Yeah,it was one part of a series by PBS that was titled something like "The Media in the 20th Century",or some such nonsense. Cronkite had a whole segment devoted to him because he had the tag of "the most trusted man in America",and the PBS show was out to set the record straight.
It tends to prove what I later came to suspect, by the way, that the entire Civil Rights Movement was an exercise in "kick your sister" and bringing out the worst in people, not the best.
What it really boiled down to was a family fight within the Dim Party between who was going to control it (and the country),the left or the right. Since MOST southern Dims were WAAAY to the right of most of what we laughingly call Republicans today,it was neccessary for the Dims in the northeast and their running mates to demonize the STRONG southern Dims. They used the power of gooberment and the media to do this. Watch the movie the left ranted and raved about "Mississippi Burning" for a good belly laugh. The Dims were over the roof about how "real" it was,yet what it really did is show their lies and slander. One part has the Feeb sent to look for the missing civil wrongs workers talking to the local sheriff about them being missing,and the local sheriff says something about "maybe they went fishing?". The Feeb replies,"These men are both trained agitators,and they had orders to check in every day." One was a obvious Jew with long hair and a beard,and the other was a black man.BOTH were riding around in Missippi and Alabama in a brand new car with plenty of money to spend,trying their damndest to stir up trouble. Basically,the Feebs SENT them there to be murdered. This does NOT excuse their murders in any way,but it's obvious wnat was going on.
Later the head Feed sends a flunkie off to rent them motel rooms,and the flunkie comes back and says "Nobody will rent us rooms". The head Feeb says "Buy the motel. We have a unlimited budget from Washington".
BTW,I will ALWAYS believe it was the FBI behind the church bombings and other nonsense. I don't believe they did it,but I will always believe FBI agents whispered the ideas into the heads of the mental defectives they found there,and those guys went out and did it.
I agree with your analysis. When I referred to "kick your sister", I was talking about the operational-level programme, if you will, that was carried forward from the 1950's. Or even, if you like, from the moment in the 1940's when a young Hubert Humphrey stood up in the Senate to attack the Dixiecrats on civil rights. I wish someone would revisit those initial moves of the Democratic Left toward the Civil Rights Movement in the terms you outline, as a flanking maneuver designed to drive the Mossbacks from their committee strongholds and open the door for socialism.
At the grand-strategic level, I think we agree that the Civil Rights Movement was about socialism, and that it meant the displacement of the South from the Democratic coalition in favor of black bloc-voters in the cities of the North, who had shown what they could do for the Democratic Party. Hence the emphasis on voting rights for blacks in the South: their Northern sponsors knew they would be 90% straight-ticket Democrats and support socialist measures and candidates when Southern Democrats would not.
The Southern senators were always interested in national affairs, even the later ones who replaced the old string-tie segregationist pols, like Sam Nunn of Georgia and Johnston of Louisiana, who replaced Allen Ellender, and John Stennis of Mississippi. They were intelligent, educated, deeply learned in national-defense and other issues -- and they wouldn't vote right. They always voted for defense issues, like their sometime leader Henry "Scoop" Jackson, who was not a Southerner himself but similarly helped constitute the conservative wing of the Democratic Party -- when it still had one.
The reviewers tell us, btw, that Robert Caro's new book, Master of the Senate, describes how Lyndon Johnson opened that door for the Northern senators by destroying the committee chairmen's power and creating the Senate leadership we know today. In the 1940's, the majority and minority whips were virtual relic positions comparable to Britain's "stick-in-waiting". It was Johnson who changed that, Johnson who opened the doors to the 1957 Civil Rights Act, and Johnson who collected for that small gesture by accepting the Vice Presidency......and then whaddayaknow, suddenly he's the President of the United States, just what he always wanted. And as Theodore White tells us in Making of the President 1964 (p. 64), Johnson was already making the first moves on the Budget that would guarantee his reelection while Jack Kennedy's body lay cooling in the Capitol Rotunda, while being careful to cultivate the public impression that the government's normal business was in respectful suspension until after the New Year.