The Media Bloodhound blog's Brad Jacobson has a post (7/22/09) adding some depth to the Walter Cronkite as belated-Vietnam-War-critic story:

Following his death last week, various network news tributes replayed footage of Cronkite's influential '68 on-air editorial. Yet scrubbed from the memorializing were similar instances of Cronkite's journalistic candor regarding Iraq, such as his 2006 call for withdrawal from a war he went on to describe as "illegal from the start," initiated on "false pretenses" and a "terrible disaster" serving "no purpose" that has "probably made us less safe."

But the most revealing omission from these tributes--especially in context to the pageant of eulogies extolling Cronkite's journalistic integrity--may be his response to a reporter's question during a 2006 news conference.

As reported in the Independent UK at the time:

When a reporter asked [Cronkite] whether, given the chance, he would offer similar advice on Iraq [as he had on Vietnam], he did not even wait until the end of the question. "Yes," he said flatly. "It's my belief that we should get out now."

In the fact that, "for Cronkite, the question was simple, his answer emphatic," Jacobson perceives some journalistic ideals distinctly unfashionable nowadays: "No need to chew it over, to seek a mealy-mouthed moderate reaction to address the Bush administration's unprecedented extremism, brutality and lawlessness. Doing so would mean that he was operating within their narrative, not his."

In a piece about current media "Celebrating Cronkite While Ignoring What He Did" by (belatedly) condemning the U.S. war on Vietnam, Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald (7/18/09, ad-viewing required) addresses another recently passed war reporter as well:

When Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Halberstam died, media stars everywhere commemorated his death as though he were one of them--as though they do what he did--even though he had nothing but bottomless, intense disdain for everything they do. As he put it in a 2005 speech to students at the Columbia School of Journalism: "The better you do your job, often going against conventional mores, the less popular you are likely to be.... By and large, the more famous you are, the less of a journalist you are."

In that same speech, Halberstam cited as the "proudest moment" of his career a bitter argument he had in 1963 with U.S. generals in Vietnam, by which point, as a young reporter, he was already considered an "enemy" of the Kennedy White House for routinely contradicting the White House's claims about the war. (The President himself asked his editor to pull Halberstam from reporting on Vietnam.)

And what exactly did Halberstam do to incur such wrath from on high? Well, "he stood up to a general in a press conference in Saigon who was attempting to intimidate him for having actively doubted and aggressively investigated military claims, rather than taking and repeating them at face value"--something present-day reporters are conspicuously remiss in doing themselves--no matter how much they profess to idolize broadcast legends like Walter Cronkite.

In another sorry indication of the state of professional journalism, a New York Times appraisal of Cronkite's career (7/18/09) by error-prone reporter Alessandra Stanley required no less than seven corrections. The appraisal's headline: "Cronkite's Signature: Approachable Authority."

Norman Solomon has noticed (Common Dreams, 7/20/09) that "media eulogies for Walter Cronkite--including from progressive commentators--rarely talk about his coverage of the Vietnam War before 1968." An "obit omit" Solomon deems "essential to the myth of Cronkite as a courageous truth-teller":

But facts are facts, and history is history--including what Cronkite actually did as TV's most influential journalist during the first years of the Vietnam War. Despite all the posthumous praise for Cronkite's February 1968 telecast that dubbed the war "a stalemate," the facts of history show that the broadcast came only after Cronkite's protracted support for the war.

In 1965, reporting from Vietnam, Cronkite dramatized the murderous war effort with enthusiasm....

Also in 1965--the pivotal year of escalation--Cronkite expressed explicit support for the Vietnam War. He lauded "the courageous decision that Communism's advance must be stopped in Asia and that guerrilla warfare as a means to a political end must be finally discouraged."

Why does this matter now? Because citing Cronkite as an example of courageous reporting on a war is a dangerously low bar--as if reporting that a war can't be won, after cheerleading it for years, is somehow the ultimate in journalistic quality and courage.

See Solomon's book and film War Made Easy for an extended look at Cronkite's important contribution to the U.S.'s war on Vietnam.