Walter Cronkite was just a TV guy

You know what? Walter Cronkite wasn’t so great.

I know, I know, we’re all supposed to be beating our breasts about Cronkite’s passing and lamenting how TV news was never the same after he retired and damnit, they just don’t make journalists like they used to anymore. And at first, I was tempted to join in the nostalgia: My first memories of news — such as they are — are memories of Cronkite, intoning in a baritone staccato how many days had passed since Americans had been taken hostage in Iran.

But you know what? Walter Cronkite really wasn’t that great.

To understand why he wasn’t so great, though, you’ve got to understand what lots of folks are lamenting this week: A bygone era of TV journalism that never really existed. Here’s a typical — and typically misguided — rant from litblogger Edward Champion:

In Cronkite’s time, it was the journalist’s job to question everything, provide dependable veracity, and present vital information for the public to consider. But today’s anchormen and editors are more concerned about money. When there’s a mortgage and a college tuition to pay off, the “journalist” knows damn well where his bread is buttered.

Right. And here’s Salon’s Glenn Greenwald:

So, too, with the death of Walter Cronkite.  Tellingly, his most celebrated and significant moment — Greg Mitchell says “this broadcast would help save many thousands of lives, U.S. and Vietnamese, perhaps even a million” — was when he stood up and announced that Americans shouldn’t trust the statements being made about the war by the U.S. Government and military, and that the specific claims they were making were almost certainly false.  In other words, Cronkite’s best moment was when he did exactly that which the modern journalist today insists they must not ever do — directly contradict claims from government and military officials and suggest that such claims should not be believed.

You know what shouldn’t be believed? Extravagant claims about how some journalists used to do things the right way. Because you know what? Walter Cronkite wasn’t that great.

Here’s why:

1. He was crushingly dull. Everybody remembers — or has seen the old videos — of Cronkite’s coverage of the Kennedy assassination, or the moon landing, the the Martin Luther King Jr. assassination. But any monkey can anchor a disaster and come away looking like a gray eminence. Look at what Hurricane Katrina did for Anderson Cooper’s career.

The truth is, the assassinations and other calamities spanned just a few days of Cronkite’s anchoring career. More often, a day in the news looked something like this in March 1977:

Blah, blah, blah. If you can get five minutes into this 10-minute video without being bored to tears, you’re a better human than I am. Lament Uncle Walter all you want, kids: There’s no way you’d sit through this stuff long enough to make him the most-trusted man in America these days. To the extent that Cronkite had influence, it’s because Americans had only two other TV news options at the time — ABC and NBC. No CNN, no FOX, nothing like that. People watched Walter Cronkite because there was nothing else to do before the good shows came on.

2. He was a sellout. Never mind the cigarette commercials he did — and botched. Never mind that he co-hosted the CBS Morning News with a puppet. A lion puppet, to be precise, Named Charlemagne. We will chalk these small embarrassments to the early days of television working its kinks out.

Cast that stuff aside, though, and the truth is that Walter Cronkite — his op-edding against the Vietnam War notwithstanding — didn’t exactly speak truth to power. He courted it. Check out these excerpts from his first half-hour nightly newscast for CBS:

There’s no other way to say it: He’s palling around with Kennedy. So, Mr. President, there’s this little civil rights problem down in Alabama. How’s that going to affect your re-election? It’s country-clubby horse-race journalism, the kind of stuff people like Glenn Greenwald say they hate unless it’s viewed through the hazy light of 45-year-old memories.

Oh, and check Cronkite’s smirk when he quotes Castro accusing the CIA of fomenting instability in Cuba. Because the CIA never would’ve done that, right? Right?

And far from being a riches-rejecting tribune of the people, Walter Cronkite owned a yacht. Which he used to go sailing with the Clintons.

3. He didn’t really make a big difference. This speaks to, as Greenwald says, Cronkite’s most celebrated act: Opining against American involvement in Vietnam. The anecdote that LBJ watched the broadcast and despaired: “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.”

Only the war went on seven more years. Most of the Americans who would die in Vietnam died after the Tet Offensive, and after Cronkite’s pronouncement. That’s not Cronkite’s fault, of course, but the telling of his story makes it sound like Walter Cronkite pushed the Vietnam War to its end. It didn’t.

Truth is, most of the journalists who dug up the truth about American involvement in Vietnam were newspaper and wire guys. David Halberstam of the New York Times was challenging Army generals in Saigon in 1963 while Cronkite was playing grab-ass with Kennedy in Hyannisport. The Pentagon Papers, which revealed the doubts America’s own leadership had about the enterprise, appeared in the Times and the Washington Post. These reporters didn’t need to take a trip to Vietnam, come back and make a celebrated speech. They laid out the facts, pointed out the discrepancies between the official story and the truth, and they did it for years and years and years.

Which leads me to the last point.

4. At end of the day he was a TV guy. Cronkite was, in the end, the grandfather of everything that Jon Stewart makes fun of every night. There’s no other way to say it.

The truth is, there’s never been a golden age of journalism. Oh, maybe for about six months in 1974 when Woodward and Bernstein were on a hot streak. But that’s about it. And it never existed for TV journalism. TV is good at wowing us, after all — good at showing us the Reagan assassination attempt, or the Kennedy assassination, or the space shuttle blowing up. It’s not so great at explaining how or why those things occur. Walter Cronkite was ringmaster for many of those memorable moments — which is why we remember him — but for the most part, that’s all he was. Anybody who says different is peddling ideological malarkey to make their own points about what the media needs to be.

And that’s the way it is.