Power Line pointed to an opinion piece at the Hill, comparing news media and their coverage of the 1968 influenza pandemic with media coverage of COVID-19. While the Hill piece provides good factual support for the wildly different coverage, I believe the author gets it wrong in claiming the media personalities then would not weaponize COVID-19. Just looking at actual conduct in 1968 suggests at least one giant was willing to use his status to drive support for the left wing of the Democratic Party.

Jeffrey M. McCall writes of 2020 COVID-19 versus 1968 influenza pandemic:

The media’s approach in reporting the 1968 health crisis was decidedly different from the wall-to-wall and frantic coverage seen today. Evidence comes from the Vanderbilt University Television News Archive, which has catalogued all television news programs beginning in 1968. The outbreak was known at the time as “Hong Kong flu,” and an archive search for a one-year period beginning late summer of 1968 shows a total of only 59 reports carried collectively by the networks’ evening news shows on CBS, NBC and ABC. Most of those reports were brief “readers” by the anchors, not full-fledged correspondent reports. Further, several of the stories were tangential to the actual pandemic, reporting, for example, that Mamie Eisenhower might miss an engagement as she recovered from flu. By contrast, an archive search of coronavirus for ABC’s evening news broadcasts over the last five months yields 210 results.

Like this year, 1968 was a presidential election year with an incumbent president. Yes, LBJ dropped out March 31, 1968. There was a strong leftist movement, challenging the old Progressive/ New Deal guard in the Democratic Party. There was violence in our streets in the name of justice and political change. There was an open war with American boots on the ground in Asia. And there was a pandemic.

McCall locates the difference in coverage in the character and life experience of that generation of journalists and in the wildly different environment of 24/7 cable transmission and social media. I grant the latter matters a lot, as I think anyone must. However, I was struck by a passage about the character of the people. See if a name jumps out at you, as it did me:

Television news anchors had much different world views in 1968 than today. Walter Cronkite at CBS, Frank Reynolds at ABC, and NBC’s David Brinkley had all lived through the depression and experienced World War II. Brinkley and Reynolds both served in the military, Reynolds earning a Purple Heart. Cronkite was a war correspondent in Europe, landing in a glider with the 101st Airborne and covering the Battle of the Bulge. Journalism served a different function and had different standards in that era. Cable news channels and the Internet hadn’t yet warped the pace of news with minute-to-minute deadlines. News outlets were concerned for ratings then, as now, but it is a sure bet Cronkite and Reynolds wouldn’t have been pandering to social media traffic.

Did you start questioning the narrative when you saw “Cronkite?” Walter Cronkite was the CBS Evening News anchor back when there were only three choices: ABC, NBC, and CBS. His signature line was: “That’s the way it is.” Four years later, in another election year, Cronkite was “the most trusted man in America” in a 1972 national poll. Yet, he used his position to push the new left’s and the communists’ narrative that we could do no better than to surrender in Vietnam after the Tet Offensive.

Consider Cronkite’s Vietnam commentary:

Mr. WALTER CRONKITE (Anchorman): I wrote a three-minute closing for the program, which seemingly, without reluctance, our stern and uncompromisingly fair news president Dick Salant approved.

(Soundbite of TV program, “CBS Evening News”)

Mr. CRONKITE: (Reading) Tonight, back in more familiar surroundings in New York, we’d like to sum up our findings in Vietnam, an analysis that must be speculative, personal, subjective. Who won and who lost in the great Tet Offensive against the cities? I’m not sure. The Vietcong did not win by a knockout but neither did we.

Then, with as much restraint as I could, I turned to our own leaders whose idea of negotiation seemed frozen in memories of General McArthur’s encounter with the Japanese aboard the Battleship Missouri.

We’ve been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders…

We’ve been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders…

(Soundbite of TV program, “CBS Evening News”)

(Reading) Both in Vietnam and Washington to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds. For it seems now more certain than ever, that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past.

To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, if unsatisfactory conclusion. On the off chance that military and political analysts are right, in the next few months we must test the enemy’s intentions, in case this is indeed his last big gasp before negotiations.

But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.

This is Walter Cronkite. Good night.

This commentary, approved by the network and made only after a visit to Vietnam, is grounded in a deliberate deception. Cronkite knew that the communists had gambled and lost terribly on the field of battle. In truth, the communists were in no position to mount offensive operations for over a year after their troops were chewed up during Tet. This was especially true of the long nurtured local forces, the Viet Cong. When Hanoi went back into the field, it had to rely on northern troops, not providing the cover of local legitimacy. That was not a mere tactical loss. Tet was an operational to strategic loss, a setback for the war aims and the ability to advance those aims. Cronkite got wrong the biggest story of his career.

So, while Cronkite was not using a pandemic as today’s news media personalities do, he was certainly ready to use his position to help the left advance. The relevant lever was war coverage, not disease coverage. An analysis of media and cultural narratives in 1968 that focusses on the Vietnam War and the Cold War, adjusted for the constant attention imperative of cable and social media, might well show far more in common with their 2020 counterparts, adjusted for salient political issues.