TV anchors and journalistic celebrities just spent the past week lauding Walter Cronkite, said Glenn Greenwald in Salon.com. Why, then, do they ignore his legacy? As the tributes to the famed CBS News anchor have noted, Cronkite enjoyed an amazing level of trust from his audience—but only because he challenged official lies in a way that today’s news anchors and establishment newspapers “will never do.” Cronkite’s crowning glory was a February 1968 broadcast in which “he stood up and announced that Americans shouldn’t trust” the government’s claims of progress in the Vietnam War. The war, Cronkite plainly said, was a “stalemate,” with no prospect of military victory. No mainstream journalist would dare be that truthful today. Straitjacketed by a false standard of balance and objectivity, anchors and reporters now think it is their job to pass on obvious government lies—“we don’t torture”—while merely noting that certain critics have different views. Cronkite, on the other hand, had the guts to speak truth to power.
And that’s how he helped ruin journalism, said James Taranto in The Wall Street Journal Online. Cronkite “was a great newsman,’’ but he let his ego get the better of him when he began editorializing. By the early 1970s, the Archie Bunker character on the top-rated sitcom All in the Family had begun calling the news anchor that “commie Cronkite”—an acknowledgement that Cronkite’s reputation as a dispassionate newsman had been terminally “compromised.” After Cronkite began indulging his personal biases, a whole generation of journalists decided it was acceptable—indeed, courageous—to blur the line “between reporting and commentary.”
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