[wardaddy]

I remember Tet as a 11 year old and Walter “That's the Way it Is” every evening and bodycounts and whatnot....theirs were always much higher.

But does anyone have links or quotes that Cronkite actually wanted to thwart the SEATO effort in Indochina or if he was simply wrong in his assumptions.

I realize he was not a right winger but the political divisions then were slightly different from today.

Political divides are not static or straight continuum

the irony is that back then i was an idealistic left leaning libertarian on many issues but like I said many things were not on our plate like today but yet we all thought the entire media both the three networks and print were staid establishment conservative...and that includes Cronkite.

there was no love loss between the media and the counter culture..aside from some weekly college rags

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

Many (all too many) Freepers would agree with this Walter Cronkite quote:

Objective journalism and an opinion column are about as similar as the Bible and Playboy magazine.

You may say, "What can be wrong with that?" and the answer is nothing - nothing but everything.

Objective journalism would be very different from some opinion columns - but, in principle, perhaps not all opinion columns. Maybe there is someone who writes objective opinion columns.

But it depends on your definition of "objective." If objectivity is the same thing as wisdom - and is there any such thing as "unwise objectivity?" - then a claim of objectivity made by a journalist (or by all journalists for each other in a mutual admiration society) is a claim of wisdom, and a claim of wisdom is (to put it charitably) notoriously unreliable. The very term "sophist," from which we get the term "sophistry," comes from the Greek and means "wise man." The term "philosopher," meaning "lover of wisdom," was developed to counter the pitfalls of sophistry coming from people who claimed wisdom.

So the point is that objectivity requires the conscious discounting of any self interested reasons you may want to believe what you are thinking, writing, or speaking. Thus, an opinion writer might say that "I have Apple stock and I use an Apple computer," before stating a favorable opinion of anything Apple. That would be at least a gesture in the direction of objectivity. On the flip side, it would also be a gesture in the direction of objectivity if that same person said that same thing, and noted that he could be speaking out of a desire to avoid suspicion of being a "fanboy" if he said something negative about Apple.

But would anyone care to attempt to find any instance of an "objective journalist" giving his hearers/readers any disclaimer which would help his audience to see any possible bias in the "objective journalist's" report? Since that is a rhetorical question to which the answer clearly is "no," "objective journalist" is an oxymoron.

Any claim of objectivity is a denial of the possibility of one's own subjectivity - and is therefore proof of the very thing it seeks to deny.

[Luke21]

It was more subtle until Reagan was elected, but we were still spoon fed the liberal apple sauce. They hated McCarthy, Nixon, Agnew, and Goldwater and got their point across.

I thought old Walter was going to bust his britches when announcing Roe vs Wade and when Nixon resigned.

[Travis McGee]

My “takeaway” from Cronkite is that he “called” the defeat in VN right after Tet, and LBJ took it to heart and also began to fight the war as if defeat were a foregone conclusion.

Then decades later, we find out he was a “world govt” mole since the 1940s!

To me, Occam’s Razor applies. 2+2=traitor.