I don't think you could really call Cronkite "politically correct" and still have the word mean much, though. Cronkite retired in 1981 and the wave of political correctness didn't come until later. Sure he had his opinions and he thought they were right. Sure there were things you couldn't say in television. But it wasn't much like things would be later (especially on college campuses).
There is a danger for a reporter in such circumstances. The temptations of hubris are seductive and as opportunistic as a virus. If you are right about civil rights, the temptation is to be right about Vietnam. If you are right about civil rights and Vietnam, the temptation is to be right about Watergate. If your experience in civil rights convinces you that you were right about Watergate and Vietnam, and is very tempting also to be right about one world government. If you operate in a world without talk radio or the Internet, there is no antiviral drug to arrest your hubristic virus.
If crusading on behalf of civil rights, against Vietnam, and Nixonian corruption introduced advocacy into your reporting and also made history and changed America so why stop there?
But why start there? With civil rights. Is it a Southern thing? Uncle Walter was also "right" about Hitler, so maybe his hubris started back then. When Cronkite became "the most trusted man in America" it was inevitable that it would go to his head.
Walter Cronkite was politically correct on all the issues but not offensively so. While political correctness was certainly very much a part of the fabric of our country, there were no competitive outlets to expose the worst excrescences of the phenomenon. In other words we did not know what political correctness was because we had no alternative reality. Walter Cronkite was not politically correct he was simply correct.
Really, my dad always knew Uncle Walter was biased. Nobody could do much about it, but it was apparent from the mid-60s or so on.
But judged by the path he opened for television journalism, he was particularly dangerous because he put a respectable face on a "news" media that was to become treacherous, detached from the middle of America from which Walter Cronkite came and which he personified. He seduced America into trusting an alien not just in our midst but in our homes. He made us defenseless to the traducers to come, to the Olbermanns and Matthews, the Daniel Schorr's and the Nina Totenberg's and, ultimately, to the Alinskys and Obamas.
Daniel Schorr was Cronkite's contemporary at CBS (his contemporary in life as well -- both born in 1916).
But all this "treachery" and "betrayal" -- doesn't that have an ominous sound for you? Maybe a little to reminiscent of some ugly stuff in the past?
Early television always provided a simplified, prettified view of the world. Finding out that everything out in the world isn't Father Knows Best, or The Brady Bunch or The CBS Evening News is all a part of growing up.
Cronkite's ratings were always quite high back in those days of just three big networks. Olbermann's and Matthews's are abysmal. Sure, Uncle Wally made for a more liberal America. But by the time he left office retired in 1981, the country was already swinging back to the right, so maybe he wasn't that important after all.
I guess I went too far there. I don't have first-hand recollections of the 60s. People who were observant could probably see that CBS had an agenda back then -- all those documentaries about migrant workers and Appalachia were clearly angling for something.
But, as you say, very many viewers did still trust Wally in those days. They assumed that he was apolitical and unbiased and really did tell you "the way it is." In the Nixon years everything got more polarized, television news and its viewers included. By the time I came along in the 70s it was pretty clear what Cronkite was all about and hard to have illusions.
Was Walter Cronkite seduced by his reputation? Sure. But Civil Rights probably wasn't as formative for him as it was for younger people. Like a lot of people of his generation, the change from Depression poverty to postwar affluence fueled a feeling that anything was possible.
The New York circles Cronkite moved in went left in the 1960s and he went with them. Tell someone he's "the most trusted man in America" and it's sure to go to his head. It could be he had the same self-righteousness of a lot of young people in those days, but he got there by a different path.
Was Uncle Walter "the thin end of the wedge"? I guess so, but all early television was like that. It imitated the way people lived at the time in small-town America, but as the way people lived in New York and Los Angeles and other big cities changed, television changed as well.