"Walter Cronkite's Legacy Was Not Objectivity, but One of Honesty"

Al Giordano:

"Today, our nation is fighting two wars: one abroad and one at home. While the war in Iraq is in the headlines, the other war is still being fought on our own streets. Its casualties are the wasted lives of our own citizens. I am speaking of the war on drugs. And I cannot help but wonder how many more lives, and how much more money, will be wasted before another Robert McNamara admits what is plain for all to see: the war on drugs is a failure."

- Walter Cronkite (1916-2009)

The late television anchorman Walter Cronkite was eulogized this morning at Lincoln Center in New York, including by President Barack Obama, who quite mistakenly praised Cronkite for “his passionate defense of objective reporting.”

But what made Cronkite “the most trusted man in America” for decades was not an adherence to the rigid concept of objectivity that corporate media and its official journalism schools preach, but, to the contrary, that he would from time to time disclose his views and explain them to the public; for Civil Rights, against the Vietnam war, and later in life against the war in Iraq, and against the drug war. Cronkite fought unsuccessfully to force TV networks to provide free airtime for political candidates, and issued harsh criticism of Fox News, calling it “a far right organization.” Cronkite signed fundraising appeals for Danny Schechter’s The Media Channel and for the Drug Policy Alliance, among other causes.

And not just in retirement: In February of 1968, Cronkite returned from a reporting mission in Vietnam and told the nation:

“…for every means we have to escalate, the enemy can match us, and that applies to invasion of the North, the use of nuclear weapons, or the mere commitment of one hundred, or two hundred, or three hundred thousand more American troops to the battle. And with each escalation, the world comes closer to the brink of cosmic disaster.

“To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past.”

That's clearly not the kind of frank talk we've heard in recent years from the national TV anchors and reporters.

It was not “objectivity” that made Cronkite so beloved and trusted, but, rather, his lack of slavish devotion to it: the honesty to tell us when he had a strong opinion based on the facts that he and his team were reporting.

Interesting, too, is how his memorial service today became a metaphor for the death of the news media industry and its own crisis of credibility, and a mourning ceremony for it.

Read between the lines on the President’s remarks there, and the cat is out of the bag:

“We also remember and celebrate the journalism that Walter practiced -- a standard of honesty and integrity and responsibility to which so many of you have committed your careers. It's a standard that's a little bit harder to find today. We know that this is a difficult time for journalism. Even as appetites for news and information grow, newsrooms are closing. Despite the big stories of our era, serious journalists find themselves all too often without a beat. Just as the news cycle has shrunk, so has the bottom line.

“And too often, we fill that void with instant commentary and celebrity gossip and the softer stories that Walter disdained, rather than the hard news and investigative journalism he championed. ‘What happened today?’ is replaced with ‘Who won today?’ The public debate cheapens. The public trust falters. We fail to understand our world or one another as well as we should –- and that has real consequences in our own lives and in the life of our nation. We seem stuck with a choice between what cuts to our bottom line and what harms us as a society. Which price is higher to pay? Which cost is harder to bear?

“’This democracy,’ Walter said, ‘cannot function without a reasonably well-informed electorate.’ That's why the honest, objective, meticulous reporting that so many of you pursue with the same zeal that Walter did is so vital to our democracy and our society: Our future depends on it…

“Our American story continues. It needs to be told. And if we choose to live up to Walter's example, if we realize that the kind of journalism he embodied will not simply rekindle itself as part of a natural cycle, but will come alive only if we stand up and demand it and resolve to value it once again, then I'm convinced that the choice between profit and progress is a false one -- and that the golden days of journalism still lie ahead.”

As a working journalist who runs an online newspaper and a journalism school, I must correct the president: the choice is between profit and progress. The news organizations of the advertising model that exist primarily to make money for investors are precisely those that are either already dead, are dying or are cheapening their content to the extreme that what they produce can no longer honestly be called journalism or news. And the solution to "rekindle" journalism is coming from media that do not have that profit motive as its reason to exist.

If the golden days of journalism lie ahead, they will come from below, and faster still when the dead wood of dead tree journalism is finally brushed aside: from a journalism that is of the people, by the people and for the people.

In the coming days we’re going to, in the process of announcing two dozen scholarships in authentic journalism, while making the applications available and recruiting the best and brightest talents of our profession from throughout América and the world, begin an international months long teach-in to redefine journalism and take it back from the commercial media – which has plagued the word with a crisis of credibility – returning journalism from the hands of a few to the hands of all.

And you, kind reader, will be invited along for the ride every mile of the way. And when it happens Walter Cronkite, wherever he's broadcasting from now, will be able to say, again: "And you were there."

H/t to Danny Schecter.