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“Krankheit” in German is pronounced the same as the “Cronkite” following “Walter.” The German word means “sickness” while the “Walter” word means the man who infected TV news with the gazillion dollar-salary Star Anchor larger than the news he is supposed to be presenting. I don’t say that to be mean-spirited or disrespectful of a man who was “the most trusted man in America,” but nobody else appears to be pointing out that Cronkite was actually a liberal ideologue; an advocate of a politically correct, totalitarian world government who used his trust to influence public policy in accordance with his own beliefs.

Cronkite should be the poster boy for full disclosure of a reporter’s politics — something I strongly advocate. Instead, he continues to be lauded as “Uncle Walter,” the journalist who was totally unbiased in his reportage at a time when there were only three networks and the size of his news audience and personal influence on politics and national policy was far beyond anything that can be imagined by those who did not experience it. That meant Cronkite was the national oracle of fact and truth during his time as Anchor and Managing Editor of CBS Evening News from 1962 to 1981. But was he really unbiased? Well, that’s not quite the way it was. (more…)

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Walter Cronkite passed away a few days ago and pardon me for not joining the wailing and gnashing of teeth of the professional media mandarins.  The fact is that Cronkite was an over-praised meat puppet, a doctrinaire liberal-left talking head who never once uttered a word that would have caused so much as a sigh of consternation in the Manhattan media environs he dwelled in. 

Except among his loved ones, the hoopla that has accompanied his passing has nothing to do with Walter Cronkite the man and everything to do with Walter Cronkite the symbol.  He symbolized a time – “The Golden Age” to hear the wistful liberals tell it – of a solid, unconquerable media monolith that passed judgment on What Is The News and defined Socially Accepted Opinion. 

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Oh, those glorious days of yesteryear, when those drooling slobs without the education or breeding to live in New York and work at the Times or at one of the three networks would genuflect before their black and white TV sets every evening and await Mr. Cronkite to bestow upon them The Truth!  Now (sigh), it’s chaos, with too many different media outlets and too many different opinions.  It’s gotten out of (our) control! 

Come back, Walter, and save us from Fox News! (more…)

Before the election, at a comfortable film festival in Spain, filmmaker Woody Allen told journalists abroad that it would be “a disgrace and a humiliation if Barack Obama does not win.”

“It would be a very, very terrible thing for the United States in many, many ways,” he said. Adding that Mr. Obama, “represents a huge step upward from (the) incompetence and misjudgment” of the Bush administration.”

You know, it’s a hard thing to watch your heroes fall. To see them as they really are, not as you thought they were, not as you wish they were.

I grew up loving Woody Allen movies, ranking “Annie Hall,” “Manhattan” and “Hannah and Her Sisters” as three of my favorite all-time films. With “Radio Days” and “Sleeper” not too far behind.  (more…)