The Mainstream Media is using this weekend to pay tribute to their fallen hero Walter Cronkite. Consistent with the MSM tradition of corporate group think, there are few if any dissenting voices who question whether it is healthy to have nearly every one in the country get their news from one man.
For a moment, I thought the Republic was going to come close to providing another view. After I wrote my own commentary on Cronkite's death (below), I read a commentary by Conservative author John Podhoretz who sounded a similar theme to mine and pointed out that Cronkite had been completely wrong on the Tet Offensive.
Podhoretz concluded with this line.
So the passing of Walter Cronkite is a moment to remember an era that has passed, an era toward which we should not experience a moment’s nostalgia.
Then I was surprised to see an excerpt of Podhoretz' commentary quoted in the "other media voices" on the editorial page of the Sunday Republic. Unbelievably, the quote was doctored to make it look like Podhoretz was speaking positively about Cronkite. Here's the original quote.
Cronkite was a key figure in many ways, but foremost among them, perhaps, was the fact that he cleared the way for the mainstream media and the Establishment to join what Lionel Trilling called “the adversary culture.” Cronkite, the gravelly voice of accepted American wisdom, whose comportment suggested he kept his money in bonds and would never even have considered exceeding the speed limit, devastated President Lyndon Johnson in the wake of the 1968 Tet Offensive by declaring that the United States “was mired in stalemate” in Vietnam—when Johnson knew that Tet had been a military triumph.
Those ten words after the dash are the key to the entire quote. Podhoretz' point is that Cronkite was powerful and wrong. In fact, that's the point of his whole commentary. But you won't understand that if you read the Republic snippet. They cut the last 10 words out and instead of leaving a three-dot ellipses to alert the reader that the editor had omitted the text, the Republic simply put a period at the end of the word "Vietnam". (Notice when they removed part of the middle of the quote, they used the ellipsis.)
The title of the editorial is "Cronkite was Classy and Authentic." Unfortunately, the Republic's manipulation of the quote was neither.
Update: New Times has a nice little update on this issue. Thanks Ray.
You are absolutely on the money about Cronkite. He believed in world government and the sooner the better. Like Obama, a real radical.
Posted by: R Pullen | July 22, 2009 at 08:57 PM