An essential element of the mainstream media’s myth about its own impartiality is the notion that before Fox News came along we were living in a golden age of broadcast news reporting. The days when national news was the dominion of three networks and a few major newspapers is portrayed as Eden before the fall, an era when partisanship of the kind that is now both familiar and expected was unknown. A key element to this fairy tale is the idea that the journalistic icons of the time, like CBS’s Walter Cronkite, were Olympian figures who would never stoop to play favorites or inject ideology into the news.
But this view is totally false. As media news analyst Howard Kurtz writes in the Daily Beast, a new biography of Cronkite by Douglas Brinkley spills the beans on the godlike anchorman’s unethical practices, including blatant partisanship that would make the conservative talkers on Fox and the liberals on MSNBC blush. While Kurtz still admires Cronkite in spite of his flaws, the problem here is not just that god had feet of clay after all. It’s that the truth about Cronkite throws the entire narrative of the liberal mainstream media under the bus. It wasn’t Fox that poisoned the well of journalism, as former New York Times editor Bill Keller recently alleged. Fox and other such outlets were brought into existence in an effort to balance a journalistic establishment that was already tilting heavily to the left. The real sin here is not bias or even partisanship but the pretense of fairness that Cronkite exemplified.
To confront the unvarnished truth about Cronkite is not to entirely discount his value as a television performer. There was much to admire about his news sense, and his on screen persona was a commanding and trusted presence that everyone who appears on television aspires to emulate. But the beloved Cronkite who generations of Americans grew up watching was only part of the picture. What Americans didn’t know about Cronkite gives the lie to the notion that the pre-Fox era was one in which non-partisan fairness ruled the airwaves.
According to Brinkley, Cronkite’s partisanship against Republicans (especially Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon) and in favor of liberal Democrats was so open that it must now seem shocking that he was rarely called out about it. He practically conspired with Bobby Kennedy during the run up to his presidential candidacy and was not too proud to stoop to dirty tricks at the expense of Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat he didn’t like.
Kurtz pardons Cronkite’s agenda-driven approach to the news because some of it was motivated by support for good causes like civil rights. But any biased journalist can make the same excuse. Cronkite’s vaunted independence was also undermined by his coziness with those in power, as long as he liked them and was given access, as was the case with John Kennedy and Jimmy Carter. Cronkite’s ethical lapses, including conflict of interest on an Olympian scale that involved taking freebies from companies like Pan Am, would be enough to get even the biggest name fired today.
So great is Cronkite’s hold on the imagination of many Americans, it’s not likely that Brinkley’s book will do much to tarnish his reputation. Like Kurtz, many will say his virtues outweighed his faults. Yet this is not the question we should be pondering. Cronkite’s personal standing with the public doesn’t matter anymore. What does matter is the still living myth that mainstream outlets like CBS or the New York Times are the impartial sources of news most unquestioningly believed them to be. It’s not that journalism was once pure but is now sordid; it’s that even the most trusted figures of the past were as crooked in their bias as the worst TV screamers of our own day. As with Cronkite, the real sin is not that his successors are biased, but that they pretend not to be.
Color me shocked! NOT. As a conservative, I do not begrudge liberals their beliefs and their reasoning. I consider them mathematically challenged and wrong headed for the most part. The dead media is an entirely different matter. The lies, subterfuge and blatant hypocrisy they've employed for well beyond 50 years while demanding that their motives are beyond reproach; scandalous. They have earned their current level of disgust by a majority of Americans. They consider conservatives neanderthals and misogynists. All of the while hiding their own regressive behavior and projecting it upon those they oppose. I cannot wait for the last fish wrap-worhty newspaper to go belly up. That will be a great day in America.
The revelations discussed in the article condemn Kurtz as much as Cronkite. I gather it is thought to be acceptable to lie and distort the news in the interest of "good causes"
Years ago David Halberstam wrote "The Powers That Be" in which he chronicled the history of CBS, the NY Times, the Washington Post and the LA Times. According to Halberstam, all four were heavily involved from their beginnings with effort to influence political outcomes. The notion that the media is unbiased, or at once was, is a myth.
Sadly, Cronkite remains the benchmark by which TV journalists measure themselves. He's the one who had the biggest hand in convincing the American people that the famous failed Tet offensive by the Viet Cong was actually an American loss. And, while it's true that our commanders were skewing battlefield numbers at the time, that's what they're supposed to do … morale and all that. The notion of judging a war only through the microscope of the daily media is ridiculous.
We should look back on the fact that Walter Cronkite, with his biased and inaccurate reporting on the Tet Offensive, was able to influence American policy in Vietnam more than any other individual as a chilling moment in the annals of American democratic government. But unfortunately back then there was no Internet or alternative media to blow apart Cronkite's transgressions in the way we were able to do so with Dan Rather in 2004. n nWe should be grateful that the day of the celebrity anchorman like Cronkite wielding such reckless and disproportionate power over the American public is over.
The reason that Bill Keller can be so enthralled with the media "preFoxNews" is rather simple. Bill Keller believes that liberalism is objective truth. Bill Keller can not imagine any scenario in which conservatives are anything other than simple hayseeds from places like Nebraska.
The thing that is REALLY chapping Cronkite's ghost and any Cronkite sycophants out there is that phrase "television performer". Oi! That is a dagger thrust worthy of Cronkite himself and I take this moment to observe that Cronkite is recognized by the spellchecker.
Haha, yeah I caught that too!
Cronkite in his heyday was a humorless blowhard who pontificated nightly because there was no one to challenge his position as the voice of news. His sainted reputation would have never survived the relentless pounding it would have received in the cable/digital age. In this case. more is certainly less.
The most fun I've had on my radio show was when I called Cronkite a Communist. It was an hour of bliss watching his supporters come out of the woodwork to defend him.
So dishonesty in a "good cause" is OK? And who defines what a "good cause" is. By any independent measure "civil rights" have destroyed generations of African American families, contributed to increased poverty among majority of AAs, fatal dependency on government handouts, ghettoization in the "projects" and a host of other social pathologies.
Cronkite's finest hour, and it was very fine indeed, was his anchoring of the Apollo 11 mission, which landed the first man on the moon. I will never forget it. But eventually I saw the intellectual dishonesty and laziness and stopped watching him. I still feel a twinge of sadness about it … His successors have all been low-talent hacks.
"the pretense of fairness " is really the arrogance of "moral superiority" that liberals of all stripes seem to possess almost as their birth-right. nThe sad and disheartening part is that conservatives seem to concede it – especilly on "good causes" like "civil rights".
Is it relevant to note that Cronkite's activities (which would get him fired today) occurred in the same era as JFK sleeping with almost everyone but his wife, and LBJ openly urinating in the Capitol parking lots. Johnson was from rural Texas, where such things are commonly done (there aren't PortaPotties out on the range) and I know that Johnson was quite crude, but this did surprise me. n nThe television business wasn't really competitive but the print journalism of the era definitely was, most major newspapers had their own Washington reporter, and the only way I can understand the pre-Watergate conspiracy of silence is that the media was equally corrupt, that it was one big "good old boys club" where much as competing factions of college student governments all agree not to tell the college administration about the underaged drinking that they all are doing, everyone in the DC of that era agreed not to tell on each other. n nI am reminded of what Senator Margaret Chase Smith (R-ME) reportedly once told a constituent in the late 1950's — "if the people really knew what was going on in Washington, there would be a revolution." And, arguably, that is what happened in the early 1970's.