Is Oprah Our Walter Cronkite?

I'm no huge fan of Oprah Winfrey or Barack Obama plus I'm hardly comfortable comparing her to Walter Cronkite. Still, Marty Kaplan's HuffPo post Oprah Is to Iraq as Cronkite Was to Vietnam is something I'll likely ponder on few a few days. Middle America might indeed look toward Oprah as much as anyone. The value in his post I found was a criticism of both today's reporting and most of the politicking on Iraq. He writes:

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.

And then he also opines:

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.

Well done Mr. Kaplan. Peace ... or War!