I'd sure like to think so. This column reflects the opinion ofBlake Fontenay. "[6], There were rumors that in 1972 left-wing Democrat presidential nominee George McGovern asked Cronkite to be his Vice Presidential running mate. (As a native Tennessean, I appreciate it when fictitious characters who sound like me are portrayed as being at least a little smarter than they're expected to be.). Roger Harrison Mudd (February 9, 1928 - March 9, 2021) was an American broadcast journalist who was a correspondent and anchor for CBS News and NBC News.He also worked as the primary anchor for The History Channel.Previously, Mudd was weekend and weekday substitute anchor for the CBS Evening News, the co-anchor of the weekday NBC Nightly News, and the host of the NBC-TV Meet the Press and . It was that neutral voice that compelled Americans to welcome television newscasters Walter Cronkite or Peter Jennings into their living rooms each night. The weather finally clears and the women prepare to go their separate ways. It is firmly set in a bar at Reagan National Airport just outside of Washington, D.C in Sept. 2010 . In 2000, he donated $1,000 to the NARAL Pro Choice America PAC and in 2004, he donated to an unsuccessful Congressional candidate in Kentucky. I am shaking my head at the spectacle of a network anchor secretly urging a politician to mount a White House campaign and then interviewing him about that very question. Cronkite hadn't gone further than many other commentators, but he alone had the standing to move public opinion. When I had my own strong opinions, as I often did, I tried not to communicate them to my audience.. After the wars conclusion, he remained in Europe, covering the Nrnberg trials and helping set up numerous UP bureaus. But after covering Nixon's historic visit to China, he let loose with a night of partying in San Francisco. Cronkite's public persona was that of a pipe-puffing family man. For entertainment purposes, we allow ourselves to be transported to fantasy lands where superheroes are real, people can train and ride dragons, and former NFL quarterback Tom Brady is beloved. Buchanan even included a reference to the protest footage in Vice President Spiro Agnews famous 1969 speech attacking television news as biased. And he was convinced that the network news broadcasts, with their executive producers living in New Yorks liberal atmosphere, were contributing to social turmoil and unrest throughout the country. Walter Cronkite Interview Walter Cronkite spoke with independent producer George Colburn about President Dwight Eisenhower 's military and political career. Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism and can be contacted at cliff.kincaid@aim.org. For many years, I did my best to report on the issues of the day in as objective a manner as possible. When Cronkite asked Gerald Ford at the 1980 Republican convention whether there would be a "co-presidency" if he agreed to be Ronald Reagan's running mate, Ford's failure to challenge the characterization blew up any chance at a joint ticket. View the complete archives from Cliff Kincaid. The . This is a mostly justifiable assessment. And we can't always pick the people who we'll be sitting next to. Could a conversation like the one Byers and Jenkins take place in our highly polarized world? CBS'S WALTER CRONKITE, TELEVISION NEWS ICON, IS DEAD AT 92. The Yishai Fleisher Show on JewishPress.com, The Civilizational Clash of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. But he often gave himself deniability with linguistic hedging. Amazingly, CBS stated it would destroy the Vanderbilt tapes if it won in court. Ousted as CBS anchor in 2004 after using suspect documents to accuse George W. Bush of going AWOL from the National Guard. All Right Reserved. The terrible truth is that Walter Cronkite symbolized liberal media bias and used that bias with disastrous consequences for our nation and the world. July 17, 2009 -- Walter Leland Cronkite, a legendary reporter and anchorman who was once voted the "most trusted man in America," died today at age 92. Terms of Use When LBJ said that "if I've lost Cronkite, I've lost the country," he was acknowledging that a single newsman had the power to change a national narrative. He retired as CBS Evening News anchorman in 1981. RM911 on Facebook; RM911 on Twitter; Archives. I am shaking my head at the spectacle of a network anchor secretly urging a politician to mount a White House campaignand then interviewing him about that very question. Had Cronkite pulled such stunts today, I would probably be among those calling for him to step down. In 1935 he left college to take a full-time position with the paper. This is a mostly justifiable assessment. Yet, his misreporting helped create the conditions for a premature U.S. military withdrawal, leading to the loss of the lives of 58,000 Americans in vain, not to mention the millions of additional deaths caused in Vietnam and Cambodia by the Communists. Cronkite told AIM founder and editor Reed Irvine that he had been misquoted by Kobysh, and that he had a tape recording of the interview to prove it. Walter Cronkite, the longtime liberal anchorman for the CBS Evening News, has given a speech before the World Federalist Association in which he has openly called for the establishment of world government. Assign them the role of newspaper reporters writing an analysis of these TV interviews for . In 1962 Cronkite attained the position he would become most famous for: anchorman of the CBS Evening News. In the episode on Tet, he addressed the criticism that reporters got the story wrong . After the Soviet collapse, Irvine wrote a 1990 AIM Report about those personalities who had taken a benign or even adulatory view of communism and the Soviet Union in the years since the 1917 Bolshevik coup detat. Cronkite was on this list of doves, which also included Hanoi Jane Fonda. We can agree on that, Carson said of the longtime CBS anchor who died in 2009. The networks also worried that if Vanderbilt continued recording their broadcasts, they would lose the ability to repackage and resell their footage. This article was most recently revised and updated by, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Walter-Cronkite, Warfare History Network - Walter Cronkite: The War As He Saw It, Public Broadcasting Service - American Masters - Walter Cronkite, Spartacus Educational - Biography of Walter Cronkite, Historic Missourians - Biography of Walter Cronkite, Walter Cronkite - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up), CBS' Gayle King to get Cronkite journalism excellence award. In 1974 Cronkite got into a spat with the rebellious Schorr, flatly denying the charge that CBS executives had ordered the evening news to "go soft on Nixon" as the president was resigning. It was that commitment to factual. That's. "You must announce your intention to run against Johnson, to show people there will be a way out of this terrible war," he said in Kennedy's Senate office. This is the same Cronkite who, when a new videotape from Osama bin Laden surfaced a few days before the 2004 presidential election, saw it as some nefarious plot hatched in the bowels of the Bush White House. The news broadcasts also included the eras biggest stories: fighting in Vietnam, communist leaders meeting in Eastern Europe and the civil war in Nigeria. when they did not express political views, when . But some unscrupulous actions outlined in the book muddy his otherwise almost spotless reputation, and make clear how much the media has changed. I don't know why to this day I got away with it," Cronkite is quoted as saying years later. Printed from: https://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/media-monitor/the-truth-about-cronkite/2012/07/11/. The late 20th century was a tumultuous time, crowded with many world-shaking events. "Rather and company shut me out from doing anything," he complained. Goldstein on Gelt: What are Alternative Investments? The offensive was an attempt . A new biography of Walter Cronkite reveals the less trustworthy side of the most trusted man in America. But he was far more liberal than the public believed, and he let it show in unacceptable ways. Lyndon B. Johnson told his staff, If Ive lost Cronkite, Ive lost Middle America, and some held that Johnsons decision not to run for reelection that year was a direct result of Cronkites reporting. On a business trip to New York in March 1968, Simpson toured each of the three networks. He captured important moments and reached millions. He was a creature of a simpler time, telling me in 2002 that the network newscasts should be all headlines and no features, seemingly ignoring the rhythms of the Internet age. But my admiration for the man is only partly diminished. In Simpsons view, this exaggerated the scale of violence and discredited the police. 2023 BuzzFeed, Inc. All rights reserved. On the day of John F. Kennedy's assassination, Cronkite nodded his head in thinly veiled contempt when handed a note on air that the Arizona senator had said "no comment." While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. But unlike Rather, who was frequently savaged by an army of critics and bloggers, Cronkite was an unassailable icon, America's Uncle Walter, his occasional misconduct and bouts of bias shielded from public view. Antiwar Movement Grows. [11] During and following his anchorage tenure, Cronkite has placed a disproportionate amount of criticism towards Conservatives while aligning himself with liberal figures such as Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, and John Kerry. Your Privacy Rights He wasnt necessarily wrong: Cronkite, who enjoyed his reputation as the most trusted man in America, did detest Goldwater and was liberal in his politics. It was dramatic stuff and Simpson and Grisham preserved it all. Privacy Policy, View the complete archives from Cliff Kincaid, Theyre lying to parents TAKE ACTION NOW, Kotaku is propagandizing to its readers ACT NOW, Teen Vogue is lying about public education TAKE ACTION NOW, MSNBCs Ruhle blasts Dollar Tree for raising prices, dismisses inflation threat, CNN reporter tries to cover for McAuliffes education remarks: It has spun out of control. In a CBS press release, his role was described as "anchor . As Salant later acknowledged, "we in CBS management telephoned the correspondents who would be covering the story that night to remind them that it was not a time, no matter how any of them felt for gloating remarks or for editorial attacks." He hosted numerous documentaries for the Public Broadcasting Service and for various cable television networks; among these programs was Cronkite Remembers (1997), a miniseries chronicling the historic occasions on which he had reported. Suite 900 Advertisement. He distinguished himself with his coverage of the 1952 and 1956 political conventions and as narrator of the documentary series The 20th Century. E-mail: info@aim.org, 2022 by Accuracy in Media. Such was the modest beginning of what Rutgers University historian David Greenberg has called the preeminent video resource for scholars of TV news.. The Board of Regents approved a change in the name to the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Telecommunication. I remember listening to him rail against Rather in his Upper East Side apartment, his anger still palpable after so many years. Although Goldwater had merely accepted an invitation to visit a U.S. Army facility there, correspondent Daniel Schorr said he was launching his campaign in "the center of Germany's right wing." Margaret Byers, portrayed by Angela Anderson Knittel, is a prim and proper woman, apparently from somewhere in the Northeast, who's waiting at the airport bar for her son, then a flight to Russia. But he was far more liberal than the public. Soon afterward, writes Kurtz, Cronkite got an exclusive interview in which Kennedy left the door open for a possible run the very candidacy that the anchor had urged him to undertake. Cronkite was America's most trusted reporter at the time, and his broadcast has come to be seen as a turning point in the war the "Cronkite moment" when the attitude of many Americans toward the war changed irreversibly. 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