Meet the Real Walter Cronkite

'Most trusted' newsman pushed radical agenda By Joseph Farah Posted: July 18, 2009 11:40 pm Eastern © 2009 WorldNetDaily WASHINGTON – Walter Cronkite is dead at 92 – but most Americans, many of whom considered him "the most trusted man" in the country during his reign as CBS News anchor – still don't know what motivated him and how he secured such an influential and lofty position. He was like a grandfatherly institution in the early days of TV. People believed him. Uncle Walter wouldn't lie, America believed. Thus, when he gave his opinions, they had impact. One example was his report on the Tet offensive in Vietnam, which is credited with swinging the tide of opinion against the war. Even in his death, however, nobody has addressed how and why an otherwise obscure figure at the time was elevated to become the most prominent anchorman on television. The story was told publicly in the July 10, 2000, edition of the Nation, a Marxist-oriented journal, in a report on death of Blair Clark, who served as editor of the Nation from 1976 through 1978: "Whether it was calling on Philip Roth to recommend a Nation literary editor or persuading CBS News president Richard Salant to make Walter Cronkite anchor of CBS Evening News, Blair had a gift for the recognition and recruitment of excellence." Clark was not only the editor of the Nation, he was also heir to the Clark thread fortune, a Harvard classmate and friend of John F. Kennedy, a buddy of Washington Post Editor Ben Bradlee and the manager of Eugene McCarthy's 1968 campaign for the Democratic Party presidential nomination. He veered back and forth between politics and journalism seamlessly as an associate publisher of the New York Post, a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, vice president and general manager of CBS News and yet remained a fixture in Democratic Party politics throughout his career. Clark wasn't the kind of man who would promote Walter Cronkite for the most visible job in journalism because of his press accomplishments alone – and his press accomplishments were noticeably meager. [CONTINUE READING]

FROM MY VIEW When I say, CONTINUE READINGI mean it. Read the rest of Joseph Farah's column. I know, it sounds so cold and cruel of me (and Farah) to be bringing up something about somebody so recently reaching room temperature, but is vitally important that you hear this now, while you still remember who he was, from your perspective. Well, while the MSM is all gushing and so full of the greet quantities of warm fuzzies for the man, the one who people trusted, and now revere and memorialize, I'm thinking that maybe the coverage needs to be fair and balanced. There are things that Walter Cronkite told the public in his later years that you need to be aware of. What is so important about that, where I would talk about somebody that is no longer with us? It may be that I have to wonder if the man's worldviews may have influenced what he provided us with as a respected and trusted news anchor. Could it be that he would only tell us what he thought we needed to know, from his own One World Government perspective? (By the way, I doubt Tony Snow or Paul Harvey, just after they passed on, always had the most reverant coverage by those on the other side of the politcal spectrum...)