Cronkite Unplugged

I wasn't going to write about Walter Cronkite even once, much less twice, I really wasn't. I figured - correctly - that the coverage of the man upon the occasion of his death would be positive, unquestioning and tinged with adoration, but then the Media decided they couldn't let such an occasion go without using it as they have on numerous other occasions to simultaneously deny the existence of Left Wing media bias, then admit to its existence but rationalize whether or not it made any difference. So it goes with so many Left Wing Premises; most are inherently contradictory, but it's not like anybody is calling them on it. And Walter Cronkite not only lived these Premises, he was the progenitor.

This story has three acts: 1) The Usual Suspects portray Cronkite as a towering pre-eminence during his career; 2) they emphasize his so-called integrity in reporting; 3) they use the reports of his post-broadcasting career Leftie radicalism as proof-positive of the aforementioned integrity.

On the first point, to read the tributes to Walter Cronkite, you would think that America didn't watch anybody else in the 60s and 70s when it came to the evening news. OffHisMeds actually had his belly-full of Cronkite as far back as the late 60s, given his blatant advocacy of all Democrat initiatives and the intentions of all Democrats, particularly people like John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Teddy Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey. There was never a Big Government program Walter didn't like, and his sycophancy for anything to do with the space program was legendary.

And while Cronkite was the most popular of Anchors during most of his tenure, there were definitely others, including Huntley/Brinkley, Howard K. Smith, and later Jim Reynolds. After about 1970, OffHisMeds resolutely sought out these alternatives to Uncle Walter for the rest of his career, largely because Cronkite's habit of promoting his advocacy for Big Government was not emulated by Huntley, Brinkley, Smith et al, and thus, their greater appeal to viewers of a more discriminating sort.

Not that I boycotted him entirely. As was the case with his ideological successors - people like Dan Rather, Peter Jennings and Brian Williams - I would, in fact, check out Cronkite every once in a while, just to see if he was still the unashamed cheerleader of the Left that I perceived him to be, and Cronkite would never disappoint.

Cronkite worked his bias into his reporting in many subtle ways, while still maintaining the mien of the impartial reporter: what stories got told was the most obvious means; which facts were given emphasis, and which were not; who was interviewed, and who was not.

Cronkite was a big Rooter for the Great Society, an ironic development inasmuch as he stabbed it's author, Lyndon Johnson in the back over Viet Nam. His starry-eyed advocacy for all the worst ideas ever to come out of NASA resulted in our abandonment of Space Exploration and the past 40 years of failure. True to his Big Government-loving roots, when somebody suggested launching a skyscraper into low Earth orbit as the next grand objective for NASA, Walter thought that was just a dandy idea, and the Space Shuttle was born. That is when I knew for certain he was a Big Government Obamite. Who else could conceive to launch a building into space, when a simple ship would do?

Cronkite was universally proclaimed to be unbiased in his coverage, but that was more a product of the age he worked in than evidence of any journalistic integrity. The fact that we knew little of Cronkite's off-camera Liberal advocacy during his broadcast years is a direct result of the prevailing Media ethos of the day regarding prominent men: the reporting of indiscretions out of the official spotlight was censored, pure and simple. The same ethos that allowed John F. Kennedy to plow through Hollywood starlets and mob-connected hookers by the dozen was the ethos that allowed the Media to ignore Cronkite's sundry engagements with - and advocacy of - all the Far Left causes he so treasured.

Dan Rather could only dream being granted that same lack of adult supervision. He might still be a lion of the airwaves instead of the creepy conspiracy theorist he's become, broadcasting out of a closet somewhere in America, his audience numbered in the low three digits, bound and determined to locate "Kenneth" and once and for all unravel his cryptic comments about "the frequency".

After his retirement in the early 80s, old Walter "came out" in a big way, supporting every Looney Lefty cause, embracing every Democrat and defaming every Conservative. He tried his damndest to discredit Ronald Reagan, the best president of the 20th century, and his support of Jimmy Carter was legendary. And through it all, he gave the same phony argument as Dan Rather and every other Agenda Broadcaster that his reportage was unbiased.

Once Walter came out, people of course leapt to his defense. Yes, they said, Walter may have been liberal, even ultra liberal, even Uber-liberal, but - and this is important - he never let it affect his objectivity. How many frigging times must we hear that from Liberals to explain the reasons why they are allowed to inflict their views on America, all whilst claiming some mythical impartiality? Call a Spade a Spade, I says.

One last anecdote: the story is told in various ways of his opinion of the man who replaced him, the hapless Dan Rather. From Cronkite's retirement until the occasion of his death, most of America was ambiguous about the fact that Cronkite had been forced into retirement, much less that Dan Rather had replaced him. This clearly drove Cronkite crazy, and OffHisMeds believes he had a point. When it came to newsreading, Rather clearly couldn't hold Cronkite's jockstrap. And yet, the Public greeted his departure with a collective yawn, then got about their daily lives, dealing with the Stagflation that was ruining their lives that was caused by the Democrats that Cronkite had spent his life fluffing up.

Cronkite was pissed, and he never got over it. So pissed, he flogged Rather for the rest of his life, accosting complete strangers and using sundry venues to criticize Rather to anybody who would listen. The most public of these critiques was mere days after Rather was himself forced into retirement in 2005, as mean a thing as one professional could do to another. But here we see Cronkite unfiltered: petty, vindictive, and not surprisingly, conducting himself upon the occasion of being forced out of the anchor chair exactly like Dan Rather, the man who replaced him.

It is all irrelevant now, of course. With any luck, Walter Cronkite stepped briskly into the Great Beyond, Gaia's door just barely missing his backside on the way out, a grateful nation - apparently with the exception of OffHisMeds and a handful of others - dabbing a single tear from their eye.