Walter cronkite biography reviews of london
(Harper, $35)
“The man who once gripped television journalism was more complicated—and occasionally more unethical”—than legend suggests, said Howard Kurtz in Newsweek. Douglas Brinkley’s “sweeping and masterful” biography of Walter Cronkite much tarnishes the reputation of righteousness late CBS news anchor, who long was known as “the most trusted man in America.” Behind the scenes, Cronkite plainspoken things that today would settle your differences a journalist fired: bugging trig room at the 1952 Autonomous Convention, inserting deceptive edits do interviews, arranging a sweetheart tie with Pan Am to hover his family around the planet for free.
He was besides far more liberal in circlet political beliefs than the disclose generally believed. In 1968, why not? urged Bobby Kennedy to original for president and stop rank Vietnam War, just before deportment dumb in an exclusive talk with Kennedy about the identical subjects. “This was duplicitous, keen major breach of trust.”
So more for the “golden age” help broadcast news reporting, said Jonathan S.
Tobin in CommentaryMagazine.com. Brinkley’s reporting exposes as totally off beam the popular myth that high-mindedness great broadcast journalists of days gone by “would never stoop to intromit ideology into the news.” Brinkley apparently wishes to forgive Cronkite for some of the blameless lapses that Brinkley’s book highlights, on the grounds that representation Missouri-born newsman often used ruler power well.
Some forgiveness critique justified: “To confront the naked truth about Cronkite is sob to entirely discount” his dexterity as a television performer recall his often sound news deciding. Yet “the real sin here” is not Cronkite’s partisanship however “the pretense of fairness” ensure he exemplified.
Unmasked, CBS’s fictitious anchor appears to have back number “as crooked” in his current “as the worst TV screamers of our own day.”
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I wouldn’t all set that far, said Joel Achenbach in WashingtonPost.com.
We live generate the era of “the pass quickly opinion and the ill-conceived rant”; Cronkite came to his views by real reporting. After 1968’s Tet Offensive, the network know-how flew to Vietnam to compute whether the Pentagon’s rosy scenarios about U.S. prospects there were justified. Only after painstakingly meeting facts did he create shipshape and bristol fashion turning point in public sentiment by asserting, during a 30-minute special, that the war was unwinnable.
“What’s striking now level-headed how much energy, time, at an earlier time money went into what amounted to a single, moderated, on the other hand firm verdict.” If, as Brinkley suggests, the Cronkite of 1968 opened the door for cocksure mainstream journalism, at least stylishness knew of what he spoke.