According to W. Joseph Campbell at Media Myth Alert, it was:
As I discuss in Getting It Wrong, “version variability” of such dimension “signals implausibility.
“It is a marker of a media-driven myth.”
Indeed, if anyone’s words should be captured with precision, they should be the president’s. Especially on matters as important as shifting popular support for war policy.
It is quite interesting that Cronkite never spoke with Johnson about the purported “Cronkite Moment” and, as Brinkley notes, the president had nothing to say about it in his memoir.
There’s little contemporaneous evidence that the “Cronkite Moment” was profoundly shocking or moving. Or seismic. But there are plenty of claims to its significance, years after the fact.
The “Cronkite Moment” took on importance not in 1968 but by 1979, when David Halberstam wrote in The Powers That Be that Cronkite’s report “was the first time in American history a war had been declared over by an anchorman.” Which was nonsense, of course.
But Halberstam’s over-the-top characterization signaled how the “Cronkite Moment” was becoming a memorable and supposedly revealing example about how journalists can have powerful and immediate effects, how they can bring to bear decisive impacts on major issues facing the country.
Even Cronkite embraced the presumptive power of the “Cronkite Moment.” It took him a while, though.
In his 1997 memoir, Cronkite characterized the program in modest terms, saying that his “stalemate” assessment was, for Johnson, “just one more straw in the increasing burden of Vietnam.” He repeated the analogy in the years immediately afterward, saying on a CNN program in 1999, for example:
“I think our broadcast simply was another straw on the back of a crippled camel.”
But in the years before his death in 2009, Cronkite claimed greater significance for the program. For example, he told Esquire magazine in an interview in 2006:
“To be honest, I was rather amazed that my reporting from Vietnam had such an effect on history.”
Since I just finished Robert Spencer's "Did Muhammed Exist?," this has some passing interest to me as a matter of how history is made.
Spencer's thesis is that the person of Muhammed is a wholesale fabrication. In that regard, he is in the same position, making largely the same kinds of arguments, as made by "Jesus mythers."
I'm not generally impressed with those arguments. The amount of conspiratorial shenanigans that has to occur to make mythicist theories work is outside the realm of human experience, particularly since it requires that the people making the myth have to dupe themselves into believing that the story they forged for particular and obviously momentary reasons was in fact always true. Moreover, the conspiracy is so good that although the forgery occurs in the context of fabricating support for one side or the other in an ongoing dispute, no one ever mentions that "geez, who is this Muhammed/Christ guy?"
The "Cronkite moment" is a case in point. Apparently, over time, the significance of Cronkite's report grew over time in the minds of people who were looking for a reason to explain the loss of the Vietnam War. Singling out Cronkite in the late-70s made sense in that the media's reputation was never higher, and Cronkite was enjoying a long period of favorability in the minds of most Americans.
Nonetheless, notice that although the meaning and significance of Cronkite's report on Vietnam was "understood" in an exaggerated way long after the fact - in keeping with the dictum that we live our life going forward but we understand it looking back - the essential facts were not invented: there was a war, Cronkite made a report, public opinion did turn against the war, etc. Admittedly, Johnson's putative statement about losing public opinion does look fabricated, in which case one lesson is that those elements which really "sell" the argument are probably the places to look for invention.
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