Walter Cronkite was a figure of quasi-religious stature for an older generation of journalists, not simply because he was a good reporter, but because of the trust he engendered in his audience and, if we're being honest, the outsize influence his views had on the country. Still, there's something that bugs me about Cronkite worship, and I think it has a great deal to do with this anecdote, after Cronkite basically said the Vietnam war couldn't be won:
In a famous reaction, President Lyndon B. Johnson told his aides, "If I've lost Walter Cronkite, I've lost middle America." Subsequently, he decided not to run for reelection.
I say this as someone who wasn't alive during the Vietnam War, but who doesn't harbor any misplaced sentimentality about our ability to succeed there: I don't think it's a good thing for any one human being in a democracy to have that kind of influence. I think it's overstating things to suggest that Johnson failed to run just because of Cronkite, or that Cronkite single-handedly changed public opinion on the war, but think ultimately democracy suffers when one person has the kind of power being alluded to here, even if it's somewhat overstated.
The line is that Cronkite was admired as much for his honesty as for his influence. But given the press' inability to take a similarly adversarial relationship with the Bush administration over the last eight years, I think the truth is that most journalists who revere Cronkite wish they had his ratings and his stature, and could care less about replicating his honesty; after all, Cronkite was a dyed- in-the-wool liberal, and we don't take those very seriously these days. Watching the coverage of his death, I can't help but feel like reporters are admiring Cronkite the phenomenon, not Cronkite the reporter. Honestly, I think it's probably for the best that people are more skeptical of reporters than they once were. Our job is to find, verify, and publish the facts, not to be loved for it. Trust is a means to an end, not an end in itself.
-- A. Serwer
