Actually, no, the returning vets were not saying the same thing. Cronkite misreported the Tet Offensive - he out and out lied about it. Vietnam may have been a disaster, soup to nuts, but the polarization in the country was caused by both sides, with Cronkite a major factor in it, and polarization locked factions into positions that made the situation worse.

As for the Rather letters, the issue is not what was in the letters. It is that CBS reported as factual artifact that which even a fourth-grader knew was not. The historical record may or may not be complimentary to the President, just as the current President's birth certificate may or may not be what he claims. But making up the document to promote a political narrative, no matter how much you believe the narrative, and then passing off the document as authentic, is the reason Rather left in shame and is why all the hand-wringing over "Faux-News" rings hollow.

And as far politicos using soldiers, I agree totally. Whether Al Gore slandering soldiers while in Saudi Arabia, or Duke Cunningham using his military record for fraud, or thief Jack Murtha promoting his non-existent gravitas because he was in Vietnam, or Mark Foley being a flag-waiver behind the soldiers, I despise political use of the military. It is a disease that afflicts both parties.

You are too kind to the current generation of "journalists." The likes of David Gregory, et al, are nothing more than sychophants who are terrified that they might offend someone by seeking the truth. Do we not all remember the presidential debate hosted by Gibson and Stephanopalous?

As a journalist, I've always looked up to Cronkite as a nearly unattainable mix of brains, guts and tact. May each of us take a piece of that and carry on.

Joan, I trust you . . . and Rachel!!!

After listening to all of Cronkite's C-SPAN interviews today, I concluded he wasn't all that special. I'm equally convinced that he didn't think he was. The times were just better when he was on the air.

So Joan's question is better phrased as: "What would it take for there to be niches again for the Cronkites of the world to fill?"

Based on his remarks in these interviews and my own experience of those times, here are a few suggestions:

1. Make it again fashionable (i.e. "cool") to be an informed citizen. Make it pathetic (uncool) to be obsessed with celebrity gossip.

2. Make the national debate one about how social-democratic we should become, not about whether a given reform is "socialist." In a word, relegate Reaganism to the bad past that includes robber barons, segregation, McCarthyism, and waterboarding (I know). That will make our political debates serious once again, since this is how real debates are carried out around the world.

3. Stop watching, reading, or even whining about, pundits and journalists whose ideas and dittos have been discredited. This can be done wholesale for Fox News. That means: Just stop. Discuss serious things offline if need be, i.e., online. Feel and speak the way Russians did about the USSR's mass media, even if it has to be done in code.

4. Cut the salaries of news anchors so that dedicated people take these jobs again. This will follow from 3.

5. Break "thinktank" into two words and don't apply the term to an institution unless each word fits.

6. Stop treating ourselves as exceptional and exempt from laws and mandates that bind every other nation. Make ours a voice the world should listen to for the right reasons.

7. Realize (a) that we've been a laughingstock because 1-6 sound farfetched and (b) that our best days are behind us unless we stop thinking of 1-6 nostalgically.

or I can make my original comment regarding Cronkite (and bemoan why these boards aren't moderated to take ALL lying Right-Wing, but I repeat myself, comments off here soon as they're posted!):

Cronkite was an actual journalist, and better than most - but at the end of the day, he was as beholden to his Corporate Masters at Brit Hume or ::contemptuous spit!:: Tom "Of COURSE Richard Jewell is guilty - the FBI wouldn't have leaked it to me otherwise!" Brokaw. He only mentioned the antiwar protests when they erupted into violence, and only then to marginalize them - same as he did with the civil rights protests. His straight-down-the middle, "objective journalism" approach never acknowledged all the things that were going on outside the camera's range - which was why so many younger people turned away from trusting "Uncle Walter" and to Hunter S. Thompson and the "gonzo journalism" of ROLLING STONE and the VILLAGE VOICE.

I don't know much about Cronkite (if he was still broadcasting in my childhood, I was too young to remember it). But I think the years between ~1950 and ~1990 were an anomaly.

In my childhood, everyone watched the same 3 networks (chosen from 5 or 6 channels), and learned about new music mostly from a handful of radio stations which were playing the same music in every city in the country. It does make me feel a little nostalgic some days (I tell my kids that when I was a kid if you wanted to watch the Wizard of Oz, you stayed up that one night a year when it was on, along with all the other 8 year olds in the country. And if you missed that, you had to wait until next year.)

But if you think about it, the fragmentation we have now, although new to us, is probably more representative of how humans experienced new things throughout the rest of our history.

In any case - is there a place for a nationally-respected figure, respected for his or her integrity today? Yes, of course. They probably exist now. But is there someone who, ( as Cronkite was said to have done) can snap their fingers and wake Americans up when we've been swallowing stupid lies? Nah. (and I'm not so sure it worked for Cronkite, judging by the current right-wing ideas about Vietnam.)

Did you really have to plug your leftist buddies at MSNBC by actually citing good ole gal Rachel Maddow's name even before Cronkite's in your piece ? Yeh, right, Maddow "a trusted voice for truth" - what a croc - she's as biased as her pals Olbermann, Schultz, O'Donnel, Shuster etc as they are on Fox for the conservatives. Oops, I forgot - aren't you also one of the former ?