Book of the week: Cronkite by Douglas Brinkley

(Harper, $35)

“The man who once dominated television journalism was more complicated—and occasionally more unethical”—than legend suggests, said Howard Kurtz in Newsweek. Douglas Brinkley’s “sweeping and masterful” biography of Walter Cronkite seriously tarnishes the reputation of the late CBS news anchor, who long was known as “the most trusted man in America.” Behind the scenes, Cronkite did things that today would get a journalist fired: bugging a room at the 1952 Republican Convention, inserting deceptive edits into interviews, arranging a sweetheart deal with Pan Am to fly his family around the world for free. He was also far more liberal in his political beliefs than the public generally believed. In 1968, he urged Bobby Kennedy to run for president and stop the Vietnam War, just before playing dumb in an exclusive interview with Kennedy about the same subjects. “This was duplicitous, a major breach of trust.”

So much for the “golden age” of broadcast news reporting, said Jonathan S. Tobin in CommentaryMagazine.com. Brinkley’s reporting exposes as totally false the popular myth that the great broadcast journalists of yesteryear “would never stoop to inject ideology into the news.” Brinkley apparently wishes to forgive Cronkite for some of the ethical lapses that Brinkley’s book highlights, on the grounds that the Missouri-born newsman often used his power well. Some forgiveness is justified: “To confront the unvarnished truth about Cronkite is not to entirely discount” his skill as a television performer or his often sound news judgment. Yet “the real sin here” is not Cronkite’s partisanship but “the pretense of fairness” that he exemplified. Unmasked, CBS’s legendary anchor appears to have been “as crooked” in his bias “as the worst TV screamers of our own day.”

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I wouldn’t go that far, said Joel Achenbach in WashingtonPost.com. We live in the era of “the instant opinion and the ill-conceived rant”; Cronkite came to his views by real reporting. After 1968’s Tet Offensive, the network star flew to Vietnam to gauge whether the Pentagon’s rosy scenarios about U.S. prospects there were justified. Only after painstakingly gathering facts did he create a turning point in public opinion by asserting, during a 30-minute special, that the war was unwinnable. “What’s striking now is how much energy, time, and money went into what amounted to a single, moderated, but firm verdict.” If, as Brinkley suggests, the Cronkite of 1968 opened the door for opinionated mainstream journalism, at least he knew of what he spoke.