Uncle Walter Had a Sting

The main thing to remember about Walter Cronkite is not why he was beloved, but why he was hated.

The media, by which people only started to mean "television" in the 1960s, did not do much to revivify their Yellow Press pre-WWI mandate to "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable" until it started reporting on the civil rights movement.

The betrayal that the white power structure in the south felt over "them dirty Yankees" televising pictures from the Little Rock desegregation crisis of 1957 and on up through the Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1964 still echoes through Republican orthodoxy today.

Then when NBC and CBS did not confine their reporting from Viet Nam to the parameters laid down by the Five O'Clock Follies official briefings, the media officially became the enemy.

"Never forget, the press is the enemy, the press is the enemy. The establishment is the enemy, the professors are the enemy, the professors are the enemy." -- Richard M. Nixon to Kissinger and Haig, 12/14/72

And Walter Cronkite was right in the middle of both the civil rights reporting and the war reporting. As has been repeated ad nauseam, Lyndon Johnson lamented,

"If I've lost Cronkite [on the war], I've lost Middle America."

It is now so much of Republican Party dogma to hate only a single class of multimillion dollar corporations, the media, that people have almost forgotten how recent their hatred is.

I seem to remember reading somewhere that a majority of American newspapers never endorsed Franklin D. Roosevelt. It is only since Viet Nam that the media have been considered leftists whereas, in fact, its members are conservative Democrats just as you would expect from their economic position.

Now, Walter was no saint, even as a newsman. Whenever Pat Buchanan would call up the network and yell about the coverage, Walter was a pliant enough courtier. He came to his opposition to the war late, though not so late as the editorial boards of the Washington Post and the New York Times, who were disgracefully behindhand.

But from the Normandy invasion as a radio guy under Edward R. Murrow through civil rights and the Viet Nam war, Walter did not do too shabby a job. Most people who were alive at the time connect him intimately with the assassinations of the two Kennedys and Dr. King. But those stories only took journalistic enterprise, not courage; and it is his courage that led to his becoming a target of opprobrium.

As the French say,

There are certain enemies a man ought to have.

After Nixon he seemed to want to retreat into a comfy, avuncular position. He let a lot slide until his retirement a few months before the tragic 1980 election of Ronald Reagan at the behest of the Ayatollah Khomeini.

Ultimately, in the judgment of history, Walter has to come up against Bertolt Brecht.

It seems obvious that whoever writes should write the truth in the sense that he ought not to suppress or conceal truth or write something deliberately untrue. He ought not to cringe before the powerful, nor betray the weak. It is, of course, very hard not to cringe before the powerful, and it is highly advantageous to betray the weak. To displease the possessors means to become one of the dispossessed.

Walter never went so far as to become one of the dispossessed. But on a couple of significant occasions, he did not cringe before the powerful; which is a lot more than can be said for most of his colleagues, and almost all of his successors.