Bearitto said:

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GruntTuff said:

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I miss the days when we could listen to Walter Cronkite and all news had to pass through a grizzled, angry, cigarette smoking news editor who demanded that reporters be able to verify sources, ask for comment from all parties involved and.....get this....clearly label NEWS as NEWS and OPINION as OPINION.

What killed the ability to rely on news for accuracy is the emergence of the internet and blogs/talking heads who can say whatever they want, propose any ridiculous theory without being challenged before going public, etc.

Nothing is ever or was ever perfect, but if you earned a Baylor journalism degree under the heavy hand of a professor like the great David McHam, you knew better than to try to conflict news with opinion, and you'd better be prepared to defend your facts before handing him a story for publication.

That is what we are missing today.

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Would anything you said there were true. Walter Cronkite is well known to have actively pushed what can politely be called opinion journalism in the extreme. Today, it might be called fake news. But in reality, he blatantly lied, bald faced, to the American people.

The Tet offensive was a massive loss, as Cronkite suggested. But not for the Americans, as he lied. The Tet offensive was devastating to the Vietcong and along with the siege of Khe Sanh, hobbled the NVA. The US was indeed winning and Tet was a tremendous victory for the US. By the end of 1969, the NVA had lost 20 percent of its forces in the South and 70% of the South Vietnam population was under US control vs 42% at the beginning of 1968.

Cronkite lies about all this. He didn't stop there. He sided with communists fairly regularly. Another example, in 1972, when hip deep in Soviet aggression, CBS Evening News ran circa 1,400 anti-military/defense spending stories vs 79 pro-military. When asked why, he said, "There are always groups in Washington expressing views of alarm over the state of our defenses. We don't carry those stories. The story is that there are those who want to cut defense spending." He admitted the story was his opinion. Seven years later, in an interview he gave to a Soviet magazine just before they invaded Afghanistan, he said he thought a "Soviet threat" was a "myth" and noted "I will never believe in a 'Soviet threat."

Cronkite was an opinion 'journalist' who snowed gullible Americans who didn't know any better. Blogs and the internet have merely exposed that institutionalized leftist bias to the light. They have made it clear that no one is objective and if you claim you are, you are the biggest liar of all.

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Walter Cronkite was a flaming liberal democrat who was quite skilled at looking straight at the camera and making biased, slanted "news" appear to be objective journalism. And given the journalistic influence he had at the time, he was a willing contributor to the disaster that was Viet Nam back in the day. He was usually more subtle about his bias and cunningly attempted to appear objective (unlike today's MSM "journalists" who make no pretense about their prejudiced, hate filled bias), but the leftist slant was still there nonetheless.