[FairfieldLife] Re: 'Goodnight, Walter, and Good Luck to us All'

[authfriend]

--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB  wrote:
>
> --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Robert  wrote:
> >
> > The New York Times
> > Editorial | Appreciations
> > Walter Cronkite
> > . . .
> > VERLYN KLINKENBORG
> 
> One wonders whether Mr. Klinkenborg, whose writing tends
> to rhapsodize the "rural life" and whose closest brush with
> "hard news" and controversy seems to have been contributing
> a quote to the furor surrounding an author who expressed his
> distaste at one of his books being chosen for "Oprah's Book
> Club," might fall into the category of journalists described in
> this article. They seem to be falling all over themselves to laud
> a man who would not have considered *any* of them journalists.

Klinkenborg would not fall into this category of
journalists, no, since he would fall into only
the very broadest category of those considered
journalists, i.e., those who write for publication
in newspapers and magazines. He isn't a reporter, 
has no journalism degree, and has never worked for
a newspaper or magazine except as a member of the
NYTimes editorial board, or as a freelance 
contributor. His editorials for the Times are 
typically about rural life, as you note.

You might call him a "literary journalist." He's
basically a writer of nonfiction.

In other words, for Cronkite not to have considered
him a journalist would not have been a criticism,
nor is he among those "media stars" Greenwald is
(entirely appropriately, IMHO) criticizing.

Sorry, but you goofed again, Barry. There are any
number of other journalists of the type Greenwald
excoriates who have written paeans to Cronkite that
you could have picked.

Here's one from WaPo by Tom Brokaw, former anchor
of NBC News:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/18/AR2009071800610.html

http://tinyurl.com/m68pk8

He devotes one sentence to Cronkite's public
disillusionment with the Vietnam War and fails to
draw any contrast with the current generation of
journalists, who wouldn't and didn't dare claim
the administration's portrayals of what it was
doing in Iraq were not to be trusted, as Cronkite
asserted of the Johnson administration's claims
about what it was doing in Vietnam.

Howard Kurtz, another media star who styles himself
a media critic, also wrote an appreciation of
Cronkite for WaPo. He mentions Cronkite's criticism
of Vietnam in passing, but only in the context of
maintaining at some length that the fact that the
public no longer trusts journalists as they trusted
Cronkite is a *good* thing, that *journalists* should
be "challenged and fact-checked":

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/17/AR2009071703787.html?sid=ST2009071703376

http://tinyurl.com/n2eht4

Had you been interested in making a solid point
instead of just mouthing off, you could have found
these two articles in about a minute and a half and
used either to introduce Greenwald's piece. But you
were too lazy; instead you smeared somebody who 
didn't deserve it because his column about Cronkite
was ready to hand in Robert's post.

[FairfieldLife] Re: 'Goodnight, Walter, and Good Luck to us All'

[shempmcgurk]

Uh, Robert, you're mixing up your news anchors.

"Goodnight and good luck" was the signature sign-off by Edward R. Murrow.

"And that's the way it was for (date)" was Cronkite's...





-- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Robert  wrote:
>
> 
> The New York Times
> Editorial | Appreciations
> Walter Cronkite
> 
> To most of us, most of the time, the news is something that happens to other 
> people, the disembodied events of the day. It was Walter Cronkite’s job to 
> embody them for us, to give them presence in our lives.
> You may not have known much about how the “CBS Evening News” was 
> assembled in Cronkite’s day, from 1962 to 1981. But you could not help 
> feeling its significance, its weight, by hearing it told in that voice â€" in 
> that reassuringly unaccented accent, the product of growing up along the 95th 
> parallel, more or less smack in the heart of the United States.
> In retrospect, Walter Cronkite’s authority is something of a mystery. Its 
> sources are obvious. His reporting during World War II alone would have 
> fueled half a dozen careers. The mystery is the modesty within his authority. 
> His job was to appear unfazed, unchanged by the events he described. But from 
> time to time â€" reporting President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, 
> reporting from Vietnam, reporting that first step on the moon â€" he made it 
> clear that the news of the day had changed not only us but him.
> 
> In those moments he seemed his most authoritative.
> 
> How one becomes a proxy for a nation, as Cronkite did, is a matter of luck 
> and timing and experience. But it’s also a matter of character. Cronkite 
> had limitless stores of character. And limitless stores of wonder. He never 
> grew weary of the world or reporting on it. He seemed bemused by the 
> accolades and almost reverential of the trust that so many millions of 
> Americans placed in him.
> 
> Some deaths end only a life. Some end a generation. Walter Cronkite’s death 
> ends something larger and more profound. He stood for a world, a century, 
> that no longer exists. His death is like losing the last veteran of a 
> world-changing war, one of those men who saw too much but was never 
> embittered by it. Walter Cronkite’s gift was to talk to us about what he 
> saw, and we are very lucky to have been able to listen. 
> VERLYN KLINKENBORG
> Published: July 19, 2009
>

[FairfieldLife] Re: 'Goodnight, Walter, and Good Luck to us All'

[Robert]

--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB  wrote:
>
> --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Robert  wrote:
> >
> > The New York Times
> > Editorial | Appreciations
> > Walter Cronkite
> > . . .
> > VERLYN KLINKENBORG
> 
> One wonders whether Mr. Klinkenborg, whose writing tends
> to rhapsodize the "rural life" and whose closest brush with
> "hard news" and controversy seems to have been contributing
> a quote to the furor surrounding an author who expressed his
> distaste at one of his books being chosen for "Oprah's Book
> Club," might fall into the category of journalists described in
> this article. They seem to be falling all over themselves to laud
> a man who would not have considered *any* of them journalists.
> 
> 
> Celebrating Cronkite while ignoring what he did   Glenn Greenwald
> 
> "The Vietcong did not win by a knockout [in the Tet Offensive], but
> neither did we. The referees of history may make it a draw. . . . We
> have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American
> leaders, both in Vietnam and Washington, to have faith any longer in the
> silver linings they find in the darkest clouds. . . .
> 
> "For it seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of
> Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. . . . 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" -- Walter Cronkite, CBS Evening News,
> February 27, 1968
>  _238788.html> .
> 
> "I think there are a lot of critics who think that [in the run-up to the
> Iraq War] . . . . if we did not stand up and say this is bogus, and
> you're a liar, and why are you doing this, that we didn't do our job. I
> respectfully disagree. It's not our role" -- David Gregory, MSNBC, May
> 28, 2008
>  ays-the-press-did-a-good-job-on-iraq/> .
> 
> When Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Halberstam died, media
> stars everywhere commemorated his death as though he were one of them --
> as though they do what he did -- even though he had nothing but
> bottomless, intense disdain for everything they do.  As he put it in a
> 2005 speech to students at the Columbia School of Journalism
>  x.html> :  "the better you do your job, often going against conventional
> mores, the less popular you are likely to be . . . By and large, the
> more famous you are, the less of a journalist you are."
> 
> In that same speech, Halberstam cited as the "proudest moment" of his
> career a bitter argument he had in 1963 with U.S. Generals in Vietnam,
> by which point, as a young reporter, he was already considered an
> "enemy" of the Kennedy White House for routinely contradicting the White
> House's claims about the war (the President himself asked his editor to
> pull Halberstam from reporting on Vietnam).  During that conflict, he
> stood up to a General in a Press Conference in Saigon who was attempting
> to intimidate him for having actively doubted and aggressively
> investigated military claims, rather than taking and repeating them at
> face value:
> 
> Picture if you will rather small room, about the size of a classroom,
> with about 10 or 12 reporters there in the center of the room. And in
> the back, and outside, some 40 military officers, all of them big time
> brass. It was clearly an attempt to intimidate us.
> 
> General Stilwell tried to take the intimidation a step further. He began
> by saying that Neil and I had bothered General Harkins and Ambassador
> Lodge and other VIPs, and we were not to do it again. Period.
> 
> And I stood up, my heart beating wildly -- and told him that we were not
> his corporals or privates, that we worked for The New York Times and UP
> and AP and Newsweek, not for the Department of Defense.
> 
> I said that we knew that 30 American helicopters and perhaps 150
> American soldiers had gone into battle, and the American people had a
> right to know what happened. I went on to say that we would continue to
> press to go on missions and call Ambassador Lodge and General Harkins,
> but he could, if he chose, write to our editors telling them that we
> were being too aggressive, and were pushing much too hard to go into
> battle. That was certainly his right.
> 
> Can anyone imagine any big media stars -- who swoon in reverence both to
> political power and especially military authority
>   --
> defying military instructions that way, let alone being proud of it? 
> Halberstam certainly couldn't imagine any of them doing it, which is
> why, in 1999, he wrote  :
> 
> Obviously, it should be a brilliant moment in American journalism, a
> time of a genuine f

[FairfieldLife] Re: 'Goodnight, Walter, and Good Luck to us All'

[TurquoiseB]

--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Robert  wrote:
>
> The New York Times
> Editorial | Appreciations
> Walter Cronkite
> . . .
> VERLYN KLINKENBORG

One wonders whether Mr. Klinkenborg, whose writing tends
to rhapsodize the "rural life" and whose closest brush with
"hard news" and controversy seems to have been contributing
a quote to the furor surrounding an author who expressed his
distaste at one of his books being chosen for "Oprah's Book
Club," might fall into the category of journalists described in
this article. They seem to be falling all over themselves to laud
a man who would not have considered *any* of them journalists.


Celebrating Cronkite while ignoring what he did   Glenn Greenwald

"The Vietcong did not win by a knockout [in the Tet Offensive], but
neither did we. The referees of history may make it a draw. . . . We
have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American
leaders, both in Vietnam and Washington, to have faith any longer in the
silver linings they find in the darkest clouds. . . .

"For it seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of
Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. . . . 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" -- Walter Cronkite, CBS Evening News,
February 27, 1968
 .

"I think there are a lot of critics who think that [in the run-up to the
Iraq War] . . . . if we did not stand up and say this is bogus, and
you're a liar, and why are you doing this, that we didn't do our job. I
respectfully disagree. It's not our role" -- David Gregory, MSNBC, May
28, 2008
 .

When Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Halberstam died, media
stars everywhere commemorated his death as though he were one of them --
as though they do what he did -- even though he had nothing but
bottomless, intense disdain for everything they do.  As he put it in a
2005 speech to students at the Columbia School of Journalism
 :  "the better you do your job, often going against conventional
mores, the less popular you are likely to be . . . By and large, the
more famous you are, the less of a journalist you are."

In that same speech, Halberstam cited as the "proudest moment" of his
career a bitter argument he had in 1963 with U.S. Generals in Vietnam,
by which point, as a young reporter, he was already considered an
"enemy" of the Kennedy White House for routinely contradicting the White
House's claims about the war (the President himself asked his editor to
pull Halberstam from reporting on Vietnam).  During that conflict, he
stood up to a General in a Press Conference in Saigon who was attempting
to intimidate him for having actively doubted and aggressively
investigated military claims, rather than taking and repeating them at
face value:

Picture if you will rather small room, about the size of a classroom,
with about 10 or 12 reporters there in the center of the room. And in
the back, and outside, some 40 military officers, all of them big time
brass. It was clearly an attempt to intimidate us.

General Stilwell tried to take the intimidation a step further. He began
by saying that Neil and I had bothered General Harkins and Ambassador
Lodge and other VIPs, and we were not to do it again. Period.

And I stood up, my heart beating wildly -- and told him that we were not
his corporals or privates, that we worked for The New York Times and UP
and AP and Newsweek, not for the Department of Defense.

I said that we knew that 30 American helicopters and perhaps 150
American soldiers had gone into battle, and the American people had a
right to know what happened. I went on to say that we would continue to
press to go on missions and call Ambassador Lodge and General Harkins,
but he could, if he chose, write to our editors telling them that we
were being too aggressive, and were pushing much too hard to go into
battle. That was certainly his right.

Can anyone imagine any big media stars -- who swoon in reverence both to
political power and especially military authority
  --
defying military instructions that way, let alone being proud of it? 
Halberstam certainly couldn't imagine any of them doing it, which is
why, in 1999, he wrote  :

Obviously, it should be a brilliant moment in American journalism, a
time of a genuine flowering of a journalistic culture . . .

But the reverse is true. Those to whom the most is given, the executives
of our three networks, have steadily moved away from their greatest
responsibilities, which is using their news departments to tel