CRONKITE: BROADCASTING TRUTH TO POWER

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THE LAST OF THE GREAT AMERICAN JOURNALISTS

WHAT REPORTER, MUCH LESS ANCHORMAN, WOULD STAND
UP TO CREEPING FASCISM IN AMERICA TODAY?

1968 DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION, CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
Cronkite: "I think we've got a bunch of thugs here, Dan."

"Uncle Walter" Called 'Em How He Saw 'Em

Those who have grown up on television news and have never known the hard-working newshounds of the late, great newspaper industry, simply don't know what journalism is. First of all, it's writing, not pointing a mike or a video camera at a talking head, and letting him or her lie his ass off. Second, it's not letting anybody use your newspaper, magazine, radio or TV network to disseminate government, corporate or partisan propaganda. Third, it ain't Fox News.

Walter Cronkite came out of the newspaper business and was one of the pioneers of direct live instantaneous reporting via trans-Atlantic wire services and radio news broadcasts, at just the moment that America needed to see and to hear what was really going on "over there." Along with other young kids like Eric Sevareid and Howard K. Smith, and seasoned newsmen like William L. Shirer and Edward R. Murrow, Cronkite gave it to us straight from Nazi Germany when that nation threatened our very existence. That kind of hard-hitting reporting at great risk to their own lives made that generation of journalists perhaps the finest the world has ever seen, or is likely to see again. The respect that earned them carried over onto television news, and helped that medium to gradually replace print as our primary source of information.

Cronkite was almost as ready to report on the failings and misdeeds of his own government as he had been in exposing the crimes of Nazi Germany. As early as 1968, while LBJ was still in office, Cronkite criticized the build-up in Vietnam in an on-air editorial. You'll never see that nowadays, or hear Brian Williams or Anderson Cooper calling a government thug a thug, but Cronkite did. Unfortunately, the growth of the shallower medium and the steady juggernaut of corporate consolidation have made the boob tube into a coal-chute of bullsh*t directly into the sub-basement of the American psyche for the closet Fascists that own, operate and influence the networks today. If we ever do see another Walter Cronkite, it'll be on a blog, not the tee-vee.

And, sadly, that's the way it is.


THE MUSEUM OF BROADCAST COMMUNICATIONS
"Legendary CBS newsman Walter Cronkite has died at 92."
The Power & The Glory...

' Initially, Cronkite was something of a hawk on the Vietnam War, although his program did broadcast controversial segments such as Morley Safer's famous "Zippo lighter" report. However, returning from Vietnam after the Tet offensive Cronkite addressed his massive audience with a different perspective. "It seems now more certain than ever," he said, "that the bloody experience of Vietnam is a stalemate." He then urged the government to open negotiations with the North Vietnamese. Many observers, including presidential aide Bill Moyers speculated that this was a major factor contributing to President Lyndon B. Johnson's decision to offer to negotiate with the enemy and not to run for President in 1968. Cronkite never stinted on coverage of the Watergate Scandal and subsequent hearings. In 1972, following on the heels of the Washington Post's "Watergate" revelations the CBS Evening News presented a 22 minute, two-part overview of "Watergate" generally credited with keeping the issue alive and making it intelligible to most Americans. '

THE ATLANTIC
"David Halberstam on Walter Cronkite"
The Anchorman Vs. The Crook.

' The men who ran broadcasting had become sensitive about going against the American norm, and being ahead of it. For their purposes now Walter was perfect, he was the norm. For him to be against the norm was like going against himself. In addition, he had a strong self-imposed sense of what the limits of his role were, and the dangers of violating the trust that had been given to him. So it worked; he became over the years one of the most trusted men in America. His more elitist colleagues in print journalism, even if they found him on occasion slow in picking up on certain stories, nonetheless respected his integrity. When political pollsters wanted to check on the credibility of possible presidential candidates, they always included Walter Cronkite on the poll as a benchmark against which the trust and acceptability of candidates could be measured, and Cronkite often scored very high. In 1970, a President who viewed television commentators as a major opposing power center was manipulating political pressure against them, and networks were on the defensive. At a meeting that year between CBS executives and affiliate owners, the resentment and anger of the affiliates against the CBS news team was showing. Cambodia and Kent State had just taken place, and the Nixon-Agnew attacks on TV commentators were their peak. The meeting had been bitter and there was a smell of blood in the air. That night CBS gave a banquet and the management trotted out all the stars, Jimmy Stewart and Doris Day and many others, and they all walked in and received polite applause. And then Cronkite came in and the house went wild, a magnificent standing ovation from the very people who had been echoing the Nixon-Agnew assault on CBS that morning. You can have it both ways. '

THE NATION
"Walter Cronkite: Definitional Journalist Saw Big Media's Flaws"
Now out of the belly of the beast, Cronkite attacks the beast.

' The reporter, editor and anchorman from 1962 to 1981, whose name remained synonymous with American journalism to the day he died, fretted in particular about a 2003 move by the Federal Communications Commission to relax media ownership rules. After the commission approved proposals that would permit a single media company to own television stations that reach up to 45 percent of American households, and that would permit a single media company to own the daily newspaper, several television stations and up to eight radio stations in the same community, Cronkite said, "I think they made a mistake, I do indeed. It seems to me that the rule change was negotiated and promulgated with the goal of creating even larger monopolies in the news-gathering business." Cronkite also argued that the networks needed to get more comfortable with criticism. He believed that, after years of battering by conservative media critics, the networks were too averse to taking risks. During the discussion about whether a network anchor might question the wisdom of the Iraq war, he said, "If they (the networks) didn't do it, I think it would be because they are afraid to get in an ideological fight - or that doing so might lose them some viewers. ... I think that is a bad thing, a bad way to decide how to approach a story." '

(cross-posted at Democracy For California by cosanostradamus)


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Suggestion Box & Tip Jar We would like to make over this blog to make it easier to access, to read and to comment on. We would also like to serve our readers better by providing more of what you need and want to see. All serious suggestions will be considered. We hope to move to our own domain in the near future, and we would like to ask for your financial assistance in doing that, and in upgrading our hardware & software. Small one-time donations and larger long-term subscriptions are welcome. Exclusive advertising is also available. If you think we are wasting our time in doing all this, please let us know. If you wish to help us, now is the time. As always, negative bullsh*t from right-wing trolls will be sh*tcanned. Thank you to everyone else. Please send feedback & PayPal contributions to cosanostradamusATexciteDOTcom. Thanks.

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WHO'S SCHOOLIN' WHO?

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IS OBAMA USING GATES TO TAKE THE BLAME?

OR IS OBAMA BEING PLAYED BY THE HAWKS?



Either Way, The Permanent Government Wins Again, Not Us, The Idiots Who Voted For Obama

Less than a year ago, a few of us got interested in this young black guy from Chicago that said he was against war and torture and stuff like that. We backed him up, sent him money, worked for his campaign for free, and helped him convince everybody else that he would quickly end the war and stop the torture if he got elected. We all worked our asses off to get him elected. When he won, of course we celebrated. It just seemed like such an earth-shaking, bad-old-days ending, wonderfully historic event. It was the first good thing to happen in politics in forty, almost fifty years. The bad guys had finally been defeated: The racists, the plutocrats, the sexists, the corporatista's, the homophobes, the fascists, the religious fanatics, the gun-nuts, the blue-noses, the torturers, the war-heads, maybe even the whole military-industrial-oil complex. We thought we could finally change the national security state, and start living in a better, saner, cleaner, more free, more abundant, more peaceful world.

AAAAAAANNNNNGGGGGGHHHHH!!!!! Wrooooong answer!

Obama has now re-appointed the Torturer-In-Chief, Bush's own Secretary of Defense, Gates. This is the guy who pretended that the "surge" had worked magic all by itself, and then took credit for it. He helped create the mess in Afghanistan in the 80's, helped set up training camps there later used by the 9/11 bombers while at CIA & NSA, and then walked away and let the Taliban take over, hosts to Bin Laden. Now he lets those same bombers, aka Al Qaida, run loose in Pakistan. He also traded Iran weapons for hostages, paid for by smuggling drugs from Columbia through Panama to the U.S. to also fund the Contras in Nicaragua, against Congressional restrictions, an off-the-books, illegally funded "covert" operation that everybody found out about. A career f*ck-up, in other words, and a criminal. And this is the guy who kept Gitmo open, supervised the water-boarding, and helped invent the practice of "extraordinary rendition" of prisoners of war, terror suspects, or anybody we didn't like, to places where they could safely be tortured, to death if necessary. This is a man whom Obama should be indicting. Instead, he is nominating him to his Cabinet. As they say on the Internets, What The F*ck?!?!?!

Yeah, maybe it's all part of some grand master plan. Maybe Obama is just the most subtle political mind since Machiavelli. But he's up against the worst people on Earth, and he seems to be succumbing to them. If he has any real stuff left, he'd better start using it. His only real hope, assuming he ever was one of us, is us. If he continues to alienate us, the people who voted for him, he will have nothing but his coterie of corporatist controllers. And they don't need him one second longer than we are willing to support him for.

Tick tock, Barack. It's damned near finished time to put up or shut up, time we moved on so we can start organizing for a REAL agent of change. You're not even in the White House yet, and you've already sold us out. At least, that's how it looks. If you're going to surprise us, and those closet-Nazi's you're surrounding yourself with, you'd better do it soon.


YAHOO NEWS
"Obama picks graybeards as wartime Cabinet"
The door doesn't even revolve any more. Just the Presidents.

' Obama's insurgent candidacy was founded on his opposition to the Iraq war and a promise to end it, fast. But with a crushing global financial crisis supplanting Iraq as Job One, the Democrat has turned to the very man running the Iraq and Afghan wars for the current Republican president, officials confirmed to The Associated Press. Gates, who has served as President George W. Bush's defense secretary for two years, will remain in the Cabinet for some time, probably a year, according to an official familiar with discussions between him and the president-elect. His appointment would fulfill an Obama pledge to include a Republican in his Cabinet. The 65-year-old climbed the CIA bureaucracy from an entry-level position to become director under President George H.W. Bush. He also served on his National Security Council, as he had for Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. Gates helped lead U.S. efforts to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan in the 1980s while at the CIA and was deputy national security adviser during Operation Desert Storm, the first U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Gates is a close friend of the Bush family. He was interim dean of the George Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M and became the university's president in 2002. The school is home to the elder Bush's presidential library. '

NY TIMES
"Meet the New Boss …"
Same as the old boss? He IS the old boss!

' As someone who was skeptical of Obama’s moderate posturing during the campaign, I have to admit that I am gobsmacked by these appointments, most of which could just as easily have come from a President McCain. (Jim Jones is an old friend of McCain’s, and McCain almost certainly would have asked Gates to stay on as well.) This all but puts an end to the 16-month timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, the unconditional summits with dictators, and other foolishness that once emanated from the Obama campaign. His appointments suggest that, if anything, his administration will have a Reapolitiker, rather than a liberal, bent, although Clinton and Steinberg at State should be powerful voices for “neo-liberalism” which is not so different in many respects from “neo-conservativism”. Both, for instance, support humanitarian interventions in places like Darfur and Bosnia. '

WIKIPEDIA
"ROBERT GATES: Level of involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal"
The man knows how to cover his ass.

' Because of his senior status in the CIA, Gates was close to many figures who played significant roles in the Iran-Contra Affair and was in a position to have known of their activities. In 1984, as deputy director of CIA, Gates advocated that the U.S. initiate a bombing campaign against Nicaragua and that the U.S. do everything in its power short of direct military invasion of the country to remove the Sandinista government [14]. The evidence developed by Independent Counsel did not warrant indictment of Gates for his Iran-Contra activities or his responses to official inquiries. Gates consistently testified that he first heard on October 1, 1986, from Charles E. Allen, the national intelligence officer who was closest to the Iran initiative, that proceeds from the Iran arms sales may have been diverted to support the Contras. Other evidence proves, however, that Gates received a report on the diversion during the summer of 1986 from DDI Richard Kerr.[15] The issue was whether the Independent Counsel could prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Gates was deliberately not telling the truth when he later claimed not to have remembered any reference to the diversion before meeting with Allen in October. '

WIKIPEDIA
"Iran-Contra affair"
Some history this guy has! If it stinks, he had it on his shoes.

' The Iran-Contra affair was a political scandal which was revealed in November 1986 as a result of earlier events during the Reagan administration. It began as an operation to increase U.S.-Iranian relations, wherein Israel would ship weapons to a moderate, politically influential group of Iranians opposed to the Ayatollah Khomeini; the U.S. would reimburse Israel for those weapons and receive payment from Israel. The moderate Iranians agreed to do everything in their power to achieve the release of six U.S. hostages, who were being held by Hezbollah. The plan eventually deteriorated into an arms-for-hostages scheme, in which members of the executive branch sold weapons to Iran in exchange for the release of the American hostages, without the direct authorization of President Ronald Reagan.[1][2] Large modifications to the plan were conjured by Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North of the National Security Council in late 1985. In North's plan, a portion of the proceeds from the weapon sales was diverted to fund anti-Sandinista and anti-communist rebels, or Contras, in Nicaragua.[3] President Ronald Reagan was a supporter of the Contra cause and many believe he knew about the illegal transaction.[4] [1][2][5] After the weapon sales were revealed in November 1986, Ronald Reagan appeared on national television and stated that the weapons transfers had indeed occurred, but that the United States did not trade arms for hostages.[6] The investigation was compounded when large volumes of documents relating to the scandal were destroyed or withheld from investigators by Reagan administration officials.[7] On March 4, 1987, Reagan returned to the airwaves in a nationally televised address, taking full responsibility for any actions that he was unaware of, and admitting that "what began as a strategic opening to Iran deteriorated, in its implementation, into trading arms for hostages."[8] '

SALON
"John Kerry, the man who uncovered Iran-Contra"
Drugs for guns, guns for drugs, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iran, Nicaragua, Gates was there.

' Kerry surrounded himself on his staff with tough, intelligent and independent-minded investigators, and he ordered them to follow the trail. In south Florida, they found men accused of drug running who were shipping guns to the Nicaraguan Contras and claiming to have been instructed to do so by the National Security Council. They tracked down a Contra advisor in Costa Rica known as "Colonel Flaco," who had evidence that North was involved in financing the Contras with Colombian drug money. The path led further to Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega and to Saudi funding sources. Kerry won support from Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to launch an official investigation in large part because of the drug aspect. (Since Vietnam, concerned about the destructive heroin addiction of many veterans, Kerry had keenly followed the geopolitics of drugs and CIA complicity.) '

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Suggestion Box & Tip Jar We would like to make over this blog to make it easier to access, to read and to comment on. We would also like to serve our readers better by providing more of what you need and want to see. All serious suggestions will be considered. We hope to move to our own domain in the near future, and we would like to ask for your financial assistance in doing that, and in upgrading our hardware & software. Small one-time donations and larger long-term subscriptions are welcome. Exclusive advertising is also available. If you think we are wasting our time in doing all this, please let us know. If you wish to help us, now is the time. As always, negative bullsh*t from right-wing trolls will be sh*tcanned. Thank you to everyone else. Please send feedback & PayPal contributions to cosanostradamusATexciteDOTcom. Thanks.

SUPPORT OUR TROOPS: BRING THEM ALL HOME ALIVE, NOW!