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Koppel and Olbermann each invoked the shade of Cronkite to bolster his argument. Olbermann recalled how Cronkite refused to shrink from the conclusion he was led to by his reporting that the Vietnam War was unwinnable and did not hide behind the codes of objectivity in order to make that commentary. Koppel invoked Cronkite as one of that pantheon of anchors that supplied the shared facts the body politic needed to arrive at consensus: "The ritual permitted, and perhaps encouraged, shared perceptions and even the possibility of compromise among those who disagreed."
Both points are sloppy, to say the least. Media Decoder's Carr is correct to point out that Cronkite's Vietnam commentary was the exception not the rule. Koppel is flat-out misleading to imply that the CBS Evening News under Cronkite's anchorship was a paragon of neutrality. Cronkite's newscast had a definite worldview, and glorifying it with the label "objective" makes that worldview no less ideological. Cronkite was the elitist voice of the liberal, Eastern establishment. I use "liberal" in the sense of a liberal arts college--tolerant, curious, undoctrinaire, cosmopolitan--not left-wing progressive. But liberal nonetheless.
For a detailed analysis of Cronkite's newscast, see Climbing Down From Olympus, the research I conducted for the Media Studies Journal in 1998.
As for Koppel, his decision to draw the bright line between the so-called objective journalism of his days in broadcast television and the contemporary content of cable news is rich, to say the least. Olbermann correctly pointed out in his Special Comment that the original venture into the incessant, politically charged coverage of a single story was made by Koppel himself. America Held Hostage, the origin of Koppel's Nightline, was created as the result of a "subjective" decision by ABC News executives to hammer away at the Teheran Embassy crisis night after night, no matter that it dovetailed so neatly with the partisan critics of Jimmy Carter that his Presidency was spineless, undermining the global prestige of the United States.
Koppel coyly corrected Olbermann on Talk of the Nation that the drumbeat coverage of Teheran lasted only for four straight months not the entire 14 months of the crisis. Nevertheless such disproportionate--owning the story, as it is called--coverage was certainly the blueprint for editorial decisions by cable news executives in decades to come. Koppel himself admitted on npr that Roone Arldege's call to go all-hostages-all-the-time was "shameless."
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