Is Cronkite Moment Just a Media Myth?
Amid all of the media excitement of NBC’s choice to grandly pronounce the ongoing violence in Iraq a “civil war,” some (like MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann) are gleefully touting NBC’s editorializing as a “Walter Cronkite moment,” referring to the then-CBS Evening News anchor’s 1968 editorial declaring that the U.S. had become “mired in stalemate” in Vietnam. In their desire for a U.S. retreat in Iraq, journalists had previously pronounced Cindy Sheehan’s protesting in Crawford, Texas and Democratic Congressman John Murtha’s calling for a withdrawal of troops to be “Cronkite moments” of the Iraq war, each time apparently hoping that the weight of the media’s pessimism finally forces a change in U.S. policy. This morning I stumbled across a piece written about a year ago by Editor & Publisher’s Greg Mitchell for CBS’s Public Eye, theorizing about whether Murtha’s anti-war declarations would be the “Cronkite moment” of Iraq. Mitchell gently suggested that the idea that Cronkite’s editorial was
