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credibility gap

 
Dictionary: credibility gap
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n.
  1. Public skepticism about the truth of statements, especially official claims and pronouncements: "The credibility gap (Walter Lippmann).
  2. Lack of trustworthiness.
  3. A discrepancy or disparity, especially between words and actions.

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Idioms: credibility gap
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Distrust of a public statement or position, as in The current credibility gap at City Hall is the result of miscommunication between the mayor's office and the press. This term originated about 1960 in connection with the American public's disinclination to believe government statements about the Vietnam War. It soon was extended to individuals and corporations as well as government agencies to express a lack of confidence in the truth of their statements, or perception of a discrepancy between words and actions.

Word Origin: credibility gap
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Origin: 1966

In war, truth is the first casualty. That maxim seemed evident as the United States mired itself deeper and deeper in the Vietnam War and protests at home became correspondingly more strident. As President Lyndon Johnson attempted to finesse the failures of the war by escalating our involvement and putting on a face of increasingly unfounded optimism, he fell into what would be called a credibility gap.

The term was used in the headline "Dilemma in 'Credibility Gap'" in 1965, but it became widely understood and discussed in 1966, after a December 1965 Washington Post story referred to "growing doubt and cynicism concerning Administration pronouncements.... The problem could be called a credibility gap." Soon pundits of various shades, as well as political opponents, were gaping at the gap.

Unpopular in part because of the credibility gap, Johnson, who had won so handily in 1964, did not even try for reelection in 1968. But though Johnson retired, credibility gap did not. It was used in 1970, for example, by an African-American leader declaring that President Nixon's administration "faces a credibility gap of enormous proportions" with blacks.

Other gaps have also been discovered in twentieth-century America. There was the missile gap, a Democratic complaint against the Republican administration in the late 1950s that the United States had not kept up with the Soviet Union in production of intercontinental ballistic missiles. We have also spoken of a generation gap (1967), "differences in values, goals, and attitudes between younger and older generations," and the gender gap (1977), "differences in values, goals, and attitudes between men and women."


US Military Dictionary: credibility gap
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1. an apparent difference between what is said or promised and what happens or is true.

2. a lack of trust in a person's or institution's statements and motives: the Army's's worst enemy is a continuing credibility gap.

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

US History Encyclopedia: Credibility Gap
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Term used to criticize a public figure or institution by suggesting that there exists a "gap" between official claims and the public's perceptions. In short, the term alleges that the people do not believe what they are being told.

The phrase first appeared in 1965 newspaper stories concerning the policies of President Lyndon Johnson. Several accounts claimed that Johnson had frequently been duplicitous in announcing one policy and then enacting another. The most politically damaging example involved the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam, which caught the U.S. military completely by surprise after Johnson had spent months predicting imminent victory.

Bibliography

Gardner, Lloyd C. Pay Any Price: Lyndon Johnson and the Wars for Vietnam. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1995.

Turner, Kathleen J. Lyndon Johnson's Dual War: Vietnam and the Press. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.

—J. Justin Gustainis

Wikipedia: Credibility gap
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Alternate use: The Credibility Gap, name of a comedy team

Credibility gap is a political term that came into wide use during the 1960s and 1970s. At the time, it was most frequently used to describe public skepticism about the Johnson administration's statements and policies on the Vietnam War.[1] Today, it is used more generally to describe almost any "gap" between the reality of a situation and what politicians and government agencies say about it.

Coinage of the term is based on several other uses of "gap" in American political dialect of the 1960s, most notably the perceived missile gap between the United States and the Soviet Union.

"Credibility gap" was originally used in association with the Vietnam War in the New York Herald Tribune in March 1965, to describe then-president Lyndon Johnson's handling of the escalation of American involvement in the war. A number of events—particularly the surprise Tet Offensive, and later the 1971 release of the Pentagon Papers—helped to confirm public suspicion that there was a significant "gap" between the administration's declarations of controlled military and political resolution, and the reality. These are just examples of Johnson's duplicity. Throughout the war, Johnson worked with his officials to ensure that his public addresses would only disclose bare details of the war to the American citizens. During the war the country grew more and more aware of the credibility gap especially after Johnson's delivery at Johns Hopkins University in April 1965[2]. An example of public opinion appeared in The New York Times concerning the war. "The time has come to call a spade a bloody shovel. This country is in an undeclared and unexplained war in Vietnam. Our masters have a lot of long and fancy names for it, like escalation and retaliation, but it is a war just the same." - James Reston.

The advent of the presence of television journalists allowed by the military to report and photograph events of the war within hours or days of their actual occurrence in an uncensored manner drove the discrepancy widely referred to as "the credibility gap."

However, the term had actually been used prior to its association with the Vietnam War. In December 1962, at the annual meeting of the U.S. Inter-American Council, Senator Kenneth B. Keating (R-N.Y.) praised President John F. Kennedy's prompt action in the Cuban Missile Crisis. But he said there was an urgent need for the United States to plug what he termed the "Credibility Gap" in U.S. policy on Cuba.[3]

"Credibility gap" was, itself, a takeoff on the phrase "missile gap." This phrase was used repeatedly by John F. Kennedy during the 1960 presidential campaign to criticize the Republicans for what he saw as complacency in regard to supposed Soviet ICBM superiority. One month after Kennedy took office, he apparently discovered that the missile gap did not exist. The U.S. was, in fact, far ahead. The "missile gap" was revealed to be the product of exaggerated and possibly self-serving Air Force reports, and was spoken of no more. Thus, the phrase "credibility gap" referred back to Kennedy's credibility problems with the "missile gap."

After the Vietnam War, the term "credibility gap" has come to be used by political opponents in cases where an actual, perceived or implied discrepancy exists between a politician's public pronouncements and the actual, perceived or implied reality. For example, in the 1970s the term was applied to Nixon's own handling of the Vietnam War[4] and subsequently to the discrepancy between evidence of Richard Nixon's complicity in the Watergate break-in and his repeated claims of innocence.

References

  1. ^ Rouse, Robert (March 15, 2006). "Happy Anniversary to the first scheduled presidential press conference - 93 years young!". American Chronicle. http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/6883. 
  2. ^ Vietnam and America edited by Marvin E. Gettleman, Jane Franklin, Marilyn Young and H. Bruce Franklin
  3. ^ (Source: Associated Press article dated December 10, 1962, available online at NewspaperArchive.com.)
  4. ^ "Again, the Credibility Gap?". TIME. April 5, 1971. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,876891,00.html. 

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)

 
 

 

Copyrights:

Dictionary. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2009. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.  Read more
Idioms. The American Heritage® Dictionary of Idioms by Christine Ammer. Copyright © 1997 by The Christine Ammer 1992 Trust. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.  Read more
Word Origin. America in So Many Words, by David K.Barnhart and Allan A. Metcalf. Copyright © 1997 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.  Read more
US Military Dictionary. The Oxford Essential Dictionary of the U.S. Military. Copyright © 2001, 2002 by Oxford University Press, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
US History Encyclopedia. © 2006 through a partnership of Answers Corporation. All rights reserved.  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Credibility gap".  Read more