I don’t know if I was the last generation to grow up believing that the media had a sense of collective integrity – that the media really did observe the whole myth of “objectivity”, that the mainstream media (the only kind we had at the time) was honest and detached and really had integrity. But there can’t have been too many after me who honestly believed, growing up and getting to learn how the world works, that the media could be trusted to just tell you the story, without larding it up with all kinds of agendas. People who could be “believe in” someone like a Walter Cronkite.
Walter Cronkite, who (perhaps you heard) passed away last week.
Cronkite died at 7:42 p.m. with his family by his side at his Manhattan home after a long illness, CBS vice president Linda Mason said. Marlene Adler, Cronkite’s chief of staff, said Cronkite died of cerebrovascular disease.
Cronkite was both the last person in the American media to be imbued with that legend of integrity, and the first – to my own admittedly incomplete memory, anyway – to be accused of flouting it. He was the poster boy for “the media”; in a way, he still is:
Morley Safer, a longtime “60 Minutes” correspondent, called Cronkite “the father of television news.”
Let’s run with that “Father” metaphor for a bit.
How many kids have you know who were the children of boundless privilege, who oozed that boundless sense of entitlement that the overprivileged have? Who never had to do what their forebears had to do to earn the privileges that the kids took for granted?
If you’re talking the children of dentists flitting around in BMWs and abusing waiters, that’s one thing.
If you’re talking an industry and institution that grew up over two generations believing that people owed them – the likes of Anderson Cooper and Lori Sturdevant and Dan Rather and Nick Coleman – respect and a presumption of detachment and integrity because, for whatever reason, the media had gotten that reputation a generation or two earlier?
Cronkite should have disowned the brats.
Damn straight.
So a group of Basques went to a department store and got stuck in the revolving door.
Moral: Never put all your Basques in one exit.
Oh, whoops- I just realized this entry is in the ‘memoriam’ section.
RIP, Walter. You were a fine journalist.
Cronkite should have disowned the brats.
Cronkite should’ve disciplined them. A spanking years ago might’ve done some good.
Mitch, you are one of my favorite righty voices in Minnesota, mostly reasonable and effective, but I think you made a strategic mistake for conservatism in praising Walter rather than burying him. I’m glad you did praise him, because I admired him greatly, but he was most definitely a progressive in outlook and attitude and in real life, if you look at what he’s said before and since.
Check this out.
http://www.mrc.org/Profiles/cronkite/welcome.asp
Reagan and Goldwater conservatives considered Cronkite to be part-and-parcel, if not the epitome, of liberal journalists, among those most responsible for the rise of the so-called nattering nabobs, as first defined by Nixon and Agnew. I know, because I was there and I had the Reagan stickers in 1973 and I know how us young Turks viewed Cronkite. He and his much reviled CBS network and the whole east coast media establishment (Wash Post, NYTimes, all the networks, all their reporters and producers and editors) were overwhelmingly anti-war, militantly pro Civil Rights, pro-busing, pro affirmative action, pro environmentalism, pro feminism, soft on crime, pro minority rights of every kind, pro consumerism, pro big government. This is not just a sneaky backdoor way of suggesting that the liberal media was actually right on most of those basic issues and that conservatives were always on the wrong side of history. On defense and communism, on family values, on personal responsiblity and welfare reform, on drugs and libertinism, on the importance of faith and religion, and on various other themes over the last 50 years, conservatives have been somewhat more correct or at least proved more valid in the long run, than the far left, in my personal view. I’m just sayin, Cronkite and his ilk were not at all neutral, and certainly not conservative.
Dane,
Fair points, all.
I should point out that I was born in very late 1962, so the views of Goldwater conservatives were either before my time or were things I absorbed when I was still a “liberal” of sorts, in high school and college. I remember hearing from the few “out” conservatives in my high school (and my first radio boss, who certainly slanted right when push came to shove) about Cronkite’s biases; at the time, I didn’t buy it.
The Reagan conservatives were another matter – which I took a lot more seriously as I gradually realized I was, in fact, a conservative in time for the ’84 elections, by which time I had changed my mind about the media (to the point where I became a Z-list conservative pundit by 1986…).
Oh, yeah…:
mistake for conservatism in praising Walter rather than burying him
Never speak ill of the dead. Conservatism’s loss is my soul’s gain.
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