"Oprah Is to Iraq as Cronkite Was to Vietnam"

Marty Kaplan

Oprah Is to Iraq as Cronkite Was to Vietnam

Posted December 9, 2007 | 11:16 AM (EST)
Read More: 2008 Election, Barack Obama, Iraq, Iraq War, Oprah, Oprah Campaigns For Obama, Oprah Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Breaking Politics News

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It's the war, stupid.



That's what came to mind as I watched Oprah Winfrey stump for Barack Obama this weekend. It's not about whether a star who can make a book a bestseller can also make a primary candidate the nominee, as the media are framing it. It's about reassuring the overwhelming majority of Americans who oppose the war in Iraq that they are, in fact, an overwhelming majority. It's also about giving courage or cover to every Democratic member of Congress who is tempted to swallow The Surge Is Working™, to take Iraq off the table, to forget that, more than Katrina, more than the mortgage meltdown, more than healthcare, it's the war -- the Cheney Libby Chalabi Blackwater WMD Abu Ghraib Wolfowitz Rumsfeld Feith Perle Yoo Waterboarding Walter Reeding Oedipus Bush war -- that looms over everything else casting lawless shadows across our country.

How do people know what other people think? The sad truth is that it doesn't come from talking to one another; it comes from the media. And the media, for reasons ranging from mercantile to ideological to laziness, frame every issue, including the Iraq war, as (at best) a battle between two plausible sides, or (at worst) as a crusade of the Right against the Wrong.

That's why no journalist can today occupy the place that Walter Cronkite did when, at the end of a CBS documentary about the 1968 Tet offensive, he said the U.S. was in a stalemate in Vietnam and should get out. That moment, it's said, caused LBJ to tell an aide, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America." But today there's no MSM journalist who channels Middles America. Whatever their other virtues are, the ABC, CBS and NBC anchors are paid their multimillions not to tell the truth, but to sell the truth-has-two-sides story, which is also how you maximize audiences. (Drop a coupla zeroes from the salaries and viewerships, and it's true of PBS, too.) Bill Moyers, Keith Olbermann, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert actually do tell the truth, and they mercilessly deconstruct the biases of "fair and balanced" faux news and fatuous "narrative" narratives, but their audience sizes limit their impact, and their matter is more than matched by Republican media anti-matter.

But Oprah -- well, in an age that has thoroughly blurred the boundary between news and entertainment, Oprah may actually be the twenty-first century's de facto national anchor. She really does channel -- and change -- Middle America.

And as I watched Oprah introduce Senator Obama in Iowa, the two-by-four that hit me on the head wasn't: Oprah is for Obama. It was: Oprah is against the war.

Maybe, just maybe, Oprah's audience will take from this the message that their own opposition to the war isn't a betrayal of the troops, as the Republicans claim; isn't giving comfort to the terrorists, as the administration asserts; isn't moral cowardice, as the Right's bile-spewing whiner intelligentsia insists. And maybe the message that current and aspiring members of Congress will take from Oprah's unembarrassed anti-war message is that it's not political suicide to stand with the decisive majority of the American people, that being called bad names by your opponents will not kill you, that if as canny a businesswoman and brand manager as Oprah doesn't think it's a fatal risk to tell the truth about Iraq, then maybe you can afford some campaign candor, too.

I don't know whether Oprah's endorsement will give Obama an edge over Hillary Clinton. But I do know that it gives a lift to every candidate and every citizen who rejects the "finish the job" neoconjob. Whether you think Senator Clinton's record warrants that mantle is a separate question. What's not in question is the message that Oprah's endorsement of the anti-war message sends to the country: If Oprah can feel it and think it and say it, then you can feel it and think it and say it. What's not in question is the message to Democratic politicians, especially incumbents, still weaseling on Iraq: If you've lost Oprah, you've lost Middle America.


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marty-kaplan/oprah-is-to-iraq-as-cronk_b_75968.html

I have very few memories of that long ago time.
Did he just 'go along' with what washington was saying at the start and change his mind or was he railing against it all along?

In 2002-2003 she ran a anti-war series produced by her production company..BUT, I do believe she fell for the same crap the Majority of Americans ended up falling for. She has since seen the light, as has the Majority of Americans.

Oprah's Anti-war series


Oprah’s Anti-war series was a series of episodes of the Oprah Winfrey Show that ran from early November 2002 until March 18, 2003. The series was supposed to begin in the Fall of 2001 but was delayed when the pilot episode inspired an enormous backlash. Winfrey was quoted as saying:
“ I once did a show titled Is War the Only Answer? In the history of my career, I've never received more hate mail — like 'Go back to Africa' hate mail. I was accused of being un-American for even raising the question."<1> ”

In a September 2002 interview with Phil Donahue Winfrey asked for advice on how one could do such shows without looking unpatriotic: “After we did a show called ‘Is War the Only Answer?’ I thought, Can’t you even ask the question without people attacking you”. Donahue replied by saying that dissent would become easier as time passed from September 11. Winfrey praised Donahue for plans to do anti-war shows on MSNBC saying “the bottom line is we need you, Phil, because we need to be challenged by the voice of dissent”<2>, but was not yet ready to rejoin the anti-war movement herself. In the coming months, her position on joining the movement changed. Professor Daphne Read noted that in the aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center, the Oprah show, like all mainstream media, "was very closely tied to the Bush administration's response and the media rhetoric of America Under Attack,…however, the content of Winfrey's forum began to diverge from the purely consensual, giving voice to a much wider range of views.”<3>
Contents


* 1 What Does The World Think Of Us?
* 2 The World Speaks Out On Iraq
* 3 What You Should Know About Iraq
* 4 Anti-Americanism – Why Do So Many Dislike the U.S.?
* 5 References

What Does The World Think Of Us?

One of the first installments in Winfrey’s anti-war series was a show called “What Does The World Think Of Us?”<4> which aired in early November 2002. The show challenged Americans to be skeptical about their government’s foreign policy. For this, Winfrey was praised by anti-war activist Michael Moore for being the only mainstream media at the time to show footage of Donald Rumsfeld shaking Saddam Hussein’s hand in the 1980s. Moore wrote:
“ When she showed Rumsfeld all lovey with Saddam, there was an audible gasp in the studio audience. Everyday, average Americans were shocked to see that the devil was actually our devil. Thank you, Oprah.”<5> ”

Moore argued that the footage was especially important for Americans to see because the rest of the mainstream media was only showing much older footage of Jacques Chirac shaking Saddam Hussein’s hand in the 1970s, seemingly to imply France opposed a war with Iraq because they were friendly with Hussein.<6>

The World Speaks Out On Iraq

“The World Speaks Out On Iraq” was considered to be the most significant installment of Winfrey’s anti-war series for being a two-day special. It was also considered significant because it aired February 6, 2003, the day after Colin Powell’s speech to the United Nations which was credited with shifting public opinion in favor of the war. Winfrey told her audience that it was the most important time to speak out against the war, and wanted to hear not just from her studio audience but from people around the world. Winfrey showed clips from citizens of Britain, France, South Africa, Iraq, and Pakistan - all urging America not to go to war. She also showed clips of Nelson Mandela and Pope John Paul II speaking out against war and interviewed a spokesman for Patriots for Peace.<7> Also appearing on the show was anti-war activist Jessica Mathews and columnist Thomas Friedman who debated whether America should go to war. Mathews pointed out that Saddam Hussein had no connections to al-Qaeda and while Friedman supported war only if America could get international support, he conceded that Hussein was not a security threat to America. At the end of the two day show Winfrey sided with Mathews agreeing that the case for war was not convincing enough considering the consequences.

During part one of the two-part show, a press conference held by George W. Bush and Colin Powell interrupted the show in many markets. An article in Buzzflash.com claimed the press conference was a deliberate attempt to silence debate:
“ Bush pre-empted Oprah for no reason other than to stop her broadcast regarding Iraq and insert his own propaganda!…In the middle of the show a "Special News Report" notice came up, then Peter Jennings announced Bush would be making a MAJOR announcement on Iraq. Then Bush and Powell came in and Bush summarized what Powell had said yesterday at the UN. He spent about 20 minutes in all…The Administration would have known the content and timing of today’s show because it is broadcast live and/or in the morning in many markets such as Oprah’s home base in Chicago. This was in such bad form I couldn't believe it! I called Harpo Studios in Chicago to let them know and they said they had received a lot of phone calls. I said Oprah should tell her audience what happened and that I thought Bush was purposely interfering with her show. They commented they didn't know what the reason was and in any case there was no way to prove anything.<8> ”

An article from Academics for Justice drew the same conclusion:
“ Today, Oprah Winfrey started a two-part series focusing on the impending U.S. war on Iraq. About halfway through the show the broadcast was pre-empted by coverage of Pres. George Bush, with Colin Powell at his side, reading a prepared statement on Iraq. The coincidental timing of this pre-emptive press statement raised immediate questions about the motives of the White House war strategists. Students of the Civil Rights Movement will recall an incident in 1964 when activist Fannie Lou Hamer sat before a live television audience and gave a riveting account of the oppression she and other Blacks faced in the South. President Lyndon Johnson was so convinced of the power of her appeal to undermine his own political/racial agenda, that he hastily called a press conference to pull cameras away from Hamer’s impassioned revelations…The pre-emption of Winfrey’s show today should be seen in the same light. Oprah’s audience is a vast and powerful—but largely apolitical—force of middle-class white women. It is likely that most did not watch Colin Powell’s live testimony at the U.N. yesterday. In fact, it is likely that this huge audience was being oriented to the issues of the Iraq war for the first time…The first 30 minutes of the show was decidedly anti-war and highlighted not only worldwide unanimity in opposition to the war but presented many of the heretofore unheard voices of ordinary people speaking forcefully against Bush’s motives.<9><snip>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oprah's_Anti-war_series

of some of the things in your post.

;)

Oprah - whom I like - just doesn't have the same dap as "Uncle Walter."

His 'constituency' was far broader.

I think Oprah can help Obama, but let's not exaggerate it. She doesn't need that.

Us poor people back in the day when we were speaking out against the war and NOW!

Oprah has an impressive history, but she's no journalist.

She'd be stumping for Kucinich.

of fucking sense.

there's some inane twisted comparative logic running through there that I can't get a hold on.

I think it's different. She is a media star and he was a member of the press who is usually supposed to be above politics and not give a personal opinion but simply to report the facts.

in one day. Why do you think 30,000 people showed up to see her in 3 different locations? No one can say she doesn't have an influence in the way her viewers think, feel and act. She's a powerful lady.

passes it off as a raw, honest memoir of a drug addict. Oprah can be easily snookered.

News flash for anyone that still isn't sure: OPRAH IS *NOT* GOD. She is NOT omniscient. She is not flawless. Her opinion means NO MORE than yours or mine.

wealthy lives. She's a citizen just like we are. She has every right to get involved in a Campaign. What I'm finding absolutely HILARIOUS is the Hillary, Edwards, Kucinich supporters reaction to her! It's so damn comical! If she was endorsing Kucinich, Hillary, Edwards or Biden....me thinks the reaction around here from some people would be completely different.:rofl: It's too damn funny!

NO, I am NOT a Obama supporter. I don't know who I'm voting for (it won't be Obama or Hillary), but I do know Obama is lucky as hell to get Oprah on his team.:rofl:

Yes, she's a citizen just like us--with a few more zero's in her bank account. I don't care who she supports. I could care less who Tim Robbins, Barbara Streisand, or Chuck Norris endorse, either. They have every right to stump for who they want. And we have EVERY right to ignore them.

but let's talk about something else and overlook that minor point.

:rofl:

that she so boasted about..praising him at the top of her lungs..waht a great bookhe wrote......
lo and behold she was conned and conned good!

a little-known writer, named ""James Frey. His book, A Million Little Pieces,""

I don't think anyone is trying to compare journalistic qualities (anyone with honest intentions that is) - but of popularity and the far reach of it to influence a large untapped audience that has been lied to by the government and it's overlords. Cronkite was the trusted dad, the voice you could rely on to tell you 'the truth' - the last of the breed of journalists with integrity - at least that is what is popularly thought.

The only comparison I see here with Oprah, is the Popularity, the trust, the influence on a massive audience - which she certainly does have. and some here seem to be avoiding some facts about where Oprah has been on the iraq issue - see in.cog.ni.tos post above, and twist away.

this has been another eye opener for me in how controlling information and disinformation at a very low and petty level seems to work just as anticipated.

...before Ed Sullivan noticed him & gave him a spot hosting the 'Million Dollar Movie'. The rest is, as they say, fantasy.

this is not a personal comparison between Oprah and Cronkite - it is a comment on what effect a popular figure has on public opinion and how that can translate to changes in policies.

I swear some of you can't read worth shit.

and they're green with envy because their candidate didn't get her endorsement...:) It's hilarious, isn't it?

how easily people can be manipulated if it helps their manipulative favorite get into office.
:(

doing front line battlefield reports. I musta missed that day. When was it?

:eyes: Wanna bet Oprah has more viewers than Walter ever dreamed of having? Add her "influence" to that "viewership" and you have one powerful woman. Like it or not.

I don't watch game shows or talk shows, but I do watch the news.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who prefers cable news. I don't watch Oprah either. Haven't watched for years, but there's millions of other people who do watch her.

I only watch the world news, not local.

he rode a sub my dad was on and the sailors had NEVER heard more vulgar stories and humor than they heard from Uncle Walter.


I like Oprah, but the Venn diagram circles of 'Oprah' and 'military policy' just don't overlap as they did for WC.

was Ernie Pyle. He had his ass in the grass.

LIVED with the troops.

Ever read about his visit to the White House w/ER and FDR? He won the Old Girl over when he admitted that he didn't have an overcoat without a hole in it, and that made perfect sense to her and didn't matter a damn.

And died with them.

Oprah is a talk-show host -- Cronkite is a journalist. BIG difference.

corporatemediawhores. I guess Keith Olbermann isn't mainstream enough yet.