'Pitfalls of an Anchorman" by Walter Cronkite - NYT Op-Ed on his meeting with RFK.

[jefferson_dem]

Pitfalls of an Anchorman
By WALTER CRONKITE

Two situations appalled me when I sat in the anchor chair. For one, there were those who would come up to me on the street and say:

I wanted to shake them and point out that our daily box score showed hits, runs and errors.

Equally appalling were the number of people who urged me to run for public office, for everything from mayor to President. (Dog-catcher never was mentioned.)

I have stood on a long-held principle in refusing even to entertain the idea of running for office. Should one who has achieved national fame as a presumably impartial news person ever run, the public is going to have every reason to question whether that person had been tailoring the news to build a political platform. The burden of credibility is already heavy enough without that extra load.

I tried to explain that to Bobby Kennedy, who was then a Senator from New York, in 1968. I had just returned from Vietnam and the controversial broadcast in which I stepped out of my normal role and, clearly identifying the material as editorial opinion, suggested that we should seek an honorable peace and get out.

Kennedy called me down to his Senate office to have lunch, just the two of us. He wanted to hear more about Vietnam but it turned out he had something else in mind. At that moment he was considering whether to run for the Democratic nomination against the incumbent, President Lyndon Johnson.

After hearing his strong views on Vietnam, which happened to coincide with my own, I fell into a trap which always lies there for the unwary newsman who succumbs to the heady narcotic of being on the inside. I became a player rather than observer.

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http://www.nytimes.com/ref/opinion/18opclassic.html

[BlooInBloo]

1. I heart people who know the difference between "principle" and "principal"...

Yes, my bar gets set lower with each passing day in America.

[Rhiannon12866]

3. Me, too. My mother taught me the difference, early on.

She told me that the principal is your "pal." LOL. :D

[misanthrope]

2. Unfortunately, I work for an editor/publisher who hasn't Cronkite's scruples...

...My managing editor is actively involved in local politics to a point that is mighty discomforting. He once told me that his goal is to have all the local power brokers "be afraid of (him) when (he) walks in the room." That's not a search to reveal the truth, that's a quest for personal power and glory.

He has buried objectivity in favor of access, swooning with the affiliation to power and maintaining it at all cost.

He is carrying on what he erroneously believes is a surreptitious campaign to unseat the current mayor based mostly on the mayor's political affiliation (Democrat) and race (African-American). He is directing content of our paper toward that end, trying to hang every perceived flaw in town on the mayor and helping convince another local politician (white and Republican) to run against the incumbent, then engaging in tantamount endorsements in the newspaper.

In his own corollary to the example given by Cronkite in this story, my boss has indeed taken up the politico's request to be a player and not an observer. But he considers himself a top-notch journalist. He even tried to nominate himself for a Pulitzer for lengthy coverage of a story that actually broke two years ago in another local publication, a story that is only a hot topic because the subject was the only African-American judge in the town's history.

The journalism field is replete with those who are the antithesis of Cronkite.