Cronkite and the Roots of Media Bias

[Geee]

Commentary Magazine:

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.

[Argyle58]

In my youth Cronkite was a hero. I went through grade school with his "You Were There" history videos and caught every minute of his Gemini and Apollo space program broadcasts. I was really too young to understand his Viet Nam coverage at the time it was airing, but in reading his memoirs in my college years I was devastated. He wasn't your average dyed in the wool liberal journalist......he was an avid communist.

 

This experience opened my eyes at the age when, according to societal norms, I should have been a liberal, at heart. Instead, Cronkite's own outing caused me to become a steadfast conservative in my early twenties.

 

In the eyes of Churchill I was heartless, but intelligent, before my due.