Yeah, well, as American University professor and Getting It Wrong author Joseph Campbell notes on his great Media Myth Alert blog, the Cronkite story is totally bushwah. Campbell notes that Johnson did not watch the original broadcast and there’s no indication he ever watched a taped version of the program either. Cronkite’s invocation of “stalemate” was not original or memorable – that phrase had been used for a long time by then. And for all the talk of a “Cronkite moment,” asks Campbell, why did U.S. troops stick around in Vietnam for another five years?…
The Cronkite story plays into the romance of supposedly objective journalists having profound effects on the world. It’s a self-flattering myth that pumps up the ego of newshounds everywhere, which can only lead them into more and bigger mistakes.
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