and got a real flavor of the time. In reality, you would be amazed at how many people of Cronkite’s generation, older and younger than he, were attracted to socialism. In fact, maybe the big secret someday will be exposed in all its enormity: that my generation, the Boomers, have perhaps been unfairly tainted as being overwhelmingly socialist, when in reality maybe Marxism never really had more than 30% of us at one time. But our parents’ and grandparents’ generations were far more substantially hooked into Marx than we were.

    My wife has a deceased uncle who attended my alma mater (the University of New Hampshire) during the 1950’s and he always said almost all of his humanities professors were Communists. My mother-in-law, his sister, attended UNH during the forties and she said there were a lot of them too. Professors AND students.

    I don’t buy the explanation that Cronkite gives of his “disillusionment” with the way the military “lied” about the war. I know vets of the war and some very smart people whom I learned a lot from. We didn’t always have very good intelligence about the Communist enemy during that war, and assessments are partly based upon intel. By the metrics of battle, we destroyed the enemy in almost every encounter. In fact, our LURPS (Long Range Recon Patrols) got better than the enemy at ambush and evade. Enemy morale was not good. Cronkite most certainly would have been privy to some of that information, but he chose a different narrative that fit his worldview.

    He carried the water for the Communists. Just as his heirs do to this day.

  12. Being just a little under ten years old when Cronkite first made this broadcast I only remember it from what I have been told about it in school; So, I am really struck by the first few lines:

    “. . . we’d like to sum up our findings in Vietnam, an analysis that must be speculative, personal, subjective. Who won and who lost in the great Tet offensive against the cities? I’m not sure. . .”

    Not having been aware of those three words – speculative, personal, subjective – I now change my outlook on this piece of history. I read it not as news, but more accurately an opinion piece. Clearly something that should always be approached with skepticism.

    Totally blind faith in anyone is not good.

    Thanks for posting this.

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