[x]

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.

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.

[nathanbedford]

Thank you for two thoughtful reactions to my obituary of Walter Cronkite.

I have a distinct recollection of returning home from school and encountering my mother watching what I think were the Army-McCarthy hearings on black-and-white television. In those days Americans divided along the cleft, pro or con Joseph McCarthy. People who were opposed to Joe McCarthy believed that the Rosenbergs were innocent of giving our atomic secrets to the Russians and believed that Whittaker Chambers was lying and Alger Hiss was innocent.

These were not just watercooler subjects for discussion, these were watershed moments in America in the 1950s and were taken very seriously indeed. If you broke on one side you turned the litmus paper Republican and if you broke on the other side you turned the litmus paper Democrat. All of intelligentsia, academia, and, significant to our discussion, the media tended to turn the litmus paper Democrat. In this context we see Edward R Murrow on CBS undertaking in at least two specials on See It Now to take down Joseph McCarthy.

I do not think it is accidental that Edward R Murrow had made his bones as a war correspondent in London during the blitz and I do not think it is of no significance that Walter Cronkite followed him as a war correspondent into the battle for Europe a couple of years later. So Cronkite succeeded Edward R Murrow in both roles.

CBS in those days was known as the Tiffany network and no one believed more fervently in the eternal truth of that description than the "journalists" at CBS News. CBS ever since Edward R Murrow's political assassination of Joseph McCarthy has been at pains to exalt its role and the "courage" of Edward R Murrow with repeated specials, with lengthy footage, and with panel discussions and presentations etc. It requires no leap of imagination to believe that Walter Cronkite saw himself under the same obligation to the world as he saw played out by his predecessor to shape history when history demanded it. Yet, it was also that CBS felt uneasy and felt the need to justify its departure of its role as journalists for partisan advocacy. They justified the transmogrification ultimately by saying that the ends justified the means. The same rationalization was easier to profess at the time of their departure from reporting into advocacy during the civil rights movement.

Hubris is the inevitable result of feeling oneself anointed.

Nor do I think it is to be forgotten that Richard Nixon was on the wrong side of the litmus paper test, having virtually single-handedly turned around the case against Alger Hiss by converting it into a matter of perjury. Alger Hiss was a member of academia, he was a fixture of the establishment being endorsed by the testimony of two Supreme Court justices, he was the darling of the media. People believed that Nixon has never been forgiven for his treatment of Helen Gahagan Douglas, I believe that he is never been forgiven for exposing Alger Hiss.

Why would CBS News support Kennedy over Nixon? Why would the media, CBS not excepted, flagrantly bend their reporting to undermine Richard Nixon even before there was any indication of a Watergate scandal? Why would these same media overlook the wiretapping of Roosevelt Kennedy and Johnson and wax indignant at the recordings of Nixon? Why would the media overlook how Kennedy stole the 1960 election in Illinois and along the border in Texas but fulminate against Nixon's dirty tricks? Why would Walter Cronkite run a very effective special pointing to the guilt of Richard Nixon during the investigation stage of Watergate? Why would Dan Rather not scruple against the use of bogus documents in an effort to throw an election against George W. Bush? The examples go on and on.

Because The Tiffany Network has been anointed by God to save America. Of course it is not just the Tiffany Network but all wannabes who feel an equally compelling urgency to save America from herself.

One can connect dots and come up with a straight line from Edward R Murrow through Walter Cronkite to Dan Rather. It seems that the Greeks had it about right concerning hubris: those whom the gods would destroy they first make mad, or, simply elevate and exalt.