Walter Cronkite: Liberalism in the Guise of Objectivity

In 1974, Walter Cronkite demonstrated to his credit that he was willing to poke fun at his courtly manners and stentorian voice by appearing alongside Ted Baxter, his fictional doppelganger, on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which appeared each week on CBS, the network where Cronkite had made his home since 1950.
But in retrospect, there were more than a few similarities between Ted Baxter and Walter Cronkite; both men succeeded as a result of their deep voice and trustworthy looks, rather than actual knowledge of the world. And both men were more than a little silly; Baxter deliberately so, Cronkite by embracing every fad aspect of liberalism that came down the pike.
According to Douglas Brinkley’s 2012 biography of Walter Cronkite, a year after yucking it up with Ted Baxter, the veteran CBS newsreader claimed that his favorite album of 1975 was Paul Simon’s Still Crazy After All These Years, whose title was “an apt description for a wizened TV survivor like himself,” as Brinkley writes.
As with much self-deprecating humor, there’s more than a little truth in Cronkite’s claim. Brinkley’s biography is a story of a man moving further and further to the left, as his party did over the years, before collapsing into insanity.
In 1991, Christopher Hitchens wrote that “television is a megaphone for the transmission of official wisdom.” Outside of the Soviet Union, nowhere was that more true than the news shows of the original big three American networks, which by the late 1960s served essentially as the dissemination mechanism of Democrat Party talking points. In Cronkite, one of Brinkley’s worst conceits is that he repeatedly seems to imagine that his eponymous subject simply moistened his index finger and placed it into the breeze ever few years to determine what the public was clamoring for. In actuality, Cronkite simply adopted whatever was the current pose of his fellow liberals (at least as they described themselves back then) to serve as a national mouthpiece.
Books such as the first volume of Steve Hayward’s The Age of Reagan, and How We Got Here, David Frum’s look at the 1970s, do a far better job of explaining how liberals moved further and further to the left, using weapons such as poisoning American support for the Vietnam War and, shortly thereafter, radical environmentalism to increasingly sink America’s vitality.
Two Cronkites In One
While I doubt this is Brinkley’s goal, because of Cronkite’s longevity as first a reporter and then a television newsreader, Brinkley reveals numerous examples of plenty of hypocrisy from his subject, as Cronkite internalizes leftwing pose after leftwing pose. For example, in December of 1973, “the Gay Raiders,” a protest group designed to generate a more sympathetic portrayal of gays on both fictional and news TV programs, sent Mark Allan Segal and Harry Langhorne, two of its representatives. to sneak into Cronkite’s TV newsroom set in New York under false premises, to hold up a sign saying, “Gays Protest CBS Prejudice” while Cronkite was live and on the air nationwide with an audience of over 60 million viewers. While they succeeded, the CBS cameras quickly went black.






I remain convinced that obama's voice is his secret sauce as well. The baritone coupled with the studious speaking manner, emanating from a person with the current PC-preferred skin color, has won him MILLIONS of votes...no matter how stupid the words are (and I do mean stupid). It's really that simple, because anybody who takes a moment to look can immediately see that the man is anti-American, a fool, a lightweight, an empty suit, a person of no accomplishment, and an arrogent idiot.
Robert Strange McNamara was almost single - handedly responsible for the substitution of cheaper ball powder in M-16 ammunition, which contributed mightily to the failure rate of early M-16's in the field.
Many first thoughts wind up being ill-considered, but these seem pretty correct these years later.
They were: "F*** Walter Cronkite."
These anecdotes remind me of one from Stalin's show trials in the 1930s. In one such trial, where Stalin's minions were trying to associate one of the defendants with anti-Soviet activities, they brought forward witnesses to testify that the defendant had met with enemy agents at the Bristol Hotel in Copenhagen a few years before. Western sources soon revealed that the Bristol Hotel had burned down years before the alleged meeting. But the show trial went on despite these revelations and defendant was duly convicted.
By the same token, Brinkley's errors will surely be dismissed as mere typos, not as game-changers. No trifling consideration like truth will be allowed to interfere with the narrative.
"Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g., El Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help but get a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated . . . . In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong."
- George Orwell, Notes on Nationalism, 1945.
“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them....To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies — all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.”
She later wrote a book about Environmental Wackos.
The earliest example of comprehensive, one-sided media left-wing bias I know of was the total misreporting of the Scopes "monkey" trial.
FIFY, Ed.
What's that in English, please?
I remain convinced that obama's voice is his secret sauce as well. The baritone coupled with the studious speaking manner, emanating from a person with the current PC-preferred skin color, has won him MILLIONS of votes...no matter how stupid the words are (and I do mean stupid). It's really that simple, because anybody who takes a moment to look can immediately see that the man is anti-American, a fool, a lightweight, an empty suit, a person of no accomplishment, and an arrogent idiot.
And his pose as spaceflight expert also exaggerated
Cronkite on space: inspiration, not information
Honoring the enthusiasm, overlooking the inaccuracies
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/570/1
The tactics are the same (because they can never really change) but the megaphones are now as small as Dixie cups. As their monopoly dissolves along with their ideology you can see how their rage is compounded.
(I do think it was a good thing that Kellogg's, DC Comics, and the Mutual Broadcasting Network had Superman fight the KKK on radio in 1946, but it seems they also had him fighting the John Birch Society. While I can't stand the latter either, did he fight Communists also?)