The Blog from the Core - Walter Cronkite Is No More

Walter Cronkite Is No More

Figuratively speaking, I mean.

Norman Podhoretz writes a monumental tour-de-force at Commentary, Sep. 2004. I spent Saturday reading it; printing it out, I used up what was left of the toner in my laser printer.

Reading the whole thing is well worth the time. (It is here, too.) I want to call your attention to this little bit, though, discussing the change in American attitude towards the Vietnam War:

.... Even when all but one or two of the people who had either directly led us into Vietnam, or had applauded our intervention, commenced falling all over themselves to join the antiwar parade, public opinion continued supporting the war.

But it did not matter. Public opinion had ceased to count. Indeed, as the Tet offensive of 1968 revealed, reality itself had ceased to count. As all would later come to agree and some vainly struggled to insist at the time, Tet was a crushing defeat not for us but for the North Vietnamese. But Walter Cronkite had only to declare it a defeat for us from the anchor desk of the CBS Evening News, and a defeat it became....

One of the biggest differences, Faithful Reader, between then and now is that no Walter Cronkite can make a pronouncement in flat contradiction to reality and have it become the dominant factor in public opinion without being challenged mightily. Walter Cronkite, of course, is only emblematic of the larger mainstream media — a wing of the Democratic Establishment — that no longer has a monopoly on the dissemination of information & opinion.

Podhoretz references four of his earlier articles; I have been able to find these three:

Podhoretz also references four of George W. Bush's speeches:

This extra reading is the kind of service you've come to expect from The Blog from the Core, though you don't necessarily get it from other sources. No need to thank me: just throw money my way. :-)