The Myth of the Fourth Estate
By What of Vietnam and television? It is offered up as a lesson of media and war: when the American public sees American casualties, the war is lost. It was an opinion held fervently by government leaders, who were enormously sensitive to the color of war reporting in all its forms. But, as Michael Schudson explains, “Television news coverage was overwhelming favorable toward the American war effort up to Tet in 1968. Far from demonstrating the horrors of war, television sanitized the conflict, and the networks were particularly loath to show American soldiers who had been killed or wounded.” The public, it turns out, was way ahead of the news. A 1967 poll showed that 50 percent of Americans saw the American effort in Vietnam as a mistake. When Walter Cronkite famously declared on February 27, 1968 that the war was unwinnable, he was, Schudson explains, “only coming around to the views of middle America.”
And what about Watergate? This is the founding myth of contemporary investigative journalism. It’s remembered as the David and Goliath story of two journalists who brought down a president. For many, it stands as the finest hour of the American press. (Though, to be sure, some conservative voices have latched on to another view. In the words of the popular historian, Paul Johnson, it was “the first media putsch in history.”) Here, too, history tells a more complicated tale than the mythology. We will have a hard time pinning the uncovering of the scandal on the press itself. What Bernstein and Woodward did was to reveal the work of the FBI and the courts and Congressional investigators to a wider public. To be sure, the Washington Post moved forward on a story that left most American news outlets uncomfortable. They gave it wide play. They helped legitimate the investigations. But that’s a far cry from picturing the press as the maker of kings. Woodward put it plainly himself: “To say that the press brought down Nixon, that’s horseshit.”
I mean, I know this blog shapes public discourse, but for the rest of the media, forget about it….
Seriously though, it’s a great essay to think about the role of the media, stripping away its self-perpetuating myths and considering the media’s history and potential.