Time: Cronkite, the 'Patron Saint of Objectivity' -- Well, Actually, Thankfully, No

NewsBusters ^ | July 16, 2009 | Tim Graham

[Stoat]

Time: Cronkite, the 'Patron Saint of Objectivity' -- Well, Actually, Thankfully, No

By Tim Graham (Bio | Archive)
July 18, 2009 - 09:02 ET

 

 

Most Americans who were born before 1970 remember Walter Cronkite as a towering figure of TV news. I remember being riveted to the set during his final newscast in 1981. But one grand claim about Cronkite should not stand: that he was "TV’s patron saint of objectivity," as Time TV writer Jim Poniewozik wrote in a tribute. Even Poniewozik can’t stick with that claim. He went on to honor Cronkite for trusting his audience enough to abandon a "false even-handedness that flies in the face of reality." If writers want to appreciate Cronkite’s biases, that’s much more honest than claiming he wasn’t part of the historic CBS effort to paint the world in liberal hues. Here’s the end of Poniewozik’s appreciation:

Cronkite was TV's patron saint of objectivity, in an era when audiences still believed in it (though he became a liberal columnist after retiring from TV). And yet ironically his most famous act as a news anchor was a rare occasion when he ventured an opinion. After reporting in Vietnam in 1968, Cronkite commented on the air that "it seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate." President Lyndon B. Johnson remarked that if he had lost Walter Cronkite, he had lost Middle America; soon after he announced that he would not seek re-election.

Despite his comments on the war — or because of them — Cronkite cemented a reputation as a straight shooter. His successors, at CBS and elsewhere, would later be denounced as biased hacks for far less opinionated statements. Maybe Cronkite benefited from working in a time when Americans simply had more trust in authority. But it may also be that he earned that trust — that by calling a quagmire what it was, he showed that a false even-handedness that flies in the face of reality is not the same as honesty.

And more important, he had faith that his viewers, even in a painfully divided period in history, were sophisticated enough to understand this. What finally distinguished Walter Cronkite, perhaps, was not the trust his audience placed in him. It was that he was a good and wise enough newsman to place his trust in his audience.

 

—Tim Graham is Director of Media Analysis at the Media Research Center.

[Stoat]

Readers may also be interested in this related NewsBusters article:

Cronkite Said He Was a Liberal, But Liberals Aren't 'Committed to a Point of View' NewsBusters.org

[The_Media_never_lie]

Say what? Liberals aren't committed to a point of view?

They are absolutely, positively committed to the liberal orthodoxy, without failure. Only the benighted masses dissagree.

[FormerACLUmember]

Cronkite was the first partisan propagandist in undercover “newsman” disguise of the democrat party controlled Mainstream Media era.

Good riddance to this evil fraud.

[Para-Ord.45]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h57UR-oIE_g

[ActrFshr]

If you take your political view as gospel, then in fact, in your imagination, it is “objective”. In that sense, for all the leftists out there, Walter Cronkite was the epitome of “objectivity”. Yikes.

[dsc]

“Cronkite benefited from working in a time when Americans simply had more trust in authority.”

No, he benefitted from working in a time when there was no Internet to catch his scumbag @ss.

[Stoat]

LMAO

[Lancey Howard]

Prayers for the families of Marines, sailors, and soldiers who were needlessly killed in Vietnam after Cronkite helped Hanoi by feeding the anti-war frenzy that helped create the very “quagmire” he “reported” about. Feeding the anti-war frenzy in America was Hanoi’s strategy from the beginning.
__________________________________________________________

In August of 1995 Stephen Young interviewed Bui Tin for the Wall Street Journal. Here are a few excerpts from that interview:

Question: How did Hanoi intend to defeat the Americans?

Answer: By fighting a long war which would break their will to help South Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh said, “We don’t need to win military victories, we only need to hit them until they give up and get out.”

Q: Was the American antiwar movement important to Hanoi’s victory?

A: It was essential to our strategy. Support of the war from our rear was completely secure while the American rear was vulnerable. Every day our leadership would listen to world news over the radio at 9 a.m. to follow the growth of the American antiwar movement. Visits to Hanoi by people like Jane Fonda, and former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and ministers gave us confidence that we should hold on in the face of battlefield reverses. We were elated when Jane Fonda, wearing a red Vietnamese dress, said at a press conference that she was ashamed of American actions in the war and that she would struggle along with us.

Q: What was the purpose of the 1968 Tet Offensive?

A: To relieve the pressure Gen. Westmoreland was putting on us in late 1966 and 1967 and to weaken American resolve during a presidential election year.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2006/04/goodbye_saigon_goodbye_baghdad.html

[Lancey Howard]

By the way, is there any doubt that if that dead scumbag Cronkite was in the anchor chair during the past 8 years that he would have joined fellow rats like Harry Reid in declaring the war in Iraq lost?

[Carry_Okie]

The relatives of the two million Cambodians who died as a result of Cronkite's bogus declaration of defeat after the Tet offensive, just might take issue with his claim of "objectivity."

[hosepipe]

Cronkeit?... A dead commie is a good start..

[ripley]

One small change:

The Patron Saint of Socialist Objectivity

IMHO

[TopQuark]

The real understanding of Cronkite parallels that of Obama. Neither of them was/is a phenomenon. The truly remarkable, and related, phenomena is the sheepish devotion that the Land of the Free had for Cronkite and has presently for Obama.

Any man that can say aloud, "And that's the way it is," as did Cronkite, is intellectually arrogant and a tyrant inside. Physicists who replicate experiments numerous times and have reasons to be confident would say only, "Experiments appear to be consistent with the current hypotheses/axioms." And this "thinker" goes somewhere, interviews a few people, and tells you "that's the way it is." What an arrogant SOB.

The real question, however, what has becomes of Americans that they have put so much trust into a single human being? They have done that previously with king-for-life, I mean, president Roosevelt. They are doing it now with Obama. We are a long, long way from 1976.