Walter Cronkite passes

[sammyg2]

That asshat contributed to the loss of the war in Viet nam more than hanoi Jane.

After the TET offensive he went on the air and declared that we had lost the war.
It didn't matter that he didn't know his butt from a jungle, he still said it.
The mush-head libs at home ate it up as gospel, and pressured our government to give up after so many lives had been sacrificed to win. Their sacrifices were made meaningless by the likes of cronkass.

The commanding officer of the north Vietnamese military and the second in command to Ho Chi Minh later wrote in his memoirs that the north had lost, it was only a matter of time. The only reason they kept fighting was because tools like hanoi jane and the walter-tard were on their side.
Eventually that gamble paid off when we ran away like scared little school girls, thanks in no small part to your hero.
I'd piss on his grave if had the chance.

[sammyg2]

Here is a copy of his cowardly commentary:

Tonight, back in more familiar surroundings in New York, 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. The Vietcong did not win by a knockout, but neither did we. The referees of history may make it a draw. Another standoff may be coming in the big battles expected south of the Demilitarized Zone. Khesanh could well fall, with a terrible loss in American lives, prestige and morale, and this is a tragedy of our stubbornness there; but the bastion no longer is a key to the rest of the northern regions, and it is doubtful that the American forces can be defeated across the breadth of the DMZ with any substantial loss of ground. Another standoff. On the political front, past performance gives no confidence that the Vietnamese government can cope with its problems, now compounded by the attack on the cities. It may not fall, it may hold on, but it probably won't show the dynamic qualities demanded of this young nation. Another standoff.

We 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. They may be right, that Hanoi's winter-spring offensive has been forced by the Communist realization that they could not win the longer war of attrition, and that the Communists hope that any success in the offensive will improve their position for eventual negotiations. It would improve their position, and it would also require our realization, that we should have had all along, that any negotiations must be that -- negotiations, not the dictation of peace terms. For it seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. This summer's almost certain standoff will either end in real give-and-take negotiations or terrible escalation; and for every means we have to escalate, the enemy can match us, and that applies to invasion of the North, the use of nuclear weapons, or the mere commitment of one hundred, or two hundred, or three hundred thousand more American troops to the battle. And with each escalation, the world comes closer to the brink of cosmic disaster.

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 Walter Cronkite. Good night.

[m21sniper]

Ah yes, the man who with one newscast lost the Vietnam war, has died.

Good riddance traitor.

[Dottore]

Another thread about to be ruined by the knuckle-draggers...

[m21sniper]

Shaddup mr. "I want a world without borders."

[Joeaksa]

Dottore,

Problem is that much of what is said above is correct. He was a reporter, not policy maker. While I respected the guy (for the most part) he had no business doing or saying what he did in many cases, especially about the Viet Nam war.

He is the one who started the downfall in news agencies IMHO in the shift from "reporting the news" to "reporting what they felt the news was" and trying to influence the public in the process. This is why I do not watch ABC, CBS, NBC or CNN.

[imcarthur]

But biased news reporting (if that’s what you want to call it) was not invented by Walter & CBS. As along as man has been relaying details of unseen events, news has been biased.

Ian

[Dottore]

Originally Posted by Joeaksa

Dottore,

Problem is that much of what is said above is correct. He was a reporter, not policy maker. While I respected the guy (for the most part) he had no business doing or saying what he did in many cases, especially about the Viet Nam war.

He is the one who started the downfall in news agencies IMHO in the shift from "reporting the news" to "reporting what they felt the news was" and trying to influence the public in the process. This is why I do not watch ABC, CBS, NBC or CNN.

The real problem with news reporting in the US is the shift to so called "info-tainment"—news that caters to the low attention spans of the average viewer. The lowest common denominator. I'm always deeply impressed how much more thorough and thoughtful your average newscast is in Germany or France, than anything you'll ever find in the US.

As for Cronkite, when I see the ass-hats on this board start on about "pissing on his grave"—well I can't even dignify that with a reply.

As for Cronkite reporting his POV on Vietnam—the truth is the overwhelming majority of America (and the world) was appalled at the idiocy of American involvement in Vietnam. We've had this discussion before. If ever there was an unjust and immoral war, Vietnam was it. The US had no business being there at all.

Towards the end of that conflict, Cronkite began to reflect the widespread public perception that Vietnam was unwinnable. I have no problem with that. I don't think the media should be in the business of apologizing for military blunders. I don't think the media should be in the pocket of the administration. Real journalists call it as they see it and let the chips fall where they may. Reporters are not instruments of policy. Instead they play a vital role in the complex system of checks and balances in a democratic society, and if that involves pointing out the excesses of the current administration and its foreign policy—so be it.

Of course America does everything to excess. The Becks and Obermanns of your world would be unthinkable in serious news organizations in Germany or France for example. It's part of your comic book culture.

So what network do you watch? (Please don't say Fox.)

[jluetjen]

Now that I've re-read his piece, I remember hearing it as a kid. I have to admit that I didn't really understand the full impact of what he was saying at the time. Alas, it seems that at that moment (unlike most of the rest of his broadcast career), he didn't follow his own creed: "report the news, don't become it". At least it was clear that those comments were an editorial, unlike much of today's "reporting". If that commentary was his low-point, certainly the Apollo coverage was a high-point.

Still, I'll always have fond memories of watching him on the 6:30 or 7:00 news while eating dinner with my folks. Much fonder memories then I have for his successor.

[jyl]

He was a real reporter. Cut his teeth on the streets, flew B17 missions over Germany, reported the Battle of the Bulge and other WW2 battles. Got to have respect for that, in this age of "anchormen" chosen for their hair and cleavage.

[rammstein]

Originally Posted by jyl

"anchormen" chosen for their hair and cleavage.

I don't judge men on their cleavage.

[nota]

without people like Walter who had the balls to stand up and report the truth
we could be still sending our kids to viet nam to die for the corrupt government there
the whole idea of the north viet's war was ''to fight one day longer''
they didnot need to win a battle or hold any ground
just keep at it until we gave up and went home
we lost 50k of our guys there
so how many more are you hard core neo-conned willing to lose there??????????
remember the north will not quit
best your war will get is a holding action
you cannot win
but you can force ever more drafted kids into the meat grinder
I think that shows how totally bankrupted the neo-conn's thinking
or better stated non-thinking is
as even today they willnot give up on ideas proven to FAIL
and hope trying harder will fix any FAILED IDEA

short history of the neo-conned
they tryed and FAILED
but do not ever learn from failures
and think they can try again harder
over and over

[dd74]

Cronkite lost Vietnam? LOL. That's a new stretch on a long-dead topic & war.

[jluetjen]

I happen to hear a few minutes of NPR in the the car earlier as they talked about Walter Cronkite. One of their pundits seemed to believe that we were better off with the constant editorialization in the news. He compared it to "The Government said this today" and "The Government said that today" days prior to Cronkite's "Vietnam is lost" piece. He felt that the earlier style of reporting was a passive endorsement of the status quo, ignoring that what followed was basically a return to "Yellow journalism" of the Hearst days. If you can't find a conflict that sells newspapers -- start one!

Personally, I think a lot of what is passed for news analysis nowadays is opinion, and opinions are like a**h***s -- everyone's got one. The problem is that none of the media reports facts any more. Nobody lets the newsmakers be the talking head any more -- just a sound-bite. Instead they have the reporter standing in front of the white-house telling us what it all means. The later reflects nothing but the reporter's opinions or desires -- something which I've found often lacks critical thinking and common sense.

[The Gaijin]

from slate.com:

"...Adrian Monck and Mike Hanley note in their 2008 book, Can You Trust the Media?, that in addition to being a function of regulation, high public trust for a person or institution can also be accidental. As consumers shifted consumption of news from newsprint to television in the 1960s, consumers shifted whom and what they trusted, too. "Quite simply, people trusted what they used, not vice versa," Monck and Hanley write.

If Cronkite were working in today's news environment, painting the news from the same palette he used when he anchored the CBS program, would viewers still invest their deep trust in him? (Assuming, of course, that the public did regard Cronkite as the nation's most trustworthy man.)

I doubt it. The news business has both expanded and fragmented in the post-Cronkite, post-Fairness Doctrine era. The news monopoly the three broadcast networks enjoyed for two decades has been shattered by the three cable news networks, all of which embrace (and thrive on) the controversy that Cronkite eschewed. The Web, which can make the cable news channels look positively Cronkitian, has only reshattered the shards.

If the nostalgia for Cronkitian news values were genuine, you'd expect PBS's soporific News Hour would be drawing huge and growing numbers of viewers. The program was, as its co-founder Robert MacNeil just testified, one that Cronkite adored. Alas, the NewsHour's Cronkite-lite approach has failed to attract much of an audience. In fact, the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism informs us that the News Hour is losing numbers, not gaining them: "For the 2007-08 season, the number of different people watching each week was 5.5 million, down from the previous season's 6.1 million." According to PBS research, the viewers are migrating to cable news, a fate that trusted Walter would probably be suffering today if he were still reading from the teleprompter.

Beware of those who fetishize trust, Monck and Hanley counsel. "Trust is a shoddy yardstick. It doesn't gauge truth, it gauges what looks close to the truth: verisimilitude," they write. It's not just the naive and undereducated who end up trusting people and institutions that they shouldn't. The sophisticated and the well-schooled are vulnerable, too. ..."

[Dottore]

Yup. Attention spans are shorter today in America. The population has dumbed down.

Pick up a 40 year old Time magazine for example. Then pick up a current one. The current issue looks like a comic book. It's hard to find an article more than a column long. Look at USA today....