Walter Cronkite, We Need You (Joe Rothstein's Commentary)

July 21, 2009

By Joe Rothstein
Editor, EINNEWS.COM

We need Edward R. Murrow, too, and the wonderful team of journalists Murrow assembled worldwide.

We need Roger Mudd (a solid journalist who wasn't selected as a TV network anchor because he wasn't handsome enough). We need William Winter, who used to be a popular radio news truth teller. We need Joe Brandt, my UCLA graduate school of journalism mentor who insisted that journalists have the academic backgrounds for the subjects they were assigned to cover.

If we had these folks alive and well today, managing network news, cable news, Washington, D.C. bureaus and the like, the fight to reform the nation's health care system would look so much different than it does.

For instance, after weeks when three major committees of the U.S. House came together to endorse a health care proposal, the American Medical Association and the American Nurses Association threw their support behind the bill, and the pharmaceutical industry began a multi million dollar campaign in support of health care reform, real journalists would not have characterized Obama's effort as “do or die,” (David Gregory on Meet The Press, July 19) or as a “hail Mary pass.” (Wolf Blitzer on CNN's, Situation Room July 17).

It's hard to know who's ahead in the race to try to kill health reform, the Republicans in Congress or the media.

Media examples:

On the July 19 edition of CNN Newsroom, host Don Lemon asked: "[I]s President Barack Obama's health care plan dead in the water?"

On the July 19 edition of CNN Sunday Morning, CNN senior White House correspondent Ed Henry said that Obama's "abrupt" decision to give a speech on health care on July 17 raises "questions about whether his health care push may be unraveling."

On the July 18 edition of Fox News Watch, Fox News vice president of news and Washington managing editor Bill Sammon said: "I think in recent days the press is coming around to the mounting evidence that this bill is in trouble."

In the 60 year-long effort to bring sanity to the U.S. health care system, never before have both houses of Congress been poised to enact major reform bills, with significant support from the medical, drug, insurance and business communities. That's the story.

That President Obama and the Democrats are trying to do this without adding to the national debt makes it an even bigger story. The fact that this is a hard act to pull off is most definitely not the story.

And then there's the subtext----which is being seriously under-reported.

The Republicans in Congress consider the health reform battle more of a political game than a serious effort to make the levers of government work better for more people.

North Carolina Senator Jim DeMint gave away the Republican view of the health care battle on a conference call with party activists: “If we're able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo, It will break him.”

This was no idle chatter by a lone wolf senator. DeMint is chairman of the Senate Republican Policy Committee. We have to assume he was speaking for his caucus. Yet this statement would have received virtually no attention if President Obama had not chosen to bring it up and attack it.

The proper role for the minority is to work with the majority to weave its political positions into bills moving toward passage. Democrats played that role when President Bush proposed his signature tax cut proposals. Three Republican senators made the difference with President Obama's stimulus plan, insisting on some spending and tax cuts as the price of their support. That's the way the system's supposed to work.

But congressional Republicans are sniffing the residual glue of the Gingrich-DeLay team's total resistance to the Clinton health reform effort of 1993. To the GOP then, health reform was not an unmet need but a political opportunity. They seized it and rode the Clinton defeat to 12 years of House majority rule.

Reread the DeMint statement in that context. And match it up with GOP Chairman Michael Steele's performance July 20 at the National Press Club. Asked why Republicans haven't introduced an alternative, Steele responded: “Now, you know, the Republicans can get up tomorrow and introduce its own bill, but you and I know how Washington works. The bill that matters is the one that the leadership puts in place. The Democrats have the leadership.”

In other words, try to move the ball, Democrats. We'll try to stop you. And if you don't score, we win. That's game talk.

How would Walter Cronkite have reported that? Or Ed Murrow? Would they have just let it slip by? Or provided “on the one hand, or the other hand” equivalency? Not likely.

Cronkite didn't let the Johnson administration get by with its rosy press releases about how well things were going in Vietnam. Murrow didn't let Senator Joe McCarthy and his defenders get by while they trashed the Constitution with their everyone's-a-communist-but-me campaign. We revere them for ferreting how the truth on big issues and having the courage to hand that truth over to rest of us.

How different would the health care debate look to most Americans if the twin stories of a reform effort on the verge of happening were paired with a campaign of total GOP resistance for political advantage?

I seldom am wistful for the “good old days.” They were rarely as good as we remember them. But Walter Cronkite's death and reflections on what journalism once was is very much on my mind now. And very much a factor in how we all view today's world.

(Joe Rothstein can be contacted at joe@einnews.com)