Walter Cronkie - American Crap

Screw Walter Cronkite

Poor Wally Cronkite.  At age 103, or whatever the hell it is, he realizes that, to a large number of Americans who don't lunch at Tavern on the Green, his legacy is hard wired to Jane Fonda's.  There was a time when Americans did trust that their media  actually put biases aside when  reporting news.  Hell, there was a time when the notion that a man who was,  what was then called "commie," now ''progressive,'' could attain a high profile media job in The Land of the Free was beyond comprehension.  Only in Communist Russia did the press pass self serving lies as truth. That's what I thought.  Of course we trusted the sonofabitch. In recent years  he has, depending on the day of the week, proclaimed that there is no left media bias,  or that, of course the media is liberal, because we care.  His memoirs [A Reporter's Life.] might just as well been penned by Che Guevara, and put an end to any attempt to portray him as less than a one world socialist. .   Cronkite pretended to be one thing, while being quite another.  I feel betrayed by Cronkite, and will not forgive him. He operated for most of his career as a mole, but no more.  His appeal yesterday for our immediate withdrawal from Iraq will play to his choir if America haters, that's to be expected.  But,  it may also poison the minds of people who don't pay attention to politics, and still believe the public relations gambit that proclaimed him "the most trusted man in America."   Walter Cronkite is pretty close to the top on my all time list of wretched Americans (well  ahead of Norman Lear, by way of example), and we will be better off without him.  Don't get me wrong.  I want him to live another 20 years. I want more examples of his low opinion of our democracy to erode any basis for a future fiction that he was somehow a great man.  I guess you could say I don't care for him at all.