I didn’t know Cronkite. Ted Baxter was allegedly patterned after CBS CH2 Chicago’s Bill Kurtis... and I just wondered if Cronkite was also that way?
Not IMO. Cronkite, CBS and most of America took Cronkite VERY seriously and believed that his news coverage was above reproach. To our own disservice.
Where Cronkite revealed his true colors was when he announced in 1968 that the Tet Offensive in Vietnam had been a complete and total defeat for the US forces. As a matter of fact, it was anything but. A North Vietnamese general revealed in his autobiography, written about 30 years later, that the Tet Offensive was a massive defeat for the North and left them on the verge of capitulating to the South Vietnamese and the US.
Until they heard Cronkite's broadcast. That energized them to keep fighting while, at the same time, it demoralized our forces. The war was extended by several years as the direct result of Cronkite's propaganda broadcast about Tet and thousands of young men, American AND Vietnamese lost their lives because of him.
But, Cronkite continues to reverberate through what pases for American "journalism" today. He provided the model to all the other "journalists" how to lie and manipulate the news such that what we see today is not reliable and is typically not even true (fortunately, today we have the Internet and don't need "journalists". In 1968, the Internet wasn't even a science fiction dream!).
Bill Kurtis could never even dream of having that kind of impact on an (alleged) "profession".