My friend and fellow Vietnam veteran, Bob Caldwell, served for decades as a journalist in major newspapers, retiring recently as member of its editorial board and editor of the San Diego Union-Tribune’s Sunday opinion section. Today, Bob returns to print, in the Washington Examiner, to remind us that’s the way it wasn’t despite Walter Cronkite’s media-pack-panic after Tet ’68.
Nationally syndicated columnist Diana West, also, examines Cronkite’s “offensive history.” West says, admittedly harshly, “No, the Cronkite post-mortem that's needed is for the zombies who conjured up the hollow rapture and the living dead who fell for it.”
If you really don't remember, and before you start arguing from ignorance, you might refresh your knowledge of the facts with reading the comprehensive The Big Story by the Washington Post's Chief of the Saigon bureau during Tet '68, Peter Braestrup. Braestrup doesn't ignore media bias but emphasizes structural, staffing and experiential limitations of the mainstream media of that time, and that these problems "persist to this day." No kidding!
P.S.: Another old friend, Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy In Media delves deeper into the wider range of Cronkite illusions, such as the Soviet threat being exaggerated and that President Carter was the brightest president Cronkite knew.
