It is hard to overlook the impact then veteran CBS anchorman had on changing public opinion about the Vietnam War in the 1970's.
Fast forward to 2007. We have the Iraq War and a very open and "interesting", and often fractious, race underway for nomination as GOP and Democratic candidate in next year's presidential election.
It is not easy to evaluate the impact of all the currents in the presidential race, but 2 candidates seem to have attracted the most attention - Hilary Clinton and Barack Osama. Now, Oprah has come out in support of Osama. The impact of her doing so awaits evaluation. However, it adds a new dimension to the debate about the Iraq War, suggests Marty Kaplan writing in The Huffington Post "Oprah Is to Iraq as Cronkite Was to Vietnam":
"It's the war, stupid.
That's what came to mind as I watched Oprah Winfrey stump for Barack Obama this weekend. It's not about whether a star who can make a book a bestseller can also make a primary candidate the nominee, as the media are framing it. It's about reassuring the overwhelming majority of Americans who oppose the war in Iraq that they are, in fact, an overwhelming majority. It's also about giving courage or cover to every Democratic member of Congress who is tempted to swallow The Surge Is Working™, to take Iraq off the table, to forget that, more than Katrina, more than the mortgage meltdown, more than healthcare, it's the war -- the Cheney Libby Chalabi Blackwater WMD Abu Ghraib Wolfowitz Rumsfeld Feith Perle Yoo Waterboarding Walter Reeding Oedipus Bush war -- that looms over everything else casting lawless shadows across our country.
How do people know what other people think? The sad truth is that it doesn't come from talking to one another; it comes from the media. And the media, for reasons ranging from mercantile to ideological to laziness, frame every issue, including the Iraq war, as (at best) a battle between two plausible sides, or (at worst) as a crusade of the Right against the Wrong.
That's why no journalist can today occupy the place that Walter Cronkite did when, at the end of a CBS documentary about the 1968 Tet offensive, he said the U.S. was in a stalemate in Vietnam and should get out. That moment, it's said, caused LBJ to tell an aide, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America." But today there's no MSM journalist who channels Middles America. Whatever their other virtues are, the ABC, CBS and NBC anchors are paid their multimillions not to tell the truth, but to sell the truth-has-two-sides story, which is also how you maximize audiences. (Drop a coupla zeroes from the salaries and viewerships, and it's true of PBS, too.) Bill Moyers, Keith Olbermann, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert actually do tell the truth, and they mercilessly deconstruct the biases of "fair and balanced" faux news and fatuous "narrative" narratives, but their audience sizes limit their impact, and their matter is more than matched by Republican media anti-matter."
Fast forward to 2007. We have the Iraq War and a very open and "interesting", and often fractious, race underway for nomination as GOP and Democratic candidate in next year's presidential election.
It is not easy to evaluate the impact of all the currents in the presidential race, but 2 candidates seem to have attracted the most attention - Hilary Clinton and Barack Osama. Now, Oprah has come out in support of Osama. The impact of her doing so awaits evaluation. However, it adds a new dimension to the debate about the Iraq War, suggests Marty Kaplan writing in The Huffington Post "Oprah Is to Iraq as Cronkite Was to Vietnam":
"It's the war, stupid.
That's what came to mind as I watched Oprah Winfrey stump for Barack Obama this weekend. It's not about whether a star who can make a book a bestseller can also make a primary candidate the nominee, as the media are framing it. It's about reassuring the overwhelming majority of Americans who oppose the war in Iraq that they are, in fact, an overwhelming majority. It's also about giving courage or cover to every Democratic member of Congress who is tempted to swallow The Surge Is Working™, to take Iraq off the table, to forget that, more than Katrina, more than the mortgage meltdown, more than healthcare, it's the war -- the Cheney Libby Chalabi Blackwater WMD Abu Ghraib Wolfowitz Rumsfeld Feith Perle Yoo Waterboarding Walter Reeding Oedipus Bush war -- that looms over everything else casting lawless shadows across our country.
How do people know what other people think? The sad truth is that it doesn't come from talking to one another; it comes from the media. And the media, for reasons ranging from mercantile to ideological to laziness, frame every issue, including the Iraq war, as (at best) a battle between two plausible sides, or (at worst) as a crusade of the Right against the Wrong.
That's why no journalist can today occupy the place that Walter Cronkite did when, at the end of a CBS documentary about the 1968 Tet offensive, he said the U.S. was in a stalemate in Vietnam and should get out. That moment, it's said, caused LBJ to tell an aide, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America." But today there's no MSM journalist who channels Middles America. Whatever their other virtues are, the ABC, CBS and NBC anchors are paid their multimillions not to tell the truth, but to sell the truth-has-two-sides story, which is also how you maximize audiences. (Drop a coupla zeroes from the salaries and viewerships, and it's true of PBS, too.) Bill Moyers, Keith Olbermann, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert actually do tell the truth, and they mercilessly deconstruct the biases of "fair and balanced" faux news and fatuous "narrative" narratives, but their audience sizes limit their impact, and their matter is more than matched by Republican media anti-matter."
Comments