…to use his own words, was Walter Cronkite an honorable journalist who did the best he could?(By the way, for some reason, it is often the practice of phillyburbs.com to publish people’s online commentaries under the byline of Editorial Page Editor Guy Petroziello. I’ve never understood why; this is at best a borderline unethical practice.)
No. What may have resulted from forgivable misimpressions due to the "fog of war" long ago crystallized into obdurate lies. Cronkite never clarified the record, never admitted that the Tet offensive - the Vietcong's surprise holiday attack on cities across South Vietnam - resulted in a military and political fiasco for North Vietnam.
This was becoming apparent even before the dust had settled in 1968, as we learn in Peter Braestrup's indispensable "The Big Story", one of the signal historical works of the 20th century, which meticulously analyzes the media's failure to assess Tet correctly as a defeat for North Vietnam. Even Leftist journalist Frances Fitzgerald in her Pulitzer Prize-winning "Fire in the Lake" reported that Tet had "seriously depleted" Vietcong forces and "wiped out" many of their "most experienced cadres." Her conclusion: "By all the indices available to the American military, the Tet offensive was a major defeat for the enemy."
And the enemy agreed. In a 1995 interview with the Wall Street Journal, Bui Tin, a member of the North Vietnamese general staff who in 1975 personally received the unconditional surrender of South Vietnam, called North Vietnam's losses in Tet "staggering." Communist forces in the South, he explained, "were nearly wiped out by all the fighting in 1968. It took us until 1971 to re-establish our presence... If the American forces had not begun to withdraw under Nixon in 1969," he added, "they could have punished us severely." And who knows? If Cronkite had not used Tet to nudge for negotiations, maybe American forces would not have begun to withdraw.
Update: Here is where the Cronkite piece originated (no surprise - Diana West is a long-time right-wing propagandist on the pages of the Courier Times, but this may just be the most odious screed she's ever written...I wondered for awhile whether or not I should have dumped on Buckley when he died - all true stuff - but now, I'm glad I did).
If someone firmly believes still that Cronkite played a pivotal role in our defeat in Vietnam after all this time, then I don’t see how I or anyone else will be able to change his or her mind. However, I will only point out the following in response (from here)…
Beginning in June 1965, with the U.S. decision to send ground forces to Vietnam, until February 1966, the polls showed a high and steady support for the President’s performance…In February 1966, this changed abruptly to a 50-50 split. By June 1966, this had declined to 42 percent excellent or good and 58 percent fair or poor. In July, after increased bombing of North Vietnam, it rebounded to 54 percent excellent or good and 46 percent fair or poor, but by September it had dropped again to 42 percent excellent or good and 58 percent fair or poor, and the downward trend continued for the remainder of Johnson’s presidency.And this is about a year and a half before Tet in January of 1968, it should be noted.
…
In early June 1966, declining public support for the war and confidence in the President’s handling of it were noted with concern by (then-Johnson aide Bill) Moyers in a memorandum to the President. He reported that conversations with Harris, Gallup and other polling professionals “confirm one thing: that our standing is down and likely to drop further.” There was unanimous agreement, he said, that the major issue was Vietnam, followed by the cost of living. “There is general agreement among all of these men with Lou Harris’ comment this morning; ‘the people are in a foul mood over Vietnam’…
Also, while it’s true that Tet was a major defeat for the North Vietnamese, the following is arguable at best (from phillyburbs)…
Bui Tin said North Vietnamese commander Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap told him Tet was "a military defeat though we had gained the planned political advantages when Johnson agreed to negotiate and did not run for re-election."As Snopes.com tells us here…
Most forms of this claim state that General Giap made his pronouncement about the effectiveness of American anti-war activism during the Vietnam War era either in his 1976 book How We Won The War or in an unspecified 1985 memoir. But Ed Moise, a professor of history at Clemson University specializing in modern China and Vietnam, noted in a review of the former book that no such statement appeared within…For those who want to argue about whether or not Giap and Tin acknowledged the antiwar effort as a reason for our withdrawal, I’m sure those so inclined would likely do so until doomsday if they could. However, what I want to emphasize is that Cronkite’s reporting confirmed what most of this country had suspected all along; it’s not as if the legendary newsman, by himself, initiated a tidal wave of public opposition.
There is an important thread that connects the failed stimulus bill and current efforts to reform health care: the federal deficit.Oh really?
This Op-Ed from Vice President Joe Biden in the New York Times recently tells us the following…
The single largest part of the Recovery Act — more than one-third of it — is tax cuts: 95 percent of working Americans have seen their taxes go down as a result of the act. The second-largest part — just under a third — is direct relief to state governments and individuals. The money is allowing state governments to avoid laying off teachers (14,000 in New York City alone), firefighters and police officers and preventing states’ budget gaps from growing wider.And as the Times tells us here today…
…
And those hardest hit by the recession are getting extended unemployment insurance, health coverage and other help to get through these tough times. The bottom line is that two-thirds of the Recovery Act doesn’t finance “programs,” but goes directly to tax cuts, state governments and families in need, without red tape or delays.
As for the final third, the act is financing the largest investment in roads since the creation of the Interstate highway system; construction projects at military bases, ports, bridges and tunnels; long overdue Superfund cleanups; the creation of clean energy jobs of the future; improvements in badly outdated rural water systems; upgrades to overtaxed mass transit and rail systems; and much more. These investments create jobs today — and support economic growth for years to come. Far from being a negative, the wide array of these investments is needed given the incredible diversity of the American economy.
Projects are being chosen without earmarks or political consideration, and many contracts have come in under budget. More than 30,000 projects have been approved, and thousands are already posted on recovery.gov — providing a high level of transparency and accountability. Taxpayers should know that we have not hesitated to reject proposals that have failed to meet our merit-based standards.
Rather than waiting for big projects to be planned and awarded to construction companies, or for tax cuts to trickle through the economy, state officials (in Linden, TN) hit upon a New Deal model of trying to put people directly to work as quickly as possible.In the future, Mackowiak should bother to ask those in this country whose jobs have been saved or who have been hired because of the “stim” whether or not they care if the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the official name) is “deficit-neutral” or not before he tells us that it isn’t any good.
They are using welfare money from the stimulus package to subsidize 300 new jobs across Perry County, with employers ranging from the state Transportation Department to the milkshake place near the high school.
As a result, the June unemployment rate, which does not yet include all the new jobs, dropped to 22.1 percent.
“If I could have done a W.P.A. out there, I would have done a W.P.A. out there,” said Gov. Phil Bredesen of Tennessee, a Democrat, referring to the Works Progress Administration, which employed millions during the Great Depression.
Certainly, we are concerned about job stability. But veteran journalists are equally troubled by the online threat to standards we hold dear.This was already addressed by Dark Syde at The Daily Kos here, so I will defer to that person’s sound judgment.
If anyone had told me five years ago that newspapers would allow anonymous comments and that we would have to respond to them, I would have invited them to come for a walk with me to the land of grown-ups. Now I regularly address authors of online comments by their made-up names and pretend this doesn't feel like junior high school all over again.
The so-called citizen journalism of most blogs is an affront to those of us who believe reporting and attribution must precede publication. Fact checking is tedious; it often derails juicy rumor and deflates many a story. And no matter how it turns out, every story is attached to our names. That should matter to anyone who cares about accountability.
However, Schultz also said the following…
One of the greatest challenges for print journalists now is to respond to change while staying rooted in the values that brought us to this profession. We feel more vulnerable because we are, but troubled times can soften edges and open hearts to the suffering around us.So try doing it instead of telling us how honorable you supposedly are for suddenly realizing this plainly obvious fact!
We are a country of hurt right now. Home foreclosures, lost jobs, closed businesses — these are hard stories but are the biggest stories of our time.
Journalists have never been better prepared to tell them.
Actually, though, I think Schultz should merely try a bit of slightly imaginative keyword searching on Google, Bing, Ask or whatever other engine she chooses first with terms such as “recession, economy, jobs, blogs, 2008, 2009” or any combination or variation thereof to find some truly high-quality “citizen journalism” on this subject that she so ridicules (including some excellent blogs both at news sites and independent outlets – Calculated Risk comes immediately to mind, among others).
After I read Schultz, I did some searching to find information that I believe communicates what is wrong with the news business (which, unfortunately, diverts attention from some of the truly outstanding reporting available both in print and online), and I found this from the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, which tells us the following…
I am not unsympathetic to the plight of news organizations that (ridiculously, I always believed) were forced to become “cost centers” instead of “loss leaders” about 30 years ago. However, I believe it is the job of blogs to, among other things, fill in the gaps of context, if you will, that are missing from much of what passes for corporate media reporting.The financial crisis—a complex and multilayered story—proved a difficult one for the media to track. Journalists were slow to pick up on the broader implications of what emerged as a housing markets crunch in late 2007. Even though coverage intensified somewhat in early 2008, the press again drifted away from the economic story in the days just before the big September collapse. But after Lehman Brothers failed, coverage exploded, filling about a quarter of the newshole (26%) during the last three months of the year. The roller coaster trajectory of coverage in 2008 reflected press problems in anticipating the meltdown and its proclivity to frantically “flood the zone” once the dimensions of the crisis became obvious. Though the presidential election and unfolding economic crisis certainly were major events, the narrowness of the year’s news agenda also strikes us as a function of the current state and characteristics of the news industry. Shrinking reporting resources, a diminishing commitment to overseas coverage, a debate-driven cable and radio talk culture that amplifies the biggest story or two, and a lack of follow-up coverage in a faster-moving media culture all appeared to conspire to help create the very top-heavy news menu in 2008. Even with the election behind us, there may not be much reason to believe that basic pattern will change in the foreseeable future.
It would be nice of Schultz to acknowledge that (oh, and the next time you talk about blogs, at least show the professionalism of mentioning one or two or more of them as if you are knowledgeable on the subject – she and others would thus have a much more credible argument).
EVERYBODY says that the flap over the Harvard professor, the Cambridge cop and the president of the United States is about race.The only point I will acknowledge here is that the Gates story indeed took our attention away from other (I would argue) more important matters, and yes, health care legislation may very well top the list.
I'll grant you this, it's about color, all right. Not black and white. Pink and blue.
Because every woman knows that if the professor, the cop or the president in this incident were female, we'd have been talking about something important last week, like health-care reform.
A female professor would've done what Gates should have done: Thanked the officer for his trouble after proving that the home was her proper residence, and then kindly asked him to leave, because "I'm a little cranky after an 18- hour flight from China. I need some rest."
I'm guessing a female officer would've walked away no matter how loud the professor got because she'd have understood that it can be irritating to have a cop in your living room.
And - ask Hillary or even Michelle - I'll bet a female president would've rolled her eyes and said, "Boys will be boys."
…
I'm thinking, in this instance, that even the president believes this incident was probably hormonally, not racially, instigated.
How do I know?
He's invited Gates and Crowley to the White House this week to discuss things - over a beer. That's what men do after they realize that testosterone got the better of them. They buzz on brews, maybe shake hands and try to move on.
Most women don't get why the silly ritual is even necessary.
It's a guy thing, ladies. You wouldn't understand.
However, before we chalk this all up to nothing more than Men Behaving Badly, I would ask that you read here about a young girl named Megan Meier.
As Wikipedia tells us here, Meier was…
…an American teenager from Dardenne Prairie, Missouri who committed suicide by hanging at the age of 13 years, 11 months.[3] Her suicide was attributed to cyber-bullying through the social networking website MySpace. The account through which the bullying took place purportedly belonged to a 16-year-old male named "Josh Evans." However, Lori Drew, the mother of a former friend of Meier, later admitted creating the MySpace account with her daughter and Ashley Grills, Lori Drew's 18 year old employee.[4] Several people contributed to running the faked account, including Drew.[5][6]So the mother of a girl who believed her daughter was the subject of rumors spread by Meier decided to get even by harassing Meier online to the point of suicide.
Witnesses testified that the women intended to use Meier’s e-mails with "Josh" to get information about her and later humiliate her, in retribution for her allegedly spreading gossip about Drew's daughter.[7][8]
A federal grand jury indicted Lori Drew on May 15, 2008, on three counts of accessing protected computers without authorization to obtain information to inflict emotional distress, and one count of criminal conspiracy.[9] Drew was found guilty on three lesser charges (reduced from felonies to misdemeanors by the jury) on November 26, 2008. The jury was deadlocked on the fourth felony charge of criminal conspiracy.[10][11]
Now let’s suppose, for example, that the two individuals here were male. Let’s suppose further that, instead of bullying, they got into a fight over it (perhaps to the point where the police were called).
Well then, that’s preferable to driving an impressionable young girl crazy to the point where she kills herself, isn’t it?
Apples and oranges? Perhaps. But this is what happens when we start ascribing gender-based characteristics to confrontations such as the Gates/Sgt. Crowley dustup (more simply put, you cannot make generalizations based on what is perceived to be gender-based behavior).
I have to admit that I’m a bit surprised to read something like this from Polaneczky, who is genuinely a pro and has produced a lot of good work. Stu Bykofsky? Uh, yep – something like this is right up his alley, as they say.
I knew that President Obama said that Crowley acted “stupidly,” a term he said was “stupid” himself (though I disagree).
However, I didn’t know that the stupidity was contagious.
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