Walter Cronkite: Trailblazer of Bias
by Dan Gifford
"Krankheit" in German is pronounced the same as the "Cronkite" following "Walter." The German word means "sickness" while the "Walter" word means the man who infected TV news with the gazillion dollar-salary Star Anchor larger than the news he is supposed to be presenting.
I don't say that to be mean-spirited or disrespectful of a man who was "the most trusted man in America," but nobody else appears to be pointing out that Cronkite was actually a one world government ideologue; an advocate
of a politically correct, totalitarian world government who used his trust to influence public policy in accordance with his own beliefs.
Cronkite should be the poster boy for full disclosure of a reporter's politics -- something I strongly advocate. Instead, he continues to be
lauded as "Uncle Walter," the journalist who was totally unbiased in his
reportage at a time when there were only three networks and the size of
his news audience and personal influence on politics and national policy
was far beyond anything that can be imagined by those who did not
experience it. That meant Cronkite was the national oracle of fact and
truth during his time as Anchor and Managing Editor of CBS Evening News
from 1962 to 1981. But was he really unbiased? Well, that's not quite
the way it was.
Cronkite was accused of political prejudice by Republicans and
conservatives as soon as he became CBS' big kahuna. The bias they
claimed was not so much in the words he said, it was in the way he said
those words in combination with his story selection, pictures and facial
expressions following comments made by non-liberals.
The first time I really noticed Cronkite's tricks was while watching his
TV newscasts during the 1964 presidential campaign between Arizona's
Republican Senator Barry Goldwater and incumbent Texas Democratic
President Lyndon Johnson. What most caught my attention was that
Cronkite's favoring of Johnson was different than the overt fawning over
JFK four years earlier by Cronkite and the general news establishment.
This was a subtle, sub-textual skewing which presented benign accurate
facts about Goldwater in a way that demonized and marginalized him.
Every actor, director and script writer, among others, knows what I'm
talking about and how to accomplish the same thing. When I was a TV
reporter, I would often make the point during speaking gigs that people
should be careful what conclusions they draw from a TV news story
because accurate facts can be juxtaposed and presented in such a way
that the viewer can be left believing the opposite. It's all a matter of
using the camera, voice and expression to exploit known fears, biases
and commonly believed "truths" which may not be true at all.
To cut to the chase, Goldwater was not just a US Senator, he was also an
Air Force General who spoke bluntly about his anti-communist views and
his belief that we should take a harder military stance against
hegemonic Marxism, especially in Vietnam. He was equally blunt about his
opposition to the civil rights bills and Johnson's proposed "Great
Society" welfare state then being argued in Congress because of
constitutional issues like equality before the law, the right of
association and other individual rights against the sort of all powerful
state Cronkite wanted.
So Goldwater's views were twisted by Cronkite within a media favoring Johnson and became the stuff of Stewart/Colbert
type ridicule by wags of the day to the effect that Goldwater was a
racist and real-life General Jack Ripper, the fictional Dr. Strangelove
character who goes crazy and starts a nuclear war. It was not the
Goldwater I discerned from his writings and speeches, but it was the
image of him I noticed being embellished on the Cronkite newscasts.
Cronkite gave the false Goldwater characterizations full credibility
before taking them to another level. Instead of simply focusing on
Goldwater's message during his run for the presidency, I started
noticing that CBS reports often sidetracked into stories that made
Goldwater's win of the Republican nomination at the convention (that's
how it was done then, not via the primaries) seem like some malevolent
scheme.
There were stories about Goldwater's use of secret communication devices
and other electronic wizardry that sounded downright nefarious. There
were other stories that implied Goldwater may not be right in the head
because he rested at the bottom of his home swimming pool while
breathing through an air hose. Others referenced Goldwater's Jewish
ancestry in ways I recognized that targeted the anti-Semitism buttons
buried within Americans who would never admit they disliked Jews in
their heart of hearts. But even that was overt compared to the really
subtle stuff in Cronkite's delivery subtext achieved through tone shifts
in his wonderful voice and those facial expressions that sent a
decidedly anti-Goldwater message.
I am not claiming that Cronkite alone caused Goldwater to lose the
presidential election. But I am saying that Cronkite was not the
unbiased arbiter of truth he is being made out to be. The way that he
delivered the news generally told me and many others how he felt about
most any given story, and his expressed opinions, starting with his
undercutting of the US Vietnam War effort after American and Republic of
Vietnam forces had annihilated the North Vietnamese during the Tet
Offensive, told me I was right.
For those who don't know, Communist forces in Vietnam were near defeat
but decided to throw everything they had left at US and Republic of
Vietnam soldiers in the form of huge suicidal attacks that intentionally
targeted civilians for wanton murder during the Chinese New Year called
Tet. It was crushed and the loss broke the back of the Marxists.
Despite that fact, Cronkite told America that Vietnam was a "stalemate" and
"unwinnable." That emboldened both the Communists there and anti Vietnam
protesters here -- many of whom were communists or sympathizers -- and
turned a massive Marxist battlefield defeat into a political win that
sustained Communist morale by confirming America's Achilles heel,
according to former North Vietnamese Colonel Bùi Tín:
"[The American anti-war movement] was essential to our strategy.
Support for the war from our rear was completely secure while the
American rear was vulnerable ... America lost because of its democracy;
through dissent and protest it lost the ability to mobilize a will to win."
That will to win was undermined every afternoon by Cronkite and his CBS
News ensemble.
Only after retirement did Cronkite actually admit the liberal newsroom
influences that are still denied today by those in them in addition to
the personal beliefs his critics had said all along were skewing his
reporting.
1996: "Everybody knows that there's a liberal, that there's a heavy
liberal persuasion among correspondents," Cronkite told those at a Radio
and TV Correspondents Association dinner.
1999: During an awards ceremony at the United Nations, Cronkite
admitted that "half a century ago" he was offered "a job as spokesman
and Washington lobbyist for the World Federalist organization" that
advocates a one-world government. "I chose instead to continue in the
world of journalism." Then he riffed: “[W]e must strengthen the United
Nations as a first step toward a world government ... We must change the
basic structure of our global community to a new system governed by a
democratic UN federation ... Today the notion of unlimited national
sovereignty means international anarchy. We must replace the anarchic
law of force with a civilized force of law ... [we must ratify the]
"Treaty for a Permanent International Criminal Court" ... [and we must
have a] revision of the [U.S. power of] Veto in the Security Council.
Cronkite then praised international billionaire financier George Soros
as one of the best thinkers on this topic.
2004: On CNN's Larry King show: “I have a feeling that [Osama bin
Laden's newly released videotape] could tilt the [presidential] election
a bit. In fact, I'm a little inclined to think that Karl Rove, the
political manager at the White House, who is a very clever man, that he
probably set up bin Laden to this thing.”
Karl Rove set-up Bin Laden?
That's as wacky a bit of conspiracy dementia as Bill Moyers' claim on
the Charlie Rose Show that, "if [John] Kerry were to win [the
presidency] in a — in a tight race, I think there’d be an effort to
mount a coup, quite frankly.”
A coup d’etat orchestrated by Karl Rove, no doubt.
"For many years, I did my best to report on the issues of the day in as
objective a manner as possible. When I had my own strong opinions, as I
often did, I tried not to communicate them to my audience," said Cronkite.
But he did.
And that's the way it really was.
Dan Gifford is a national Emmy-winning,
Oscar-nominated film producer and former
reporter for CNN, The MacNeil Lehrer
News Hour and ABC News.
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