(Born, St. Joseph, MO, Nov 4, 1916 – NY, July 17, 2009) was the chief correspondent and an anchorman for, and managing editor of, the CBS Evening News, 1962-1981. Widely regarded as authoritative, he was known as “Uncle Walter”. Unfortunately, he was a liberal-progressive and failed to see the threat of international Communism. Worse, he if anything advocated for Communism, even admitting he wanted a democratic federal world government and was willing to sit on the hand of Satan to get it.[1]
- He was the first journalist that told the nation in 1963 that John F. Kennedy had been assassinated.
- From the outset, critics accused Cronkite of politically slanting the news to the left. This bias, they said, was evidenced not so much by Cronkite’s words as by his choice of what stories CBS covered, and by his habit of raising his eyebrows and scowling to show his disapproval of statements made by conservatives and Republicans.
- Cronkite strongly influenced the politics and outcome of the Vietnam War. In 1968 the Communist forces in South Vietnam, facing defeat, staged massive kamikaze attacks on U.S. positions in Saigon and elsewhere during the Chinese New Year celebration called Tet. This suicidal “Tet Offensive” was a military disaster that cost the lives of 100 Communist fighters for every American killed. But as a top Communist general said years later on the Public Broadcasting Service documentary series Vietnam, those on the left in the American press turned this Marxist military defeat into a political victory for the Communist side.[2]
- Cronkite sold America on the moon landing hoax
In 1950 Cronkite began working for CBS, where he hosted the documentary series The Twentieth Century and the historical re-creation series You Are There, and he briefly co-hosted the CBS Morning Show. Starting in 1952 he also anchored CBS coverage of the national political conventions in presidential election years.
In April 1962 Cronkite succeeded veteran Douglas Edwards as Anchor and Managing Editor of the CBS Evening News, a position Cronkite would keep until his retirement in 1981.
From the outset, critics accused Cronkite of politically slanting the news to the left. This bias, they said, was evidenced not so much by Cronkite’s words as by his choice of what stories CBS covered, and by his habit of raising his eyebrows and scowling to show his disapproval of statements made by conservatives and Republicans. In 1964, amid accusations of such bias, CBS replaced Cronkite as anchor at the political conventions with Robert Trout and Roger Mudd.
Cronkite strongly influenced the politics and outcome of the Vietnam War. In 1968 the Communist forces in South Vietnam, facing defeat, staged massive kamikaze attacks on U.S. positions in Saigon and elsewhere during the Chinese New Year celebration called Tet. This suicidal “Tet Offensive” was a military disaster that cost the lives of 100 Communist fighters for every American killed. But as a top Communist general said years later on the Public Broadcasting Service documentary series Vietnam, those on the left in the American press turned this Marxist military defeat into a political victory for the Communist side.
“It seems now more certain than ever,” Walter Cronkite told his audience in a de facto editorial, “that the bloody experience of Vietnam is a stalemate” and that the war was “unwinnable.” Cronkite’s statement and call for U.S. withdrawal helped turn public opinion against the war. It also demoralized American troops and Democratic President Lyndon Johnson, who was said to have declared that losing Cronkite’s support meant he had lost the backing of Middle America.
When Republican President Richard Nixon refused to withdraw U.S. forces from Vietnam, the Democrats used the Watergate scandal to topple his presidency. Cronkite played a key role in the political process that ousted Nixon — chiefly by broadcasting a news story every night on the CBS Evening News under the banner “Watergate.” At the time, Cronkite insisted that he was non-partisan, objective and fair. After his retirement, however, he acknowledged his liberal political views.
“Everybody knows that there’s a liberal, that there’s a heavy liberal persuasion among correspondents,” said Cronkite in 1996, speaking to his colleagues at the Radio and TV Correspondents Association dinner.
In 1988 Cronkite was a guest speaker at a People For the American Way event, where he praised that organization as one that stood for “all of those rights and privileges and responsibilities encompassed in our Bill of Rights.” In that same speech, he offered a passionate “defense of liberalism”:
“Liberalism isn’t dead in this country. It isn’t even comatose. It simply is suffering a severe case of acute laryngitis. It simply has temporarily, we hope, lost its voice. And about that Democratic loss in the [1988 presidential] election…. It was not just an [Republican] opposition that conducted one of the most sophisticated and cynical campaigns ever…. It was the fault of too many who found their voices stilled by not-so-subtle ideological intimidation.
“For instance, we know that unilateral military action in Grenada and Tripoli was wrong. We know that ‘Star Wars’ means uncontrollable escalation of the arms race. We know that the real threat to democracy is [to have] half of that nation in poverty. We know Thomas Jefferson was right when he said a democracy cannot be both ignorant and free. We know that no one should tell a woman she has to bear an unwanted child…. [W]e’ve got to shout these truths in which we believe from the rooftops.”
In a 1996 interview, Cronkite said that America should try “to find some marvelous middle ground between capitalism and communism.” “[T]he first priority of the new order,” he added, “must be a revision of the [American] educational system to … guarantee that each of our citizens will have equal resources to share in the decisions of the democracy, and a fair share of the economic pie.”
In October 1999, Cronkite was given the Norman Cousins Global Governance Award by the World Federalist Association, which advocates for a one-world government. In his acceptance speech, he said “we must strengthen the United Nations as a first step toward a world government,” adding that “Americans will have to yield up some of our sovereignty.”
In that same speech, Cronkite said: “For many years, I did my best to report on the issues of the day in as objective a manner as possible. When I had my own strong opinions, as I often did, I tried not to communicate them to my audience. Now, however, my circumstances are different. I am in a position to speak my mind. And that is what I propose to do.”
“We must change the basic structure of our global community,” Cronkite continued, “… to a new system governed by a democratic UN federation.… Today the notion of unlimited national sovereignty means international anarchy. We must replace the anarchic law of force with a civilized force of law.” Cronkite specifically called for ratification of the “Treaty for a Permanent International Criminal Court” that would allow Americans to be convicted of actions deemed crimes by judges from other nations. He also called for a “revision of the [U.S. power of] Veto in the Security Council” and cited international billionaire financier George Soros as one of the best thinkers on this topic.
In addition to his biased reporting on the war, FBI documents, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act by Yahoo news, evidence that legendary CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite collaborated with anti-Vietnam War activists in the 1960s, going so far as to offer advice on how to raise the public profile of protests and even promising that CBS News would rent a helicopter to take liberal Senator Edmund Muskie to and from the site of an anti-war rally.[3][4][5]
Cronkite’s influence on the America’s public perception of the Vietnam War was recognized by President Lyndon Johnson when he stated after a critical report on the war, “if we’ve lost Walter Cronkite, we’ve lost the country.”[6]
However nice a person he may have been, Walter Cronkite was, more importantly, a model voice for liberal-progressives’ brand of socialism. His lack of understanding about the nature of the Constitution and about the founding ethos of the United States allowed him to warp the minds of millions of Americans with the historicism that characterizes liberal-progressivism. — Thomas E. Brewton[7]
There were rumors that in 1972 left-wing Democrat presidential nominee George McGovern asked Cronkite to be his Vice Presidential running mate.[8][9] However, Cronkite denied that he was asked.[10]
Cronkite took other left-wing positions, such as supporting tax increases, supporting giving up U.S. sovereignty to the United Nations, wishing for a one-world government, supporting gun control, among other liberal positions.[11] During and following his anchorage tenure, Cronkite has placed a disproportionate amount of criticism towards Conservatives while aligning himself with liberal figures such as Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, and John Kerry.[11] With two exceptions, Cronkite was not a political campaign contributor according to Federal Election Commission records. In 2000, he donated $1,000 to the NARAL Pro Choice America PAC and in 2004, he donated to an unsuccessful Congressional candidate in Kentucky.[12]
In 2004, he appeared in the liberal documentary Outfoxed, in he which criticized Fox News Channel and claimed it had a conservative bias.[13]
Cronkite was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He died on July 17, 2009, at the age of 92.[14]
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