Free Republic

During the 1960s, Walter Cronkite gave the nation an unprecedented look at the battles and the casualties of war. Although Cronkite has retired from CBS News, he is watching the coverage of the war in Iraq very closely. We talked to Cronkite Friday when he was visiting San Francisco, and he said he's worried about what he's seeing. When Cronkite went to Vietnam, he showed Americans a side of war many had never seen. Unlike reporters who covered the battles in Iraq, Cronkite wasn't embedded. "We went anywhere we wanted," he said. While Cronkite praised the work the embedded reporters...

Lauren Hutton and Georgette Mosbacher squared off in a verbal claw-fest Tuesday night at the Sony Club, significantly upping the entertainment value of a State of the Union-watching party hosted by Atlantic Monthly magazine. "Bush is responsible for a trillion-dollar deficit," declared the gap-toothed fashion icon, rising from her seat to respond to Mosbacher's lonely defense of President Bush amid a liberal-leaning crowd that included Walter and Betsy Cronkite, Pete Peterson, David Dinkins, Tina Brown and Harry Evans, former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld and Moby. "I guess you can't read, or something," Hutton jabbed. "Because I can - and I'm...

His goal is to get clergy behind the Democrats LEXINGTON MAN HEADS NEW GROUP PUSHING FOR POLITICAL CHANGE By Frank E. Lockwood HERALD-LEADER STAFF WRITER Most regular churchgoers want to re-elect President Bush. Most non-churchgoers plan to vote for the Democratic presidential candidate. That's the finding of a recent poll by the Pew Center for the People and the Press -- and it's a finding that Lexington's Albert M. Pennybacker hopes will change between now and November. Pennybacker, a former Lexington Theological Seminary professor, a Disciples of Christ minister and a lifelong Democrat, is chief executive officer of the Clergy...

Last Sunday the nation awoke to the good news that U.S. forces had, at long last, captured Saddam Hussein. The subject dominated all network television programming -- including, of course, the Sunday talk shows. Among the questions everybody seemed to ask were: Now that we've got him, what do we do with him? How is justice to be administered here? The Iraqis, understandably, think they should try him, though they do not have a constitution yet, nor a national legal system. Others -- Iran and Kuwait, for instance -- have their own scores to settle. And many believe that Saddam...

Some knowledge of history and the memories of a long life have given me a sense of wonder at the shape-shifting habit of ideals and the ideologues who espouse them. What brings this to mind is the eloquent and idealistic foreign-policy speech that President Bush recently gave in London. Some commentators liken Bush's rhetoric to the idealism of Ronald Reagan, but it has earlier, Democratic antecedents, both in Woodrow Wilson's war "to make the world safe for democracy" and in FDR's "Four Freedoms." In both cases, these ideals were carried forward on American bayonets. Bush's London address was masterfully crafted...

MEDIA MATTERS Cronkite: Speech by Bush 'masterful but worrisome' Former CBS newsman questions president's conviction, cites failure to 'follow through' -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted: November 29, 2003 4:30 p.m. Eastern © 2003 WorldNetDaily.com Walter Cronkite, the former CBS news anchor who writes a weekly opinion piece for King Features Syndicate uses a recent column to describe the foreign-policy speech President Bush gave recently in London as ''eloquent, idealistic and worrisome.'' Walter Cronkite Cronkite says Bush's address was masterfully crafted to defend his foreign policy against widespread European hostility, although parts of it sounded a bit ''off-key'', leading Cronkite to question the president's...

You might remember MAD - the Cold War policy of Mutually Assured Destruction in which the United States and the Soviet Union each planned to obliterate the other in the event of a nuclear attack. Well, among themselves, the Democratic presidential candidates have triggered their own version of mutually assured destruction. If the economic gains being reported now prove to be a genuine start of recovery, it could put a big dent in the Democrats' 2004 campaign plans. But right now, they are facing another formidable danger. For some weeks now, a visitor from Mars, observing his first election campaign,...

Despite a muscle tear a couple of years ago that curtailed his tennis playing, Walter Cronkite, who turns 87 next week, is still going strong. The former CBS anchor now writes a syndicated newspaper column, in which he has criticized the war in Iraq and other Bush Administration policies. TIME's Richard Zoglin talked with the man once dubbed the most trusted in America.By     COURTESY OF WALTER CRONKITE  Sunday, Oct. 26, 2003You have basically come out and said you're a liberal. How do you respond when critics say, "Aha, I knew reporters were liberal, and this is why the...

Cronkite: I believe in war censorship Ciar Byrne in Dublin Wednesday October 22, 2003 Cronkite: partisanship 'cannot be avoided' Walter Cronkite, the legendary CBS newscaster and correspondent, has said he fully supports the censorship of journalists in wartime situations. The recent Iraq war was no different in this respect to the second world war or Vietnam, said Cronkite, who reported on both earlier conflicts during a journalistic career spanning more than 60 years. "I'm for censorship. I believe we have to be very careful about reporting information that will be of comfort to the enemy," Cronkite told the Newsworld International...

Walter Cronkite is an old man -- a very old man. He can remember things that happened a long time ago. He can remember when George S. Patton was slapping shell-shocked GIs across the face in Sicily during World War Two. He was there -- if not in person, at least in spirit. He was at the OK Corral when the Earps gunned down the Clantons, and he looked right straight into the TV cameras, and said, "You are there," and John Q. Couch-Potato believed him. Walter has been in more places, has done more things, and has met more...

Iraq & Tet, George W. & LBJ Posted: September 29, 2003 1:00 a.m. Eastern © 2003 Creators Syndicate, Inc. "Things perceived as real are real in their consequences." So it has been wisely written, and repeated so often it has become a cliche. The Tet Offensive of 1968 was a desperate roll of the dice by the Viet Cong. It ended in their disastrous defeat. Some 50,000 of its critical cadre were killed, and all the gains of Tet were rolled back by the Americans in three weeks. But America, which had been hearing only triumphal news of U.S. victories,...

Walter Cronkite, appearing on Wednesday's Larry King Live on CNN, declared that he thinks "we were misled" by the Bush administration about the Iraqi threat. Cronkite contended "it's a question seriously of whether that was deliberately done or whether it was just their vocabulary got ahead of their thinking." The performance at the Tuesday night debate of the field of left-wing presidential candidates pleased Cronkite, who thought Howard Dean "did quite well." Cronkite added: "I thought that really all of them did fairly well last night. I was impressed with the field. It was perhaps better than some people thought...

Cronkite pulls plug on fight against giant wind farm By Marcus Warren in Hyannis, Cape Cod (Filed: 02/09/2003) An alliance of East Coast liberals opposed to the building of the world's largest wind farm within sight of their holiday homes has been shaken by the defection of "the most trusted man in America".(sic) The change of heart by Walter Cronkite, the legendary broadcaster, deprives the campaign of its front man and most revered supporter. Other opponents of the project include the Kennedy clan and its patriarch, Senator Edward Kennedy, and the historian David McCullough, but none can compete for authority...

Walter Cronkite's 10 Point Plan to Destroy the Democrats One of the most distressing things about our retired pundits is that they fail to retire. Just when you'd hope that somebody who made millions blathering into a camera would just finally fade away to a robe, slippers and a hot, steaming cup of STFU, here they come again telling you to "leave your delusions at the door, sit down, open up wide for a big ole' slice of truth, with a side of wisdom." Today we have Walter Cronkite with his mind-numbing "Ten propositions for the Democrats." It would seem...

The Wall Street Journal, last week, ran a blip about Knight Ridder Inc., being "hurt by a continuing slump in demand for retail and classified advertising." Among those hit the hardest is the left-wing liberal Inquirer. Things should improve now, howeve. They hired the most trusted (heh, heh) "Baghdad Bob" Cronkite to boost circulation. *** By adding "Baghdad Bob" to its left-wing slate of opinionists the Inquirer has put itself in the lead of the daily Bush-bashing sweepstakes. It is now nosing out the New York Times, The Washington Post and the Boston Globe. You can do it guys! Be...

Stop the presses! Decades after retirement, Walter Cronkite can still break a major story. Saying he believes "most of us reporters are liberal," Cronkite is admitting what many on the left have denied fervently for years: that there is a bias in the news media, and that it tips to the left noticeably. Cronkite offers the flimsy excuse that "[t]he perceived liberalism of television reporters [...] is a product of the limited time given for any particular item." Essentially, his argument is that bias stems from short segments: there isn't enough time to be balanced. But if reporters can't be...

We [journalists] reached our intellectual adulthood with daily close-ups of the inequality in a nation that was founded on the commitment to equality for all. So we are inclined to side with the powerless rather than the powerful. If that is what makes us liberals so be it, just as long as . . . we adhere to the first ideals of good journalism. -- I hope we all get along as we go along. I expect that occasionally we will have some differences of opinion. I expect to be provocative. After more than 60 years as a journalist, I...

<p>Walter Cronkite was a CBS News anchorman for almost two decades. He has been a syndicated newspaper columnist for fewer than two weeks. Already, though, he has addressed one of journalism’s most serious issues, and in a much more candid manner than was ever possible for him behind the anchor desk.</p>

Memo to Bill and Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, Al Franken, Eric Alterman and all the rest of you liberals out there who have lately been claiming that there's a conservative bias in the media. Walter Cronkite, the founding father of the TV news age, has just admitted that the press is overwhelmingly liberal. "I believe that most of us reporters are liberal," Cronkite confesses in his new gig as a King Features syndicated columnist. In a rare burst of candor, the grand old man of CBS News explains that the press' left-wing bias is not necessarily deliberate, maintaining, "[It's]...

Second Thoughts By: William W. Lawrence 08/19/2003We are still keeping an open mind about Amanda Bennett, the Inquirer's new editor. We are not about to place big money on it, but the odds that she will guide the newspaper into a more fair and balanced path appear to be going south.She has hired Walter Cronkite to write left-wing commentary on the editorial page. Cronkite, who says he is registered as an "Independent," claims to be a fiscal conservative and a social liberal.Yeah, right. If you want all those liberal programs administered by highly paid political hacks, American taxpayers will have...