Was there a "Fox News" back in the day?

[HadleyH]

Just what he did for you before I would imagine. He was nothing if not consistent---wrong but consistent

I agree.

"Cronkite shows how its a lie the notion that the pre-Fox era was one in which non-partisan fairness ruled the airwaves."

 

[LizzieMaine]

And Gallop Polls are taken where, large metropolitan areas, SF, NY, Washington DC. The south, Midwest, northeast didn't follow the urbanites and city dwellers same feelings. But like it is still today, those people count, rural America doesn't. I have never had any desire to follow or believe in Polls. 1000 people don't and can't speak for an entire nation about anything. Polls today also say that 86% of Americans have respect for the VietVets. I've often wondered, how many of those 86% today are waving the flag because they have sons and daughters, grandsons and daughters wearing the uniform and were burning the flag back in the 60s. The Vietnam War no doubt tore the nation in two and that's because Vietnam was in everyone's living room every night and being presented by people like Cronkite and Kerry. The media, both radio and TV control people into hysterics. So many people are so gullible, War of the Worlds comes to mind........... Put enough drama, suffrage and fear into anything and people will believe whatever they are lead to believe.

One other thing...Tet started on Jan 30..............any large scale offensive will cause casualties......remember Hitler's Ardennes Offensive??? They threw us way back beside casualties.

My point, if you examine those polls, is simply that unambiguous public support for the war had dropped below the 50 percent mark by the middle of 1967, which correlates with what you'll find reading the editorial pages of many small-town newspapers during that period. I said before and will say again, Cronkite was merely riding the wave when he came out against the war. At the time his was just one of many voices.

The way Cronkite's influence on public opinion is portrayed today is very similar to the way Ed Murrow is misremembered as "the man who brought down McCarthy." He, in fact, did nothing of the kind -- McCarthy was already well involved in bringing himself down, and had already lost the support of much of the country before the end of 1953. Many reporters at the time accused Murrow of jumping on a bandwagon which had been rolling for at least two years by the time he got on board.

"War of the Worlds" is also an example of how memory will often distort the reality. There was no "national panic" in 1938. Less than 6 million people, out of a population of around 150 million, even heard the program, and according to independent research done by Princeton University shortly after the incident, less than a million "reacted" in any way to what they heard. Much of the country never heard the program at all due to its preemption by local features on many CBS stations. The story of the panic was fanned way out of proportion by the newspapers -- who were still smarting from radio's getting the jump on them during coverage of the Munich crisis the month before -- and by certain congressmen who were looking for an excuse to call for Federal censorship of broadcasting.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I agree.

"Cronkite shows how its a lie the notion that the pre-Fox era was one in which non-partisan fairness ruled the airwaves."

As we've been saying all along, there has never been such a time, ever. Media by its nature reflects the biases of those who control it, whether they're individuals, corporations, or political entities. People in the Era knew and understood this. People should know and understand it today. The only human being who is totally neutral is a corpse.

And as I said before, too often the protests of "you're not neutral!" really mean "you don't agree with *me!*

 

[31 Model A]

The way Cronkite's influence on public opinion .

Well, if the "most trusted man in America" couldn't influence American opinions.....CBS wouldn't have got their money's worth and nor would the political left today.

I believe "War of the Worlds" was also broadcasted on CBS. Time zones of the broadcast had a lot to do on the influence so you can't include the whole 150 million population or the small amount who listened to it and some only heard portions of it and they were the first parts that were presented in news reports.

I guess one could say, CBS 'WAS' the Fox News Network back in the day. It's my opinion, Fox News today is just a copy cat.

 

[HadleyH]

As we've been saying all along, there has never been such a time, ever. Media by its nature reflects the biases of those who control it, whether they're individuals, corporations, or political entities. People in the Era knew and understood this. People should know and understand it today. The only human being who is totally neutral is a corpse.

:amen:




LOL a corpse!lol

 

[31 Model A]

And as I said before, too often the protests of "you're not neutral!" really mean "you don't agree with *me!*

I like to think I have always been neutral and fair but it's hard in such a biased world, whether it's race, nationality or religion. Some people always thinks they, their race, nationality, status or religion is better than others. It's what makes life so intolerable................it's hell getting old but I'm glad I am.

 

[LizzieMaine]

My WOTW figures come from Hadley Cantril, who studied the broadcast immediately after it occured.

Many CBS affiliates chose not to carry the Mercury Theatre programs because they were under no obligation to do so -- it was a "sustaining" feature which could be aired or pre-empted at the will of the individual station. No station in Maine, for example, carried the program, and it wasn't even minor news here. What reaction there was to the program was focused mostly around the New York-New Jersey-Pennsylvania area, and when you review the newspaper accounts you find the same incidents being mentioned over and over again, but when the Federal Communications Commission investigated the various charges that Welles had caused a panic, they found no cause for any sanction against the performer or the network. Cantril found that in the vast majority of cases those who "reacted" to the program merely picked up the phone to call someone to ask if they'd heard about it -- or reached over and twisted the dial to hear if Charlie McCarthy was still on NBC. There were no confirmed deaths, no suicides, no traffic jams out of the cities.

Public opinion had been turning against the Viet Nam war from the beginning -- it had started to lose support from 1965 forward, and there was no evident bump in the Gallup figures after the Cronkite report. Support continued to decline along the same downward course it had already been on. If those figures are based solely on metropolitan areas -- and I believe Gallup was using a much more broadly-based methodology by that point, but for the sake of argument let's say only the metrops were covered. You'd expect a dramatic bump in the figures for those questioning the war after Cronkite -- since, the common wisdom tells us, the cities are the domain of the "leftist elite" who made up the bulk of Cronkite's audience -- but that bump just isn't there.

I know a lot of people feel the need to blame -- somebody, Cronkite, Kerry, Jane Fonda, whoever -- for what happened in the late sixties and early seventies. The legend of a "stab in the back" is common after something like that happens to a nation -- just ask any German in 1923. But it's much more likely that Americans simply lost patience with the situation, and would have continued to do so even if Bill O'Reilly had been doing the CBS Evening News in 1968.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I like to think I have always been neutral and fair but it's hard in such a biased world, whether it's race, nationality or religion. Some people always thinks they, their race, nationality, status or religion is better than others. It's what makes life so intolerable................it's hell getting old but I'm glad I am.

It's possible to have firm opinions without being a bigot. This is what American society has sadly forgotten. The mere fact that someone disagrees with me doesn't make them my enemy.

 

[31 Model A]

I know a lot of people feel the need to blame -- somebody, Cronkite, Kerry, Jane Fonda, whoever -- for what happened in the late sixties and early seventies. The legend of a "stab in the back" is common after something like that happens to a nation -- .

I have no animosity towards Fonda, she didn't realize what she was doing other than being a spoiled Hollywood child. She knew she had done wrong and since has apologized more than once. IMO.. any VietVet that still dwells on it needs to move on. Kerry on the other hand was the lowest of the low and he rode his lies and allegations in front of that congressional panel all the way to his position today and marrying into money didn't hurt either. Cronkite used what he was labeled as, the Most Trusted Man in America on national TV to dishearten those who believed in their country...right or wrong.

All I can say in defense of those who did their duty is, all the battles were won, even TET, the war was lost though back on home front.

 

[LizzieMaine]

This isn't a thread to debate the Vietnam war, so I have nothing further to add to what I've said before on Cronkite's role in it. But I will point out that the "most trusted man in America" line wasn't attached to Uncle Walter until 1976, when a poll conducted by the conservative-oriented "US News and World Report" determined him to be thus. Make of that what you will.

 

[Stanley Doble]

I thought Cronkite took his reputation for neutrality and honesty seriously, and turned down many offers to endorse or appear in ads for commercial products. Am I misinformed?

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

The only human being who is totally neutral is a corpse.

Not if you're downwind.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I thought Cronkite took his reputation for neutrality and honesty seriously, and turned down many offers to endorse or appear in ads for commercial products. Am I misinformed?

In his earlier years, before taking over the Evening News, he had a number of jobs with CBS, some of which involved doing live commercials for sponsor products. This was standard practice for radio and television right into the early sixties -- Paul Harvey was still doing it on radio into the twenty-first century, but in earlier years pretty much everybody did it. One of Cronkite's sponsors during the early part of his career was R. J. Reynolds, makers of Winston cigarettes -- and as the story goes, he got into a serious disagreement with the advertising agency because he refused to say the ungrammatical line "Winston tastes good like a cigarette should."

Whether that story is true or not, CBS enacted a rule in 1964 preventing any of its news department personnel from doing commercials, whether they were live in the program or filmed inserts. Mike Wallace actually had to give up a lucrative contract with Philip Morris in order to join CBS News.

Cronkite even hosted a game show in the early fifties, a "What's My Line" type panel show called "It's News To Me."

[video=youtube;myfkWb8KvhE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myfkWb8KvhE[/video]

 

[31 Model A]

This thread started with the question about the existence of a relative radio/TV/newspaper similar to Fox News "back in the day". I think that since the OP's first post it has been proven all media are the same when it comes to content that stretch the truth, lie or deceive the listener, viewer or reader but that depends solely on that listener, viewer or reader being neutral or being a bully. Usually when someone starts bashing anything other than what they read, watch, view or believe on someone else is a bully. "People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones"

 

[plain old dave]

Drew Pearson might have fit the bill....

 

[LizzieMaine]

Pearson and his partner Robert Allen were pretty hard left in the Era -- they broadcast once a week, and had the "Washington Merry Go Round" column for many years, a column eventually inherited by the unforgettable yet forgotten Jack Anderson. Pearson's approach was very much like that of Walter Winchell, in which if he thought you were his enemy he would go after you without mercy. He was the first journalist to expose Joseph McCarthy, and got so deeply under his target's skin that one night, McCarthy, in a drunken rage, beat him bloody in a Washington men's room -- and might have actually beaten him to death if Richard Nixon hadn't stepped in and pulled McCarthy off. Pearson then took great satisfaction in suing McCarthy for assault. Pearson, in the end, had far more to do with McCarthy's downfall than Murrow.

FDR didn't like or trust Pearson -- and one reason he cultivated a friendship with Winchell was to ensure he had protection if Pearson turned against him.

 

[Harp]

Gen Giap's forces were just about all but decimated. It would have taken him a few years to get back to the same strength level.

"Mais beaucoup VC ici Joe..." Giap was an interesting ba***rd. Helluva soldier. Amen to the past.

 

[Redshoes51]

I listen and watch to both (left and right). I find halfway between the two sides is usually the truth.

I have thoroughly enjoyed Lizzie's contributions to this thread... I think I have been naive for a long time in that I didn't sense this animosity among the "news networks" like there is today.... blatantly taking sides... but as I started to go back and read about past political head-buttings, it seems to have been going on for sometime.

I'm with GreatWhiteHunter up there... I tend to listen to all of the sides and look for the Truth somewhere in between. I tend to be skeptical about what politicians say... I've also discovered that when one applies "Intellectual Consistency" to the stories being told, that all parties tend to 'fudge' a bit.

~shoes~

 

[Redshoes51]

It's possible to have firm opinions without being a bigot. This is what American society has sadly forgotten. The mere fact that someone disagrees with me doesn't make them my enemy.

My Liberal friends believe me to be very Right Wing... My Conservative friends view me to be very Left Wing. I suppose there is a smidgen of Truth to both comments... I've discovered that when leadership in this Country has been tilted towards the Conservatives, that I tend to be more Liberal, and when control is tilted towards the Liberals, I tend to be more Conservative.

Does that make me a Moderate? HAR!!

~shoes~

 

[LizzieMaine]

One very important thing to remember is that the terms "Liberal" and "Conservative" as used today can be very confusing when applied to the Era. A liberal in 1940 favored military intervention in Europe. A conservative in 1940 strenuously opposed it -- and in extreme cases, continued to oppose it even after the US entered the war. The ultra-conservative publisher Robert McCormick was a good example of this -- under his control the Chicago Tribune was widely considered to be the most antiwar, "defeatist" paper in the nation.

Today the terms have been taken so far to the extreme as to become meaningless. Many conservatives of the 1960s -- Nixon, for one -- would be considered moderate or even outright liberal in many respects by the exaggerated standards of today.