YES. NEXT QUESTION? Has the Media Been Responsible for America Losing Wars?
The White House statement goes into specifics to answer the charges, closing by saying that “No amount of CNN hackery will change that.”
In short? Unlike 1968 and Walter Cronkite’s attack on LBJ’s Vietnam policy, President Trump is not sitting back and allowing today’s media – CNN in this case – to paint its own anti-media picture of the Trump Iran/Middle East policy.
Time has moved on. As is said often enough in this corner: Stay tuned.
What unfolds between the media and the Trump administration when it comes to the coverage of American policy in Iran and the larger Middle East remains to be seen.
In his 1977 book, It Didn’t Start with Watergate, Victor Lasky wrote:
By the time Lyndon Johnson left office, his administration was under bitter attack by the media and its subsidiary organizations. Thus in 1968 the journalism society Sigma Delta Chi had this to say: “The Credibility Gap, which has reached awesome proportions under the Johnson Administration, continued to be a grave handicap. Secrecy, lies, half-truths, deception—this was the daily fare.”
In turn there were those who felt that the press had its own credibility problems. Douglas Cater, special assistant to President Johnson, suggested that too often newsmen presumed an expertise they quite obviously didn’t have.
“I’m concerned about the little demigods of TV who make an instant analysis of complicated events,” said Cater. “There should be bounds on what TV men do, so much of which is delivered with flippant abandon.”
Cater, of course, was and is of the liberal persuasion. His remarks concerning “instant analysis” were generally overlooked at the time. A year or so later Vice President Spiro Agnew used the same phrase in condemning television coverage of presidential speeches—and all hell broke loose. The reaction ran true to form. The liberals claimed the remarks augured—in the words of the International Press Institute in Zürich—“the most serious threat to the freedom of information in the Western world.” And commentators like Walter Cronkite agreed.
But down in Texas the former President wondered out loud whether “Ted” Agnew had been politic in saying what he did. It wasn’t that Citizen Johnson disagreed with what was said. Shortly after the 1968 election he had sought to warn the Vice President-elect about the antagonistic nature of the media.
“Young man,” he had told Agnew, “we have in this country two big television networks, NBC and CBS. We have two news magazines, Newsweek and Time. We have two wire services, AP and UPI. We have two pollsters, Gallup and Harris. We have two big newspapers—the Washington Post and The New York Times. They’re all so damned big they think they own the country. But, young man, don’t get any ideas about fighting. . . .”
Well, Agnew got precisely that idea and came out swinging.
And how. Not surprisingly, so has the Trump administration. And why not? The DNC-MSM never punched back when (P)resident Biden routinely insulted them. Why should they expect anything less from the current administration?