I think you emphasized the wrong line in that excerpt from Cronkite.

I'd do it as follows:

"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"

IMO, the "in the face of the evidence" is what is most important. It means that the journalist is supposed to evaluate what is being said against the evidence.

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When Bush says "Heckuva job Brownie" and New Orleans continues to not receive aid, juxtaposing the evidence and Bush's statement is what the good journalists did. This is not editorializing.

I agree that when the evidence is ambiguous or can support more than one narrative, what the journalist does may seem like editorializing. But the journalist can provide the evidence such as it is, and point out the ways in which it supports and does not support what is said.

As a side note, I guess I would give minor credit to Katie Couric (much as it pains me to say that) simply for her Sarah Palin interview last fall. While hardly in the company of Cronkite or Halberstam (or Helen Thomas, for that matter), at least she was willing to press the governor on various matters, which gave Palin the perfect opportunity to show her ignorance and vapidity to the entire country.

Of the three network news anchors, Katie Couric is definitely most inclined to understand what real journalism is.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/05/28/gibson/

That may not be the most impressive achievement -- it simply means she's better than Charlie Gibson and Brian Williams -- but she clearly is.

Somehow over cocktails on a pleasant Florida coast spring evening in a retirement community with in-laws, the subject of Tim Russert came up.

I casually mentioned his role as official stenographer, as evidenced by his Libby-trial comment--"All my conversations are presumed to be off the record"--and suddenly the night turned dark and stormy.

It was soon clear Russert occupied a place in the America's religious pantheon and was defended in terms like "great American" and his journalistic objectivity extolled to the darkening heavens.

What does this have to do with today's superficial celebration of Cronkite?

Mainstream America's illusions about this country are held together by a deeply-felt and fiercely protected faith.

The Sunday morning trip to Russert on Meet the Press was like the ritual of church going, a man and a place that could be relied on to give us the sermon to reinforce our faith in America, the land of opportunity, equality, justice, democracy for all.

Cronkite is being elevated to the pantheon, and he will transcend in white robes of American greatness and illusion. Damn it.

Your conversation with Chuck Todd had several moments of devastating and unintentional revelation. One of the most striking for me was Todd's continued insistence that you had to guarantee that a public political spectacle would not ensue if war crimes were investigated. Todd has internalized his most essential role:

Keep the faith. Maintain the illusions.

from antiwar.com:

... In the wake of the Ia Drang Valley battles of November 1965 — the first major collision between an experimental airmobile division of the U.S. Army and regular soldiers in division strength from the People’s Army of North Vietnam — President Johnson ordered McNamara to rush to Vietnam and assess what had happened and what was going to happen.

Up till then, just more than 1,000 Americans, mostly advisers and pilots, had been killed in Vietnam since Ovnand and Buis. Then, in just five days 234 more Americans had been killed and hundreds wounded in the Ia http://Drang. There weren’t even enough military coffins in the country to handle the dead.

McNamara took briefings from Gen. William Westmoreland, the top U.S. commander in Vietnam, and from Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge and assorted spy chiefs and diplomats. Then he flew to An Khe in the Central Highlands and was briefed on the Ia Drang battles by then Lt. Col. Hal Moore, who had commanded on the ground in Landing Zone XRAY in the Ia Drang.

On the plane home to Washington, McNamara dictated a Top Secret/Eyes Only memo to President Johnson dated Nov. 30, 1965. In that report he stated that the enemy had not only met but had exceeded our escalation of the war and we had reached a decision point. In his view there were two options:

–Option One: We could arrange whatever diplomatic cover we could arrange and pull out of South Vietnam.

–Option Two: We could give Gen. Westmoreland the 200,000 more U.S. troops he was asking for, in which case by early 1967 we would have more than 500,000 Americans on the grhttp://ound and they would be dying at the rate of 1,000 a month. (He was wrong; the death toll would reach more than 3,000 a month at the height of the war). "All we can possibly achieve (by this) is a military stalemate at a much higher level of violence," McNamara wrote.

On Dec. 15, 1965, the president assembled what he called the "wise men" for a brainstorming session on Vietnam. He entered the Cabinet room holding McNamara’s memo. He shook it at McNamara and asked: "Bob, you mean to tell me no matter what I do I can’t win in Vietnam?" McNamara nodded yes; that was precisely what he meant.

The wise men sat in session for two days. Participants say there was no real discussion of McNamara’s Option One — it would have sent the wrong message to our Cold War allies — and at the end there was a unanimous vote in favor of Option Two — escalating and continuing a war that our leaders now knew we could not win.

Remember. This was 1965, 10 years before the last helicopter lifted off that roof in Saigon. It’s a hell of a lot easier to get sucked into a war or jump feet first into a war than it is to get out of a war.

Walter Cronkite told the American Public in '68 that we were in a stalemate and not "wining". That was an act of heroism at the time, and we must pay our respects to the departed for his gamble all those years ago.

However, we must also note that nobody in the media was able to discover what McNamara told in both memo and in person at the meeting of the wise men hosted by President Johnson. If the nation had known in '65 that we could not possibly win perhaps millions of lives could have been saved.

Plus, there is the unintended consequences. The bill for the war came due and a depression hit. President Jimmy Carter was tagged as the one responsible, but the bill was rung up in the administrations before his. If Carter had won rather than Reagan, it may have been a different world in the middle east --- the Palestinians had a chance with Carter.

If the people had known the whole story, the history of the later half of the 20th century might have been very different.