Walter Cronkite, World’s Most Overrated Reader of the News
First Michael Jackson and now this. A little over a week ago, I was captive in a local car repair shop for over two hours as one absurdity after the next dribbled out from the non-stop television coverage of Michael Jackson’s funeral. A phalanx of commentators paused to reflect solemnly on Jackson’s manifold contributions to the world of pedophilia–er, I mean, to the world of pop culture.
It is possible, I’m told, for a kind-hearted person to experience pity when contemplating the wreck that was Michael Jackson’s life. But could anyone really take him seriously as an cultural figure? (His place as a cultural symptom raises a different question.) I found nausea competed heartily with irritation as the assembled news casters marshaled superlative after superlative to describe the career of someone whose entire life was a monument to voracious commercial exploitation, on the one hand, and artistic nullity fired by unstopped narcissism, on the other. [UPDATE: But I think there is a lot to be said for this Michael Jackson.]
Now, apparently, we are going to be treated to the same cloacal cataract of sentimentality about Walter Cronkite. One had to have a heart of stone, said Oscar Wilde, and not laugh at Dickens’ account of the death of “Little Nell.” Similarly, one has to have a cast iron stomach to withstand the adulation accumulating around the name of Walter Cronkite in the aftermath of his death at 92 last week. “Hero, role model, friend” ran a typical headline. Almost all of the scores, nay, hundreds of stories about Cronkite that have appeared in the last few days solemnly cite a poll that denominated that homely, mustachioed news reader “The most trusted man in America.” Was he? By whom was he trusted?
According to a story in The Los Angles Times, Cronkite was “was not just a news man.” Quite right. He was also a pop celebrity. Like Michael Jackson, he was so successful because he perfectly incarnated certain popular clichés. His success was not a matter of substance. It was a matter of tone. As that piece in the LA Times acknowledged, “The news that Cronkite reported was barely distinct from the news his colleague-competitors reported.” Indeed. He didn’t research or write the news. He read it. He emitted the same platitudes every other news reader mouthed. He did so, however, with a sort of cardigan authenticity that used car salesmen would climb naked over broken bottles to emulate. When JFK was assassinated, Cronkite wept, almost. He swooned when Neil Armstrong walked upon the moon. He was righteously indignant over the war in Vietnam, Watergate, and the war in Iraq. How he loathed President Bush, how he admired President Carter, the “smartest” president he ever met. He was a partisan news reader whose reputation for impartiality survived only because he espoused the same ideology as those in the media who determine who is awarded points for impartiality. Liberals like Cronkite suppose they are objective because they are secure in the belief that their opinions represent a neutral state of nature. It is (they believe) only those who dissent from those opinions who bring politics into the equation.
Michael Jackson was famous for inventing a dance step called the moonwalk in which the dancer seems to float backwards while walking in place. Walter Cronkite did something similar. He seemed to float above the yapping clamor of common opinion. At bottom, though, he merely reflected it. The adulation that has greeted his demise is as unearned as it is emetic.
Cronkite’s premature calling the war lost in Vietnam after the Tet offensive helped turn public opinion against the war. The reality was that the Viet Cong were defeated and close to elimination after Tet. Thanks to Uncle Walt and friends, defeat was snatched from the jaws of victory. It was not surprising that in his later years Cronkite was spearheading opposition to a proposed wind farm off Cape Cod to protect the view from his summer home. Good riddance to a liberal hypocrite.
Cronkite also had some stupid, dangerous opinions:
Excerpted remarks of Walter Cronkite upon receiving the 1999 Norman Cousins Global Governance Award:
“I am greatly honored to receive this Norman Cousins Global Governance Award for two reasons. First, I believe as Norman Cousins did: that the first priority of humankind in this era is to establish an effective system of world law that will assure peace with justice among the peoples of the world.
It seems to many of us that if we are to avoid the eventual catastrophic world conflict we must strengthen the United Nations as a first step toward a world government patterned after our own government with a legislature, executive and judiciary, and police to enforce its international laws and keep the peace.
To do that, of course, we Americans will have to yield up some of our sovereignty. That would be a bitter pill. It would take a lot of courage, a lot of faith in the new order.
But the American colonies did it once and brought forth one of the most nearly perfect unions the world has ever seen. The circumstances were vastly different, obviously. While the colonies differed on many questions, at least the people of the colonies were of the same Anglo-Saxon stock. Democracy, civilization itself, is at stake. Within the next few years we must change the basic structure of our global community from the present anarchic system of war and ever more destructive weaponry to a new system governed by a democratic UN federation.
Today we must develop federal structures on a global level. We need a system of enforceable world law– a democratic federal world government–to deal with world problems. Today the notion of unlimited national sovereignty means international anarchy. We must replace the anarchic law of force with a civilized force of law.
Some of you may ask why the Senate is not ratifying these important treaties and why the Congress is not paying our UN dues. Even as with the American rejection of the League of Nations, our failure to live up to our obligations to the United Nations is led by a handful of willful senators who choose to pursue their narrow, selfish political objectives at the cost of our nation’s conscience. They pander to and are supported by the Christian Coalition and the rest of the religious right wing. Their leader, Pat Robertson, has written that we should have a world government but only when the messiah arrives. This small but well-organized group, has intimidated both the Republican Party and the Clinton administration. It has attacked each of our Presidents since FDR for supporting the United Nations. Robertson explains that these Presidents were and are the unwitting agents of Lucifer.
The only way we who believe in the vision of a democratic world federal government can effectively overcome this reactionary movement is to organize a strong educational counteroffensive stretching from the most publicly visible people in all fields to the humblest individuals in every community. That is the vision and the program of the World Federalist Association.
The strength of the World Federalist program would serve an important auxiliary purpose at this particular point in our history. There would be immediate diplomatic advantages in just the world knowledge that this country was even beginning to explore the prospect of strengthening the UN. We would appear before the peoples of the world as the champion of peace for all by the equitable sharing of power.
Our country today is at a stage in our foreign policy similar to that crucial point in our nation’s early history when our Constitution was produced in Philadelphia.
Let us hear the peal of a new international liberty bell that calls us all to the creation of a system of enforceable world law in which the universal desire for peace can place its hope and prayers. As Carl Van Doren has written, “History is now choosing the founders of the World Federation. Any person who can be among that number and fails to do so has lost the noblest opportunity of a lifetime.”
I have read some of Cronkite’s personal writings and it seems as though he did not write this speech either. Instead he must have merely read it.
Cronkite until the end of his productivity had problems with grammar, precise word selection and usage, etc. His second book was largely ghost written. But his first reveals that he was a college drop out who complained about his editors demands with regards to his crime beat submissions. He was saved when it was discovered that his voice was uniquely suited to radio.
He first became the sports guy at WTOP radio, the CBS affiliate, in Washington, DC. When WTOP TV needed a sports reader Cronkite migrated to the small screen. Eventually his professorial looks and demeanor brought him the the CBS national news reading anchor tasks.
But in reading his own unaided writing it becomes quickly obvious that he was an out loud reader and not a thinker.
Thank you for telling the truth about Cronkite.
Jackson wasn’t famous for inventing a dance step, but for selling hundreds of millions records, and his dancing. Jackson, love him or hate him, had enormous talent — Cronkite, not so much.
Walter Cronkite is dead and I extend my sympathy to this relatives and friends who grieve. As for me, I cannot find it in myself to mourn his passing. I watched his version of the news constantly, recalling his famous closing line “and that’s the way it is.” The problem is, as I learned later, that’s not the way it was.
Walter Cronkite was labeled – I don’t know by whom, probably the marketing department at CBS News – as “the most trusted man in America.” He, and many others, used that trust to create an aura around the news business that it has taken literally decades to reveal as a false front. At a time when information was one-way and media outlets were severely limited in number, the version of reality that was reflected by Walter Cronkite shaped public opinion so massively that opposing opinions stood no chance. That is why it was Walter Cronkite who ended America’s quest for victory in Viet Nam.
When Lyndon Johnson said that “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.” He recognized a political truth. Consider this.
In mid-February, in the immediate aftermath of the Tet Offensive, both Gallup and Harris noted a surge in American support for the war. Both pollsters said 61% of Americans favored a stronger military response against the North Vietnamese Army. 70% of Americans favored increased bombing of North Vietnamese targets, which was up from 63% in the previous December.
Then came Cronkite’s February 27 commentary.
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 suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory conclusion.
In early March, just a few days later, 49% of Americans said it was a mistake to have entered the Vietnam conflict. Only 35% believed the war would end within two years. 69% now approved of a phased withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam.*
The political power Cronkite wielded was acknowledged not just by Lyndon Johnson – who effectively ceded control of America’s war policy to a news commentator – but is acknowledged by his cohorts in the news business:
It is impossible to imagine CBS News, journalism or indeed America without Walter Cronkite,” CBS News president Sean McManus said in a statement. “More than just the best and most trusted anchor in history, he guided America through our crises, tragedies and also our victories and greatest moments.”
Repeat that in your mind: “He guided America.” An employee of CBS news “guided America.” This is not a brief for Lyndon Johnson or the literal crooks and clowns who inhabit the house and senate, but the power that Cronkite wielded over America is troubling to me.
From the same article we are reminded that Cronkite had a team. And who was on that team? Eric Severeid, Daniel Schorr, Dan Rather, Roger Mudd, Mike Wallace. See anyone there who you would recognize as a Conservative voice? Neither do I. Today Daniel Schorr delivers diatribes against the Right from his sinecure at NPR and Dan Rather maintains that it was those damn Right Wingers who smeared him by exposing his phony Bush papers story.
Cronkite, it was said, “did not editorialize often.” Well, let’s put it this way, he did not come out and say “this is my opinion.” But his way of editorializing is the same craft that the media used in his time and ever since: selective use of facts, the omission of this story, the emphasis on that story, all used to weave a version of reality that people believed about the world around them beyond the reach of their five senses.
Walter Cronkite gained immense power and, in my opinion used that power badly to advance his personal wealth and his personal ideology. There’s a lot of money to be made if you are the “most trusted man in America.” And you can convince a lot of people that “that’s the way it is” if they believe you.
The healthiest thing for American democracy has been the internet, having broken the death-grip that the mainstream media have had on American perspectives of reality. Had Walter Cronkite lived with the internet, his title and his sign off line would have been laughed at.
Rest in peace.
Is this the best you can do? This is the most intellectually lazy argument about Cronkite I’ve read in the 24 hours or so since he shuffled off this mortal coil. As the pioneer in what was still an unknown media gamble, yes, he did read what his producers presented him, but his experience prior to taking the “anchor” seat for CBS News, from World War II onward was true old-school reportage and he did allow it to guide his choices on air.
Did he screw up? Sure, his opinion on the state of Vietnam was extraordinary, but more than turn public opinion, it opened the way for such mealy-mouthed anchors like Dan Rather and narcissists like Bill O’Reilly to turn the position into bully pulpits that do a disservice to journalism. So, in short, you should thank him first before you diss him.
The other issue is that while all the bloggers, er, “citizen journalists” (Insert peals of laughter here; they are all against MSM until the first libel suit makes them realize why there are certain rules of the road in reporting), TV pundits and anchors either lament or deride his passing, they will never do what he did. And that’s just sour grapes.
And slinging accusations of “pedophilia” towards a man proven innocent in a court of law, is slander.
Jackson was weird, no doubt, but he was no child molester.
Michael Jackson was found “not guilty.” He was not “proven innocent.” A “not guilty” verdict means that the jury was not persuaded, beyond a reasonable doubt, that he was guilty, and that is all it means. Even after a person is found “not guilty” in a criminal proceeding, he can subsequently be found monetarily liable in a civil case. Ask O. J. Simpson if you do not believe me.
“The first priority of humankind in this era is to establish an effective system of world law that will assure peace with justice among the peoples of the world.”
Even when he said it, Cronkite should have known, had to have known, that an effective system of world law perhaps would bring peace, but not with justice.
I can take a sort of intellectual approach to his effect on the war in Vietnam. Of course, if I were one of the tens of thousands of Vietnamese who were executed, the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese consigned to camps, the million or so boat people who fled the North’s victory, knowing their chances of merely surviving were not great…or for that matter one of a couple of million dead Cambodians…I don’t think I’d think about him with quite the same equanimity.
I have wondered what would have happened if he had instead said that the US and South Vietnam had won a smashing battlefield victory and that the people of South Vietnam had shown which side they preferred.
I give Cronkite this: his appearance as himself on a “Mary Tyler Moore Show” episode was pretty funny.
It would be interesting to know what happened when Crankcase walked up to the Pearly Gates and the better part of 58,000 guys (the ones who died in Tet and afterward) crowded around St. Peter. If Wally wrote what he said about ‘Nam and Tet, he was a liar; if, as he later claimed, he read what he was told to say on that particular occasion, he was a hypocrite.
Good thing for you that you’re not bitter or anything, Roger.
I managed to live my life almost entirely unaware of the existence of Jackson, but the Mostrustedmaninamerica occasionally intruded. The last I saw of him was a solemn interview with Dennis Kucinch shown at the University of Maine in Farmington. Utter drivel about the Department of Peace project.
“Michael Jackson was famous for inventing a dance step called the moonwalk in which the dancer seems to float backwards while walking in place. Walter Cronkite did something similar. He seemed to float above the yapping clamor of common opinion. At bottom, though, he merely reflected it. The adulation that has greeted his demise is as unearned as it is emetic.”
Mr. Kimball, that just earned yourself another tin of cookies. No sharing with James.
Cronkite was an excellent reporter and understood the news far better than most. He had brains and guts and a skill. He, Sevareid, Shirer, Murrow, and their colleagues went out and actually got the stories. They were on the front lines. They were newsmen first and last, unlike today’s versions.
Cronkite at Tet called the ball. The American people were stunned by the attack, and our military did not at the time know that the North Vietnamese had pretty well shot their bolt. The American public was lost when those images came on the screen every night.
We can re – argue Vietnam over and over, but Cronkite was the messenger, not the message. The war was lost because the United States lost the will to win in 1968.
Cronkite doddered farther from the center as the years went on, but the entire Blue State intelligentsia did the same. It’s the same groupthink that captivates so many today. He was a product of his environment with the credibility to further a liberal agenda and advance it every night a 6:00.
He was a classic Roosevelt Democrat filled with idealism at a time when the whole world was torn between fascism and communism. I disagreed with him on many things, but nevertheless respected him.Requiescat in Pace, Uncle Walter.
I had breakfast once with Walter. It was in a palatial suite like a Moorish fantasy in San Francisco with a rooftop garden. Visiting Saudi royalty booked it when in town. Walter and I talked about many things, including his 123-foot yacht. The term “limousine liberal” could have been coined for him. Whatever his origins in journalism, Walter developed into a splendid actor olaying the role of the trusted uncle who came into your home every night and told it like it was. To think we bought it as long as we did.
Dud. Jackson did not invent the moonwalk step – he did make it famous tho.
Google is our friend, try it sometime.
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0047157/bio
Generally considered the inventor of the “moonwalk” dance step, as seen in _Cabin in the Sky (1943)_ starring Ethel Waters, ‘Eddie ‘Rochester’ Anderson’ and Lena Horne.
Bitter art-critic bitterly criticizes a successful respected newsman whose politics he did not agree with, disguised as an intellectual exercise. Details at 11.
As I recall the Tet offensive was a military disaster for the North that they managed to turn into a political victory thanks, in no small part, to the efforts of Cronkite and others. We are paying the price to this day.
And that’s the way it is.
Left-wingers, who consider themselves to be atheists, are desperate to worship some cult of personality figure.
Go to Youtube to watch any Michael Jackson music video, and the comments are gushing with low-IQ fans who are happy to believe anything and everything about Michael Jackson that makes HIM the victim. This includes :
1) “He missed his childhood” – but didn’t his siblings Marlon, Randy, and Janet have the same childhood, at the same time? None of them are abnormal people.
2) “He had no plastic surgery, he got Vitiligo” – Somehow, a disease this idiots had never heard about before also causes the eyes to widen, the nose to narrow, the lips to narrow, etc.
Hey, maybe the white man invented Vitiligo so that black people would be turned white!!! The white man invented AIDS to exterminate blacks, after all, so if they can invent one disease, they can invent another.
The stupidity of these people is astounding.
If Pajamas Media had been around in 33 A.D. they would have run something about Jesus being “The Most Overrated Rabbi” in which JC would be depicted as a talentless hack, mixing Judaism and Eastern religions into some kind of cheap Gorp-y stew that only idiots would swallow, and how his long hair and radical ideas were a sign of the decay of society, &c.
Cronkite like Obama was good at reading from a teleprompter. Nothing more.
Traitor to Vietnam Vets.
Cronkite’s best work was in the entertainment industry, as host of “You Are There”. Great stuff.
Yes. Cronkite was patently partisan, spinning the news in favor of the Democrat Party and the Left and against Republicans and classical liberalism. But he did it in a finely “non-biases” demeanor and tone.
What can to stun me as I became an educated adult is just how little depth and intelligence Cronkite had — proving to me that reading a lot of headline news and interviewing a few famous people didn’t make a man intelligence and didn’t give the man a depth of understanding.
Blarty, did you just compare Cronkite to Jesus?
Walter Cronkite did not deserve all the media accolades given he inserted his opinion when he was supposed to be reporting the news; in fact, he helped us lose the Vietnam War. He would fit right in today, but be severely diminished.
TO: Roger Kimball, et al.
RE: Cronkite
The man was the proverbial ‘useful fool’.
Regards,
Chuck(le)
[The Truth will out....]
Roger – it’s so obvious now – why didn’t I see it before?
The media loves the teleprompter-savant-in-chief, because he’s one of them! The pinnacle of journalistic success is to be a teleprompter reading monkey. Dan Rather couldn’t think his way out of a paper bag, but he could read that ‘prompter. Uncle Walter had the intellect of a goat, but he could rattle the words convincingly.
I’ve always known that they in the media think their own are a few notches above everyone else (despite the banality of their online banter; http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0309/20086.html ). Of course, they’re going to start worshiping a leader who resembles their ‘greats’.
Wrong address. He’s having a beer with Ho Chi Men right now. Soon, he’s going to get plenty of that gay action that he said he would have preferred to his wife.
Blarty, did you just compare Cronkite to Jesus?
To the extent they are famous and dead, yes.
P.S. I’ve noticed a number of people calling on God to condemn Cronkite to Hell.
I recommend that such minded people reconsider their condemnation. After all…..if a christian recognizes it’s not part of their ‘job description’ to condemn ANYONE to Hell…..
….they should not be quite so ‘quick’ in damning Cronkite to someplace they’d rather not be themselves.
As I recall….it’s not part of OUR ‘job description’. Rather it’s part of His…..
Oh, lordy. And right on cue, some lefty tool compares him to the Messiah. As I said, he and the teleprompter-savant-in-chief are cut from the same cloth, and share the same groupies.
In the business of news more than other businesses, it’s difficult to speak of a man and take him out of his historical context.
Cronkite made his bones while chronicling the sixties in such a way as to make one shocking event after another comprehensible, reporting in a dignified matter. Of course the TWO other networks reported basically the same news–but Cronkite had the ratings. If you watch him, he’s obviously not out there to build his ratings, but the ratings followed him.
Of all of the events in the 60s, it’s possible that the Vietnam war was the most puzzling. How was it that the country that defeated a war machine like the Nazis, that could stand toe to toe with a nuclear USSR, could not handle a bicycle tech army like the North Vietnamese? And I’m talking about a time period of within three months to a year. Neither the Joint Chiefs of Staff nor the Johnson administration could answer this question. Hindsight says that Cronkite was very wrong. But hindsight says we’re all idiots.
The journalistic line was drawn at Watergate, when the kid reporters became the stars, when the years that Cronkite put in no longer mattered, when a newspaper brought down a sitting President. It’s power that journalists could neither resist nor responsibly handle.
The years that followed the sixties also brought changes, new nations emerged with power, nations and cultures with which Cronkite had little personal experience, and when events no longer made sense to him, he saw fit to retire–still using his view of the world, forged during the thirties and forties, as lenses to see everything.
As with so many people, he was stuck in the sixties and lived the rest of his life with a certain amount of naivete–with only occasional forays into the public eye. It’s almost as if he knew the world no longer made sense to him.
The line from today’s irresponsible reporting only goes as far back as Watergate and CNN. Walter was the end of a different era of American culture.
The other issue is that while all the bloggers, er, “citizen journalists” … TV pundits and anchors either lament or deride his passing, they will never do what he did. And that’s just sour grapes.
I think that’s probably true. I can’t imagine any blogger managing to kill quite so many people as Walter Cronkite did.
Chet Huntley and David Brinkley were real anchormen. Walter Cronkite just played one on TV.
Yes, Cronkite had the opportunity to be a great newsman, but he squandered it to be a bad political philosopher instead. In retrospect, I have to wonder just how Red his vision of a world under Global Governance really was. I don’t recall that his news reports on the Korean unpleasantness were as badly, and baldly, skewed as those on Vietnam, but it was a long time ago and I’ve grown vague on the details.
On a more personal note, I recall being annoyed when Cronkite told us, toward the end of the first lunar landing mission, that the capsule would splash down somewhere in the vicinity of Pago Pago and Walla Walla. He did enjoy saying that … over and over.
Polemicscat: Your comment was kind of confusing. Were those all Cronkite quotes? Or Cronkite quoting other people?
Cronkite was a pompous ass, away from the screen. He typlifes the media elite. Because they are on the air in millions of homes they suddenly become larger than life when in actuality they are never more than 6 inches tall – depending upon the size of your screen.
He began his TV career introducing historical plays “The Way It Was” – a look back into history that aired weekly. It was corny crap but it took up air time. That is all Cronkite ever did was take up air time reading the news. Television made Cronkite. He was never a first rate thinker or news commentator. His lack of education made him an intellectual junkie, always seeking to absorb the ideas of others and promoting them as his own. Yes he was on the left because the left are rich and heavy into intellectualism, and philosophical psycho bable. They are always coming up with a new world utopia, with themselves on the top of course.
If you stay on TV long enough you become a legend, even if you have no talent. Ask Ed Sullivan. Does anyone remember Ed Sullivan, or Arthur Godfrey, or Dave Garroway or Jack Parr? Not for long old friend.
Thanks for your cogent comments about Walter Cronkite. I recall him during Viet Nam. I despised him then, as I did several other mainstream journalism fools. My opinion didn’t change over the years.
http://www.bloggybayou.com/2009/07/walter-cronkite-was-lyon-himan-chaim.html
This puts Walter into perspective….
This is great stuff. Conservatives will definitely appeal to normal Americans by slagging Walter Cronkite.
Keep it up!
37:Pity Dick Nixon is no longer around to pass judgment on the media and its much delayed introspection…now cracked open for all to see..
Nixon had a first-rate mind going back to his meteoric rise as a congressman at age 37, and later assembled a host of enemies in the networks and papers BECAUSE he knew what he was talking about whenever some fixture in the New England-Washington axis would bear down on clever ‘outsiders’..of whom Nixon was the best!!
The present occupant at the White House seems to think that speeches ALONE will serve to solve America’s problems…
Yeah, he’s got nothing on Steve Doocy.
Blarty Blarckleblart:
Blarty, did you just compare Cronkite to Jesus?
To the extent they are famous and dead, yes.
=========================================
I compare Blarty McClarty to human fecal material
I love it! Absolutely love it. Blast away boys and girls. The GOP is shrinking so fast. I wish there was a way to get more Americans on this website to see what the GOP really stands for. Any now the new poster “child” Audra Shay.. nice pick there too. Congrats.
btw, if 38 is considered “young”, the GOP is doomed.
You’re a really sweet bunch of people. God, are you a political party or an asylum for the crazed & bitter?
The author of this piece is an ignorant and lazy writer, which gives me no choice but to discount the entire article.
Think what you want about Michael Jackson, but he was not a pedophile. Lobbing such accusations as if doing so is of no consequence is also offensive on too many levels to express in a comment. It’s disrespectful to the many who have been branded child molesters with no proof, as well as the many who have actually been the victims of such perverse behavior.
How about I start going around and telling everybody that the author is a pedophile? It wouldn’t take that long for others to start repeating my accusations, especially now that we have the Internet to fan flames far and wide. Do yourself a favor and conduct a little research before you make molestation charges against complete strangers so flippantly.
(1) The 1993 case against Michael Jackson was blatant extortion instigated by a pathetic dentist who maliciously manipulated and drugged his son for that express purpose. [http://tr.im/t4P5, http://tr.im/t4OR, http://tr.im/t4OY
(2) Michael Jackson's insurance company negotiated and paid to settle the 1993 case -- and I quote from legal documents filed with the appropriate court -- "over the protests of Mr. Jackson and his personal legal counsel." Those present say that Jackson nearly collapsed when told he was being forced to settle instead of pursuing vindication in court. [http://tr.im/t4Ob]
(3) The 2005 case was likewise an extortion attempt rooted in mind-numbing greed. Furthermore, the perpetrators were proven serial liars who had attempted the same nonsense against other celebrities previously. The behavior of the accuser’s mother, both in and out of court, also hinted she could be mentally ill. [http://tr.im/t4Qg]
(4) There are no other child molestation charges against Michael Jackson, although pedophiles are notorious for leaving a trail of over 200 victims during their lifetime. How interesting considering the large number of children Jackson interacted with on a regular basis.
You’re welcome for this information. Be informed, not ignorant. I suggest quoting a few facts in your apology article and leaving the feckless insults for your private conversations.
A man who told the news dies. Lots of people liked him. He was known as the ‘most trusted man in America’.
And these crazed Pajammers have nothing but hatred.
Start saving your crocodile tears when Limbo dies . . .
And that’s the way it is.
“overrated”
is going soft on him, he was a lair and a traitor with blood on his hands.
I wonder how the millions who were slaughtered after we left vietnam thought of Uncle Walt?
“He didn’t research or write the news. He read it.”
Not true – as his trip to Vietnam and countless other examples attest. Kimball, once again you’re WAY out of your league.
#2: “Cronkite’s premature calling the war lost in Vietnam after the Tet offensive helped turn public opinion against the war.”
And none too soon. Robert MacNamara, who didn’t need Cronkite to tell him the facts, would have agreed with him completely.
#2: “The reality was that the Viet Cong were defeated and close to elimination after Tet. ”
The reality was that the Vietcong were eliminated completely by the North Vietnamese. Unfortunately, we were fighting both of them.
#15: “I had breakfast once with Walter.”
Too bad he didn’t know he was having breakfast with a snake.
—You’re a really sweet bunch of people. God, are you a political party or an asylum for the crazed & bitter?–
As one-time psychologist, the defense mechanism ‘projection’ is so prevalent in the neuroses of the left. The ideology that points the fingers at us bitter ‘clingers’ is the party of:
‘Screw ‘em Koz’ American contractors killed in Iraq.
‘Rape ‘em’ Ann Liebowitz saying she would like to see Palin raped
‘Stone ‘em’ Alec Baldwin saying he would like to have Congressman Hyde killed
‘Assasinate ‘im’ BBC television show fantisizing about a Bush assasination
‘Cholesterol ‘im’ Susan Malveau (wishing a heart attack on Clarence Thomas)
and ‘kill ‘em’ Billy Ayers. Who aimed to kill hundreds of American GIs on an Army base and is said to have accepted/advocated the need to exterminate millions of Americans to realize his red revolution.
But when a conservative website fails to hail Walter Conkrite as the Messiah of the 1960s’ (man you guys love your messiah’s!!!!) we’re ‘crazed and bitter’.
Oh, the sweetness and High Humanity — let us say the fierce moral urgency –of our leftist bretheren!!!
Post 16:
Jerome Howard better known as “Curly” of The Three Stooges did a version of the moon walk back in the 1930′s. Who’da thunk some short pudgy bald white guy could be so smooth?
ANTHONY and VIVO: The man read the news. Repeat that. He read it. He read it to us well. He never had a hand in the matters he read about. Yet he is treated as an icon. History would not have changed much if he never lived, except that maybe, just maybe, the American public would not have been deceived into thinking that we could not win in Viet Nam. Limbaugh: he educates, he reveals, whether you like him or not. Good ridance to a man who abandoned his journalistic principals, espoused a political philosophy, and laid the foundation to people you despise so much (Limbaugh, Hannity, O’Reilly).
“When JFK was assassinated, Cronkite wept, almost.”
Outrageous! If only Fox News were around, it would have delivered the news with a smirk.
For me Cronkite flushed his legacy down the toilet when he blasted Bush’s policies. Just another knee jerk liberal was stamped on his forehead. Who knows what crap he’d say if he Anchored in today’s times. Reporting was different back then. Pres. Kennedy’s prostitutional liasons in vitually every city he visited basically went unreported. Sheesh just one episode is enough to force almost any politician to step down. 50 years down the liberal road and sex is even dirtier than was during a more conservative era. We took what Wally said for granted. We still take news for granted. The lies, half reported events, selective reporting, biased reporting, etc. makes it more imperative to know how to read through any news item. I doubt Cronkite would or could have risen above it. We chose to believe Wally because we were more innocent then. What’s our excuse today?
Number 43: Stop picking on Doocy. At least he can do the weather. He can read and point to a screen behind him. Cronkite could never do that.He could only turn from camera one to camera three and hold on to his script.
Number 49: We really don’t hate Cronkite. We hate the undeserved adulation and misplaced reverence. He is due our respect but his ideas and philosophy are offensive to people who love liberty.Cronkite was an elitist who achieved fame as a television personality. He reported the news in a skewed fashion, but not nearly as much as it is today. He accomplished something in his life. He was popular when there were only two other alternatives. It is doubtful he could achieve Katie Couric like ratings if he was still doing the news. In reality he could not even get on in today’s market unless he joined MSNBC. They will put anyone on. Just scream like a lunatic and throw things at the camera.
Had he been a conservative news reader he would have had 30 seconds of air time, with a parting sarcastic shot at his integredy. It is the media left that we really hate, for their distortion of the facts, for their deliberate withholding of valid information and their elitist arrogance. As journalists they are suppose to report what they see. Instead they skew the news to fit their political agenda.
Walter we hardly knew Ye!
That is until after you retired and let the mask drop. My Dad never watched CBS, he was a Huntley-Brinkley freak, and couldn’t stand that old blowhard Cronkite. He used to yell at the TV when the news came on at 6:30PM, and now I’m doing the same thing. The apple don’t fall too far from the tree, eh?
heh heh
I don’t think it’s the “failing to hail” that offends common decency here, Red. It’s the “I’m glad he’s dead, rot in hell you traitor and I hope Teddy’s next” bullcrap that points to what hateful, hateful folks you people are.
Own up to it. EMBRACE your hatred.
Michael Jackson didn’t have inappropriate relations with young boys and OJ Simpson didn’t murder Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman.
Good post, red.
Also, let’s not forget all the abuse, and even threats, leveled against Sarah Palin’s son Trig! The sweet and highly humanistic Left goes ballistic at the thought of one small, Downs Syndrome child, which they apparently see as a menace to civilization.
Of course, they’re just doing it because of their—let us say, “fierce moral urgency.” And it must be their high and pristine morality that also led them to claim that Palin’s daughter was actually Trig’s mother, and to file frivolous lawsuits against Palin, which the State of Alaska had to pay.
But it’s us eeeeevil conservatives who are “crazed and bitter.” Yah. Right.
But whatever bile they spew, you must remember, they’re only doing it because they CARE! And because they’re IDEALISTS!
Here’s a bit more of that Liberal peace, love and compassion (if you can stand it): http://www.moonbattery.com/archives/2009/04/liberal_calls_f.html
But, dear Vivo, Blarkleblart, Glenn Kenny: Cronkite just read other people’s words on TV every night. What did he actually DO to make him such a object of veneration?
Anything more than this?
“He emitted the same platitudes every other news reader mouthed. He did so, however, with a sort of cardigan authenticity that used car salesmen would climb naked over broken bottles to emulate.”
Bravo, Roger.
John,
And OJ isn’t a murderer.
From my knowledge, the Crokite comments seem ignorant, irrationnal, or just plain uninformed. Please understand that a malformed comment is often worse than an opinion.
Holy cow, Roger. You done talked bad about the wrong person. Cronkite’s a ‘pontent person. Yer not s’posed to talk like that about ‘potent people. Yer s’posed to talk like that about them dum people like Palin and Joe the plummer, not ‘pontent people from the big TV station in New York.
I mean, git a clue.
OLD ENOUGH: What is “uninformed”? I watched Cronkite and enjoyed him very much. He was excellent at what he did, probably the best ever. He was the best at reading from a teleprompter in such a way as to keep his listeners engaged. He was an excellent show piece. He also did an excellent job at saying things like: “And now with more on the situation is Khe San, we go to our reporter on the spot, John Smith.” He was simply the best ever at doing that. He did it extremely well for a long time. Now, I know that he did some very good jouranlistic work before he took the chair before the teleprompter, BUT that’s not why the left venerates the man. That’s not why his is considered by the pros to be an icon. It’s because he was a die hard leftist who believed in things like world government and the superiorty of the UN. Can you argue with this line of reasoning?
Nausea–the perfect word for the feeling I have when I think about all the damage Cronk did to our once great nation.
So Jesus and Cronkite can be compared because they’re both “famous and dead?” Well, then, Hitler, Francis of Assisi, Paul Newman, Jeffrey Dahmer, Thomas Jefferson, Genghis Khan and Bette Davis are all alike in Blarty’s book. All famous. All dead.
Jesus, Cronkite, what’s the diff?
Remember, folks, Blarty thinks he’s smarter than us. He’s hysterical. I’d miss him if he left.
Aa for the idea that the American people as a whole will be just outraged by right-winger casting aspersions on saintly Uncle Walt – oh please.
Does anybody under the age of 40 even know or care who the man was? Once again, narcisstic liberal boomers and media people imagine that everyone is interested in their obsessions.
I grew up in a Democratic family – but we watched Huntley and Brinkley. So I would have a very limited interest in Cronkite’s death, even if he wasn’t a VC symp and boneheaded limo liberal.
“could not handle a bicycle tech army like the North Vietnamese”
Erm, you mean that army with tanks, 122mm howitzers, SAMs, MiGs- that bicycle-tech army?
To answer your question, look no further than that “wisest fool in Christendom,” Macnamara. In his beancounter arrogance, he thought he could throw away every principle of warfare and get away with it.
He couldn’t.
—————
Let’s not overlook Unca Walter’s legacy- the flotillas of ‘journalists’ who, from the air-conditioned comfort of their Baghdad hotels, spent all of 2006-08 telling us that that war was lost, too.
Cronkite was a “krankheit,” albeit a chronic one that keeps mutating into ever more virulent strains, whether left, right, statist, or libertarian.
The Vietnamese boat people I grew up with are mostly Republicans today thanks to Cronkite and the Dem Congress that cut their throats and funding to South Vietnam, which continued fighting for 2 more years anyway (the Soviets, however, did continue their funding); the resulting re-education camps, high-seas piracy, and union members shouting “Boat people go home!” (why, check with Jello Biafra, if you like) contributed.
I like Cronkite doing his reporting from Vietnam with his helmet straps unbuckled, which suggests he was utterly safe and could thus act stupid, as anyone who has been in the military knows. Image had already come to mean more than reality.
Who was the good little Statist, First Class, who tossed in a comment about wishing for Teddy’s (Kennedy, you mean?) death? I didn’t see that in any preceding comment. More projection?
67. lefroy:
“What did he actually DO to make him such a object of veneration?”
It’s very simple: people liked him.
That’s how simple American people are and how they choose their icons. Just like music and sports, people like something and then icons are born.
Brain Dead: What possible inderstanding do you have of decency. Hatred? You are of the LEft. You hate civilization itself. What silliness. Where you even alive when Cronkite doing hs damage? Cronkite was an international socialist one-worlder. Few things are as evil as that.
Old enough: You are evidently not old enough to understand the english language. Go look up malformed.
Moonbats ‘libtard’ and left wingers try and claim the moral high ground but ‘JOHN I love MJ and worship the ground he walks on’ exposes you for the gullible, hysterical emotional Obambi worshiping fools that you are
As a kid I enjoyed listening to Cronkite.
He was wrong about Tet. The North Vietnamese admitted they lost Tet years after the war was over. Read the NV General’s own account. Did Cronkite contribute to the loss of the war? Maybe.
Well before he retired I had stopped listening to him. So while his passing is sad I certainly won’t miss him.
local conservative talk show had a Vietnam vet on over the weekend who called Cronkite a hero for telling the truth and all the vets had the utmost respect for him. At least the vets in his unit.. go figure.
Cronkite – I believe it was from an interview with him on the biography channel:
(1) Fired from his first reporter position (Houston?) while covering a woman’s murder. Cronkite broke into her home and stole her picture, which was posted in the newspaper. The problem was Cronkite broke into the wrong home (a neighbor) and stole the neighbor’s picture. Cronkite proved to be a very stupid man and an inept thief! (Oh, and he justified it by saying that “the news media was less honest back then.”)
(2) Pressured from a different job (Texas) after a natural gas explosion killed 155 (?) school children, one of whom was the School Superintendent’s son. Cronkite hounded the grieving Superintendent with no care fro his feelings – for a news story. What a cold-hearted miserable pig!
(3) While a war correspondent (remember Cronkite was draftable age), Cronkite left the Sicilian invasion (pressured to go bring first hand accounts of the fighting), without going ashore. Missing for three weeks, he returned to the USA and convinced his managers that he wanted to tell the American public first hand about “the way it is.” Coward, while letting real American’s die!
On a purely professional level, Cronkite was hardly the most gifted talent that ever sat at a news desk. I was working at a CBS affiliate (that will remain nameless)back in the 80s and worked with Walter Cronkite in the recording studio taping some promo announcements for the station. LOTS of blown takes and cussing on that tape. His daughter was actually smoother in front of a mike.
I recall Cronkite expressed skepticism about Vietnam in the fall of 1965 when it took guts.His later career he tendend to be pompus and boring.
Walter Cronkite did not invent reading the news and Michael Jackson did not “invent the moonwalk”. What’s the big deal?
So all dead white men are Jesus?
Maybe we need a counterpart to Godwin’s law for comparison to Jesus. Hitlerwin’s law?
Truth is stranger than fiction: The real “most trusted man in America” is Bill Perron
While I agree with your Cronkite assessment, your Jackson-bashing demonstrates your advanced age. Because you had no particular interest in his music, it seems to cloud your judgement. It exhibits every conservative stereotype in seeming callous, unfeeling, & angry toward a great but troubled entertainer.
Let’s not forget the REAL Michael Jackson: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Jackson_(writer)
More here:
http://www.examiner.com/x-241-Beer-Examiner~y2009m6d26-Michael-Jackson-the-Beer-Hunter–lest-we-forget
If there were any real justice in the world, M. Jackson would have been murdered in prison twenty years ago, and that commie bastard Kronkite would have been shot for treason in “68″. I’m a Vietnam Vet, who was recovering in a hospital in Japan, when that lying liberal scum told America he thought the war was a stalemate. The other men in my ward were wondering if the ass had lost his mind. And that’s the way it was.
“Walter Cronkite [...] seemed to float above the yapping clamor of common opinion. At bottom, though, he merely reflected it. The adulation that has greeted his demise is as unearned as it is emetic.”
And that’s the way it is. Kudos to Mr. Kimball for saying it.
“Liberals like Cronkite suppose they are objective because they are secure in the belief that their opinions represent a neutral state of nature.”
Absolutely spot on. On the political scale, modern liberals regularly – and incorrectly – believe they are at 0, moderate, non partisan, and every one they disagree with far to the right.
I believe that is the root of their self righteous indignation at those with whom they disagree.
Who will now assume the title of “The World’s Most Overrated Leftist Newsreader?” Not Katie, as no one rates her very far above last place. Not Jon Stewart (the Daily Show guy), as he apparently writes at least some of his own material. Perhaps “Baghdad Wolf” Blitzer?
Cronkite…rot in hell. For the thousands of names you added to that black wall in DC. Some of them friends of mine who died after you emboldened Ho Chi Minh, the VC and the NVA. Then you spawned the likes of Keith Oberfurher, Matthews, Anderson and Mad Cow Maddow to walk in your dirty shoes.
“And slinging accusations of “pedophilia” towards a man proven innocent in a court of law, is slander.
Jackson was weird, no doubt, but he was no child molester.”
OJ Simpson and Robert Blake were also aquitted. Does that mean they were innocent? No. It just exposes the flaws in our justice system.
Thanks to Barry Scheck, F Lee Baley, Johnny Cochran and a completely racist and stuid jury a murderer walked. Forget about DNA evidence proclaiming only one man (OJ Simpson) in several billion could have commited the crime. Not guilty does not mean “proven innocent”.
7. Anthony:
Did he screw up? Sure, his opinion on the state of Vietnam was extraordinary, but more than turn public opinion, it opened the way for such mealy-mouthed anchors like Dan Rather and narcissists like Bill O’Reilly to turn the position into bully pulpits that do a disservice to journalism. So, in short, you should thank him first before you diss him.
Allow me to thank Uncle Walt for the millions of Cambodians who were sentenced to a living hell and early death due to our “failure” in South Vietnam.
So all dead white men are Jesus?
No, all dead white men are Socrates.
I met Walter Cronkite as a young Airman First Class who’d been assigned as a public affairs liaison to the CBS team during the Apollo 17 launch operations in December 1972. There was, as I recall, some kind of technician’s strike going on, and as a consequence CBS management and editorial personnel were working the launch.
Alone among the CBS team, Cronkite treated me with the kind of respect you’d expect from a relic of the Ernie Pile generation of journalists. Without exception, the young “talent” who now undoubtedly constitute the network’s leadership went out of their way to be rude, insulting and condescending. To me he was a class act I’ll never forget, notwithstanding his politics were or how he influenced network news.
Michael Jackson’s “moon walk” was borrowed from Marcel Marceau (who did it a bit better). He’ll be all but forgotten by the end of the decade, replaced by the next so-called “celebrity”, the next creation of publicists and record companies.
#77 Vivo:
“It’s very simple: people liked him.
That’s how simple American people are and how they choose their icons. Just like music and sports, people like something and then icons are born.”
I don’t think for a minute that Americans – “simple” or otherwise – are so stupid that they turn people into “icons” merely because they like them. I like lots of people but I don’t regard them as “icons” or saints.
Americans who canonize people just because they like them are indeed “simple Americans”, but not quite in the sense that you meant it.
The point you haven’t answered is that the canonization of Cronkite is based on sentimentality. Like him by all means, like him a lot, but don’t turn him into an object of veneration and invest him with every conceivable virtue, because it’s dumb; he’s done nothing to deserve that kind of treatment.
I’ll miss Cronkite a lot more than Michael Jackson. When I heard he passed away I felt like I lost a member of the family. He earned the tag of the “most trusted man in Amwerica.” The man was a class act. He was a part of what makes America great.
lefroy you’re wasting your time.
vivo is in the boat with folks who will say Obama’s accomplishment is his being 1/2 black.
The definition of ‘Accomplishments’ has been altered, skewed, redrawn to make up for mediocre.
102. lefroy:
“I don’t think for a minute that Americans – “simple” or otherwise – are so stupid that they turn people into “icons” merely because they like them.”
If you don’t believe that, it’s your privilege.
A few American icons:
John Wayne, Marylin Monroe, Frank Sinatra, John F. Kennedy, The Beatles (even if British), Michael Jackson, Babe Ruth, Elvis Presley, Walter Cronkite, American Idol singers, and a miriad of others locally and nationally.
Pat J (103)
“I’ll miss Cronkite a lot more than Michael Jackson.”
Why? His songs on the nightly news were at least as contrived as Michael Jackson’s lyrics and he danced around the truth every bit as well as Jackson danced around the stage.
“When I heard he passed away I felt like I lost a member of the family.”
You need some serious help from a psychologist.
“He earned the tag of the “most trusted man in Amwerica.” The man was a class act.”
He was a duplicitous liar, but I guess you could trust him to be lying in furtherance of his bias whenever his lips were moving, on or off the air. It takes more than an expensive suit and good speaking voice to make someone a class act. Now, if you had said, “he was a good actor who did well at portraying someone with class”, I could see your point.
“He was a part of what makes America great.”
He was an opportunist who took advantage of the prestige the media had left over from WWII and used it to sway public opinion. That’s not a Great American unless you think the best way to help America is to undermine it. Is that you’re perspective? If so, I guess he could make your pantheon of heroic bomb throwers.
Have a nice day
I stopped watching “the most trusted man in America” when a day after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Cronkite paused, frowned and…intoned something like …”the riots following the death of MLK, taxed the patience of us all..or taxed the patience of the best of us”…or some pretentious similar statement in that context. I thought ..who in the ****..does he think he is? That was the end of me and Cronkite. Have been looking for that segment on YouTube. No luck. Am I the only one who remembers that?
Interesting – a rough count appears:
65% of Americans (this and other blog comments) despise Cronkite
35% of Americans seems to like him
I guess that really reflects American today – most American’s lean conservative, distrust the media, want values & integrity back into our society. The bottom 35 percenters seem to wallow in the cesspool of social disharmony, public larceny and “new age – make them up as you go” values!
My recollection of Cronkite is that he was more determined to keep his personal predilections & leanings to himself than today’s gaggle of newsreaders.
At least until he retired, at which time I (anyway) was surprised to learn he was a flaming liberal.
Not long ago, I heard a professor say he felt it was his duty to inculcate his captive audience into correct (i.e., leftist) thinking. I was shocked at both the sentiment and the apparent lack of shame in acknowledging it.
When I was in college, it was the tacit rule of thumb that professors kept personal views out of their teaching.
Now, most of those personal governors in news & education seem to be off, and both are more akin to exercises in brainwashing & indoctrination.
One more media useful idiot,and world fascism sympathizer croaks ,symbolizing the death of left-wing mind control via tv. I think it’s great,and I hope he lingered in great pain before his diseased brain shut down. May he rest in hell!
tanstaafl, I was a full-time student at UC Davis while active duty Air Force.
Often, I’d leave for class in my BDU’s for I would leave straight from work.
Many students and Professors on campus would give me looks of disgust while going to/from class.
My major being Meteorology, 2 of my professors, both middle aged, 1 sporting the polo collar up and the other a ponytail. Apparently, the 80′s had a profound influence on them.
Anyways, these 2 would often make comments regarding “..this not being possible..” or “..you’ll not see this occur..”
I often had to correct or disagree with them. I was fortunate to have already gone through the military’s meteorology program and been to several overseas locations whereas I had experienced such phenomena that was being bunked. My being in my late teens – early 20′s made me somewhat squeamish to speak up. Though I’d finally gained confidence to comment. 1 of the 2 actually told me to “Prove it.” The next class I brought in the charts, alphanumeric data, satellite images to ‘Prove the impossible’
These ‘Educators’, who’d held me in such contempt was both disheartening but a great wake up call to NEVER allow one of authority to sway, attempt to indoctrinate my mindset.
I experienced this ‘chosen ignorance’ amongst colleagues in Antarctica.
I was having a drink, playing darts with some atmospheric scientists who’d been complaining of Bush, wars, et al. Now I’m no huge Bush fan, but Kerry or Gore? I’m pleased with the former. I told these folks, who are by no means buffoons, they’re part of the problem.
They’d looked at me with questioned looks on their faces. I told them our employer, Raytheon Polar Services is one of the bigger contributors to scientific research, yes. Though a big player in weapons research as well. Ahh, Professors ‘Know best’.
So; Explain why Cronkite refused the chance to be President of The United States? Didn’t make much news, but he refused, just the same!
These ‘Educators’, who’d held me in such contempt was both disheartening but a great wake up call to NEVER allow one of authority to sway, attempt to indoctrinate my mindset.
Yes, Paul, kind of an unintended education, but maybe more valuable (in its way) than the official one.
Thanks for writing some of your story.