With my ignorance identified, can you tell me why the hostility about this show from a right wing perspective? How did it favor left over right?
Also, Walter Cronkite was retired before I think I was born but he is hated by the right yet when he died the History or Discovery channel (I can't recall) showed a documentary of his life from Cronkite's memories and in it Cronkite was called biased for Nixon against Kennedy during that election. In fact it was declared by Kennedy that Cronkite hated him and had it in him (per the show).
Was it that Cronkite turned against the Vietnam war? But that is confusing to a young person like me because Nixon promised to end the Vietnam war and Johnson was president at the time Cronkite declared the war was not winnable.
So if you or any reader can help me out on this I would be much obliged.
If you lived through such events I am envious of your first hand accounts and would love to hear them.
Much thanks.
My assessment was based mostly on hostility expressed by my Dad and many freepers & other conservatives I've known through the years towards the journalists on the show.
The General Westmoreland defamation has been extensively covered here at FR, but there were other famous controversies about the integrity of their reporting as well,(See here at WIKI, scroll down to controversies.)
I haven't watched the program for 20 years because once I saw a story on an area in which I had expertise and I could readily identify the half-truths, misrepresentations, and ignorance of the subject by “journalists” who abandoned what was the sine qua non of journalistic ethics - objectivity and a search for the truth. 60 Minutes became “a search for a scandal” with its personnel acting like prosecuting attorneys rather than truth seekers. And since the political leanings of “journalists” are overwhelmingly liberal, that bias showed up in its stories. 60 Minutes was “dirty journalism” - editing tape to make someone look guilty or foolish (Katie Couric learned this technique well by the time she interviewed Sarah Palin). They really began the politics of personal destruction. Some things were hammered again and again - anti-abortionists were always portrayed as lunatics; corporations were always evil; the military were a bunch of insensitive thugs and master manipulators; every story on race showed minorities as noble beings crushed by fate and white racism. the only real experts were those who saw everything from a liberal perspective. So 60 Minutes became a weekly partisan attack on conservatives.
This reached a pinnacle on the September 20, 2004 broadcast of one of the 60 Minutes spin-offs when Dan Rather, continuing a campaign to discredit President Bush's National Guard Service he began on a September 8 CBS News segment, produced documents which he claimed proved that Bush had lied about his service. The documents were such obvious forgeries that a FREEPER (apparently on his home computer, leading to the creation of the term “pajamas media”) was able to expose their obvious in-authenticity within 45 minutes of the broadcast. The CBS website now carries the following remark about the original CBS News broadcast:
(CBS) EDITOR'S NOTE: A report issued by an independent panel on Jan. 10, 2005 concluded that CBS News failed to follow basic journalistic principles in the preparation and reporting of this Sept. 8, 2004 broadcast.
Cronkite simply out and out lied to the American people about the outcome of the TET offensive (the U.S. was victorious, but “the most trusted man in America” waged a campaign to convince the U.S. had lost, and thereby undermined the American public’s support for the war). Many feel that Cronkite (along with John Kerry and associates) forced the U.S. into a precipitous retreat that resulted in thousands of needless casualties among American troops and also among Vietnamese who had supported the U.S. war effort.
But don't expect any of that to show up in the MSM.
I first watched an episode of 60 min in 1977 while I was waiting to go overseas. Having never watched it before I had no misconceptions at the time about any bias or agenda. It quickly dawned on me that the story segments that they aired that night were told from a singular perspective and not very well balanced at all. It was the first time that I had seen the type of ambush journalism that quickly came to dominate agenda driven news programming on TV. Even then it was basically dishonest reporting of only one side of the story and I could easily tell that “lies of omission” was standard operating procedure for that show.
The leftward bent was subtle back then and has grown much more blatant in the intervening years. My main complaint against it wasn’t so much based on the politcal bias but more that I’ve always despised that type of dishonest reporting. Needless to say that I’ve rarely bothered to watch any other episodes of that show in the last thirty years.