Walter Cronkite 1916-2009

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... As the Watergate crisis unfolded, Cronkite began to increase the amount of airtime devoted to it. This drew the wrath of the Nixon Administration, which threatened to pull the licenses of TV stations owned by the network. On the 50th day of the crisis at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1980, Cronkite began closing his newscast by reminding viewers — including President Carter —how many days the Americans in Iran had been held hostage. Yet in his biography Cronkite wrote, "A career can be called a success if one can look back and say, ‘I made a difference.' I don't feel I can do that." In particular, Cronkite felt the values he had learned as a journeyman — clarity, modesty, accuracy — were rapidly being abandoned under pressure from corporate management and shareholders. In a 1976 survey by U.S. News and World Report, readers selected Cronkite as "the most trusted man in America" — a moniker that would accompany him the rest of his life. President Carter awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1981. ... Cronkite, who never earned a seven-figure salary, spoke out against the networks for paying their biggest stars huge sums while cutting reporters and slashing resources behind the scenes. He was particularly harsh on CBS, and bemoaned the fact that his advice was ignored by Lawrence Tisch, the financier who took over the network in 1986. He spoke out on a variety of other issues, such as climate change and the war in Iraq, ending the neutrality he had tried to keep under wraps while reporting the news. Yet when asked about the sway he thought his opinions held with the public, Cronkite would try to distance himself from the personality cult that had built up around him. "I always have been concerned about the idolatry connected with anchorpeople on television," he told the New York Times in 1989. "It bothers me a great deal that people would say, 'I believe every word you say.'" ... At one of them in 2003, Cronkite criticized the Bush administration's plan to invade Iraq. "We have shown arrogance, almost an egotism, in our conduct of foreign policy so that we have alienated most of our former allies in the world," he said, adding that the Iraq War "is going to get us in very serious trouble." ...

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Original post by LessBread According to Cronkite set standard for news anchors around the world, news anchors in Sweden are called Kronkiters and in the Netherlands, Cronkiters. Can anyone confirm this?

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Original post by LessBread According to Cronkite set standard for news anchors around the world, news anchors in Sweden are called Kronkiters and in the Netherlands, Cronkiters. Can anyone confirm this?

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Original post by LessBread According to Cronkite set standard for news anchors around the world, news anchors in Sweden are called Kronkiters and in the Netherlands, Cronkiters. Can anyone confirm this?

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... All of that was ignored when he died, with establishment media figures exploiting his death to suggest that his greatness reflected well on what they do, as though what he did was the same thing as what they do (much the same way that Martin Luther King's vehement criticisms of the United States generally and its imperialism and aggression specifically have been entirely whitewashed from his hagiography). So, too, with the death of Walter Cronkite. ... Cronkite's best moment was when he did exactly that which the modern journalist today insists they must not ever do -- directly contradict claims from government and military officials and suggest that such claims should not be believed. These days, our leading media outlets won't even use words that are disapproved of by the Government. ...

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... For it seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. This summer's almost certain standoff will either end in real give-and-take negotiations or terrible escalation; and for every means we have to escalate, the enemy can match us, and that applies to invasion of the North, the use of nuclear weapons, or the mere commitment of one hundred, or two hundred, or three hundred thousand more American troops to the battle. And with each escalation, the world comes closer to the brink of cosmic disaster. To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion. On the off chance that military and political analysts are right, in the next few months we must test the enemy's intentions, in case this is indeed his last big gasp before negotiations. But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.