Naturally, we five kids thought my dad was completely nuts. We were even a little embarrassed by him, because no one else in our teeming suburban development in the south hills of Pittsburgh had a Catholic Republican father who yelled at the TV news all the time, liked Nixon better than Kennedy and got strange magazines in the mail like National Review.
Now, of course, I realize how lucky I was to get those early lessons in media criticism from my dad, even if he was often subjective, partisan and one-sided himself.
Sure. Uncle Walter was a great print and electronic journalist and a historic TV broadcaster. No one in broadcasting will ever again have the authority, cultural clout or political power he had – which is a very good thing.
But Uncle Walter was never objective (no one can be) or even particularly fair or balanced. As his friends and enemies could tell you, he was a typical East Coast liberal journalist who remained a typical East Coast liberal till the end of his life.
He wasn’t always wrong. He eventually got it right on the un-winnability of Vietnam and he spoke out against the foolishness of the war in Iraq. Later he forthrightly declared the war on drugs another lost and immoral war.
But Cronkite loved and trusted government power too much and even thought it was time for the United States to give up some of its sovereignty to the idiots at the U.N.
Uncle Walter also never understood or appreciated that Fox News Channel was deliberately started to serve politically conservative Americans and counter the elite liberal bias of the mainstream news media – a bias he could never see because he was so much a part of.
To hear NPR and other mainstream journalism places eulogize Walter Cronkite last week as a nonpartisan or objective newsman made me laugh. But it would have made my late father yell at the TV again. As he would have quickly pointed out, liberals only think Cronkite was an objective newsman because he never said anything they didn’t agree with.