The MSM Triumphant (Part II)

Democrats dominated the U.S. political scene from 1932 until the party fractured over Vietnam in 1968. And the electronic media (radio, then TV) largely aided Democratic presidents’ efforts through the Depression, World War II, and the Cold War (“politics stops at the water’s edge”) until around 1965. While many leading regional newspapers, and the influential Luce publications TIME and LIFE, leaned Republican, Henry Luce backed Kennedy in 1960—making a difference that year.

During the Vietnam War, the media became a powerful, separate political force in America. New York Times correspondent David Halberstam, a Harvard graduate whose reporting from Vietnam was so on-target (he won a Pulitzer in 1964) Kennedy asked the Times to transfer him out, inspired a generation of journalists covering the war. Halberstam published his Vietnam book The Making of a Quagmire in 1965, just as American combat troops were entering Vietnam for the first time. Halberstam had it right from the beginning.

Television news helped turn the country against the Vietnam War with its same-day “living color” combat footage that came into American homes nightly. The near-realtime TV shots of Vietcong invading the U.S. Embassy grounds, along with other close-fire reporting during Tet 1968, led the impartial CBS anchor Walter Cronkite to editorialize on air that the U.S. should leave Vietnam. LIFE generated another key turning point against the war when it published pictures of the 242 men killed in Vietnam in one typical week, May 28-June 3, 1969. And LIFE did it again with its graphic November 1969 report on the My Lai Massacre.

Republican Nixon was president by 1969, having benefited from the media’s drive to end Democrat Johnson’s Vietnam War. Nixon nevertheless deeply distrusted the media, especially the three he placed at the top of his “enemies” list: the New York Times, The Washington Post, and CBS News. Nixon’s mistrust proved founded. In 1972, the Post unfolded an historic investigation of the “Watergate caper” that helped force Nixon from office within two years.

Thus by the mid-1970s, the MSM had aided the 1960s civil rights struggle, pushed forward the feminist revolution, ended the Vietnam War, toppled a president, and become America’s dominant agenda-setting institution, more powerful than the Democratic Party itself.