Yeah, well, as American University professor and Getting It Wrong author Joseph Campbell notes on his great Media Myth Alert blog, the Cronkite story is totally bushwah. Campbell notes that Johnson did not watch the original broadcast and there's no indication he ever watched a taped version of the program either. Cronkite's invocation of "stalemate" was not original or memorable - that phrase had been used for a long time by then. And for all the talk of a "Cronkite moment," asks Campbell, why did U.S. troops stick around in Vietnam for another five years?
This is not a tendentious point, Campbell argues persuasively
...I'd go a bit further: The Cronkite story plays into the romance of supposedly objective journalists having profound effects on the world. It's a self-flattering myth that pumps up the ego of newshounds everywhere, which can only lead them into more and bigger mistakes. Filled with true tales of massive falsehoods, Campbell's Getting It Wrong: Ten of the Greatest Misreported Stories in American Journalism is essential reading not just for journalists but all consumers of the news.
ReasonTV just interviewed Campbell a couple of weeks back. As he points out, not only is the "Cronkite moment" stuff malarkey, but so is the hoary cliche that Cronkite was the "most trusted" man in America...
[Revkin]: My Second Half - NYTimes.com
Lately, I’ve been describing the kind of inquiry I do on Dot Earth as providing a service akin to that of a mountain guide after an avalanche. Follow me and I can guarantee an honest search for a safe path. This is a big contrast from the dominant journalism paradigm of the last century, crystallized in Walter Cronkite’s “That’s the way it is” signoff.
Climate Denialists Would Be Remembered as Villains, Says Mann - ABC News
Mann: Yeah, absolutely. You know, when I was growing up, you know, I’m old enough to remember… You know, my family was gathered around the TV screen, and sorry to say, watching CBS nightly news. We were watching Walter Cronkite, and at the end his newscast he would say, “And that’s the way it was” on April 18th … and everybody knew that that’s that the way it was.
We accepted the facts — we could agree upon the facts, and you know, people had room for the opinions, but they didn’t have room for their own facts… And we seem to have evolved to a point in the public discourse where, frankly, there are news outlets that are dedicated to arming climate change deniers with their own set of false facts to justify their continued denial of the reality of human caused climate change. I think it’s a dangerous development.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment