Frank Rich says the greatest quality the late news anchor Walter Cronkite possessed was the willingness to confront those betraying his nation's trust -- up to and including Cronkite's bosses.
Rich sees little of that quality in today's broadcast journalists.
That’s why the past week’s debate about whether there could ever again be a father-figure anchor with Cronkite’s everyman looks and sonorous delivery is an escapist parlor game. What matters is content, not style. The real question is this: How many of those with similarly exalted perches in the news media today — and those perches, however diminished, still do exist in the multichannel digital age — will speak truth to power when the country is on the line? This journalistic responsibility cannot be outsourced to Comedy Central and Jon Stewart.
Moving as it may be to repeatedly watch Cronkite’s famous on-camera reactions to J.F.K.’s death and the astronauts’ moon landing, those replays aren’t the story. It’s a given that an anchor might mist up during a national tragedy and cheer a national triumph. The real test is how a journalist responds when people in high places are doing low deeds out of camera view and getting away with it. Vietnam and Watergate, not Kennedy and Neil Armstrong, are what made Cronkite Cronkite.
In the case of Vietnam, the anchor began as a reliable mouthpiece for the optimistic scenarios purveyed by the Johnson administration. It was the contradictions and chaos Cronkite saw in a visit to Vietnam after the Tet offensive that tardily changed his mind in 1968. Even now, right-wing bloggers who still think we could have “won” in Vietnam and are busy trashing Cronkite miss the point of what he said in his on-air editorial. He did not presume to judge the confusing outcome of Tet itself; he viewed the war as a whole (accurately) as a stalemate.
What really outraged him was more elementary than any prognostication. He saw that the American government was lying to its own people. “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,” he said.
Cronkite was braver during Watergate. The Washington Post, still largely regarded as a local paper, had been on a lonely limb pursuing the scandal in the months after the break-in of June 1972. Its young reporters Woodward and Bernstein were nobodies. The leading national paper, The Times, was lagging behind and underplaying the story. The networks, the biggest news source for Americans, barely mentioned Watergate. The narrative was too complex and didn’t yield the kind of visuals that scream Good Television.
What Cronkite did on Oct. 27, 1972, was remarkable. Though CBS News had little fresh reporting of its own, it repackaged The Post’s to make it compelling TV. The Post’s logo and headlines often served as the visuals. The piece clocked in at an unprecedented 14 minutes — two-thirds of a news program running 22 minutes without commercials — and was broadcast just days before the election. As Katharine Graham, then the paper’s publisher, wrote in “Personal History,” her 1997 memoir, “CBS had taken The Post national,” giving its Watergate reporting the credibility and mass circulation that would ultimately allow it to affect the course of history. ...
Watching many of the empty Cronkite tributes in his own medium over the past week, you had to wonder if his industry was sticking to mawkish clichés just to avoid unflattering comparisons. If he was the most trusted man in America, it wasn’t because he was a nice guy with an authoritative voice and a lived-in face. It wasn’t because he “loved a good story” or that he removed his glasses when a president died. It was because at a time of epic corruption in the most powerful precincts in Washington, Cronkite was not at the salons and not in the tank.