Walter Cronkite created Fox News.
This aspect of Mr. Cronkite’s long and distinguished career as a
journalist was not mentioned in this week’s showing of the PBS
series American Masters that saluted the veteran CBS
newsman. The show, which is designed to examine “the lives, works,
and creative processes of our most outstanding cultural artists,”
dug deep into Mr. Cronkite’s life and career. He was praised (one
might even say worshiped!) for his coverage of the Kennedy
assassination, political conventions, Vietnam and Watergate. He was
cited as a television pioneer, which he most certainly was.
Yet there was not a word about Mr. Cronkite’s fundamental role
as a “cultural artist” in creating Fox. The reason for this was
obvious. To mention Cronkite in this regard is to say that there
were many Americans who slowly came to the recognition that
Cronkite — and the men and occasional woman who were around for
the creation of the modern mainstream media — was not “the most
trusted man in America.” Good old “Uncle Walter” turned out to be,
well, “the most trusted liberal man in America.”
It is hard to pinpoint exactly when this transformation took
place, and no doubt there are differences to be had on exactly when
this occurred. Surely one of the most notable moments of Cronkite’s
liberalism being unmasked in a highly visible fashion was his now
famous series on Vietnam. It was Cronkite, personally, who took to
the airwaves to inform the American people not about the facts of
the Vietnam War — but rather of his quite liberal opinion about
the War. (It was, in short, get out.) Former CBS reporter John
Laurence was so taken with this Cronkite decision that he
rhapsodized in the PBS show that it was a “breakthrough” for a
journalist to “express opinion.”
Well, now. It was surely news in 1968 that Cronkite would devote
valuable air time to such an out front opinion on the war. But by
this time conservative Americans were already well awake to the
realization that this powerful new institution of television was
being used in ways both subtle and not, to convey the message that
there was no more enlightened or superior world view than modern
American liberalism. Broadcast by broadcast it was increasingly
apparent that those who disagreed or who challenged the liberal
media status quo would be given either no air time or have their
own views graphically misrepresented.
Physicist Fritjof Capra, in his bestseller The Tao of
Physics, writes that “by the very act of focusing our
attention on any one concept we create its opposite.” In other
words, to use the language of physics, when Mr. Cronkite’s very
focused liberal world view blinked into the American consciousness,
its conservative polar opposite blinked into existence along with
it. The problem with Cronkite and his fellow “cultural artists” is
that over time there emerged what seemed to many Americans as a
very, very conscious decision to shut out the conservative world
view altogether or, if forced to give it air time, to misrepresent
it.
Thus Barry Goldwater found himself being portrayed on the CBS
News as a Nazi sympathizer. A Republican Senate move to broaden the
authority of the Senate Watergate Committee to investigate not just
the 1972 presidential campaign but reports of Democratic
malfeasance in the presidential campaigns of 1968 and 1964 was not
simply defeated in the Democratic Senate but uninvestigated
completely by Cronkite’s CBS. The failure of the Viet Cong Tet
Offensive attacks was made out as a Communist success and an
American failure, when the fact was the reverse. Later in
Cronkite’s career social issues such as abortion or busing were all
presented with the view that the proponents were honorable,
well-intentioned people with solid, sensible policy — and those
opposed either nuts or racists. It is a liberal world view of
journalism that, by 2004, was so perfectly rational to CBS
executives they let Dan Rather roll right ahead with a phony report
on George W. Bush’s national guard service.
Unwittingly, Cronkite’s adamant liberal insistence of “that’s
the way it is” had not only created Capra’s opposite concept to a
liberal media. With an unexpected assist from technologies old and
very new the conservative world view was blinked into a highly
visible national and global existence. Rupert Murdoch’s invention
of Fox News was a television network waiting to happen. Suddenly,
beaming into American living rooms through satellite and cable was
a different world view altogether, a conservative world view that
millions of Americans recognized from their every day existence in
places far distance from a Manhattan TV studio populated by liberal
“cultural artists” such as Cronkite. AM radio, once assumed to be
close to dead air in the liberal world view, stirred to life with
the presence of Rush Limbaugh and, eventually, hundreds of
conservative talk show hosts in local markets. And of course the
Internet appeared, allowing conservative writers such as the ones
on this site to communicate instantly with a national and global
audience that was once the almost exclusive preserve of Mr.
Cronkite.
Mr. Cronkite’s creation has shaken the world he created as a
“cultural artist” to its very core. The liberal media monopoly he
personified has vanished into the ether that gave it birth.
Sometimes the results are amusing. The PBS program recalls the
vigorous protest of Nixon Vice President Spiro Agnew about the
liberal dominance of the television media in 1970, a protest that
included a hint that the government should pull the broadcast
licenses of offending networks. Cronkite, of course, took immediate
umbrage, going out of his way to give a speech attacking Agnew’s
threat in a return visit to his Missouri hometown. By 2004 the
media world had changed so dramatically that it was liberal
Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean who called for the
break-up of Fox News. There was no word from Mr. Cronkite
criticizing Howard Dean.
In his retirement, Cronkite has been unabashed in his liberal
sentiments. He is a semi-regular on the liberal Huffington Posts,
out front attacking Christian conservatives and assailing the Bush
administration policy on global warming. His view on Iraq? But of
course — get out!
Is Walter Cronkite a man who deserves to be honored for his
contributions to American life? Absolutely.
But for the record, all of those contributions should be
honored, however unintentional. For Fox News and every conservative
radio show, magazine, website, and editorial page to succeed they
had to have an audience. Walter Cronkite, with his relentless,
decades-long delivery of his liberal world view as “the way it is”
created that audience almost single-handedly.
Thanks, Uncle Walter. What would conservatives have done without
you?
