Anchor Away
Walter Cronkite’s last newscast was more than twenty years ago, but he’s still plugged in. Here, the most trusted man in America speaks out on the current state of the media, his new syndicated column, his problem with Bill O’Reilly, and his fresh memories of that November day in 1963.
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I'm thinking about how, right after 9/11, the president's spokesman, Ari Fleischer, told reporters something to the effect of "Be careful what you write."
Yes, and we've seen it coming from the Defense Department too. Recently, the Secretary of Defense said something like, "We've got to be careful of what we say because we may give comfort to the enemy and create an impression that we're weak and not united." I don't doubt that there's some possibility that that could be true, but we cannot make a decision on that basis to hide the truth from the American people about what's happening to our troops overseas and our policy in Iraq and so forth.
You've covered a lot of presidents. Do you think that the coverage of this president is any different from the coverage of others?
No, I don't think it's different from other presidents'. What this president should understand is, we haven't had a situation as critical to the future of our nation and the world as we have now. There's never been a time when the world was in such delicate balance, and how much our difficulties today are the responsibility of this president and his policies is something that should be kept under constant assessment. And I do think those policies are being pretty well reported on by the press.
Now, when I talk about the press, I should say that I read the New York Times and the Washington Post regularly. These are probably more liberal than a lot of the papers in the country, so maybe I'm not getting a clear picture of what the rest of the papers are doing. But I also read the Wall Street Journal. I try to balance my reading as much as possible.
You bring up the issue of the Times and the Post being liberal, so let me ask you about bias. There's been a whole lot of publicity about Al Franken's book, which attacks FOX News and some of the more conservative members of the media. FOX sued him and lost, which intensified the debate about the political leanings of journalists. Do you believe the press is biased?
In the papers I mentioned, I do not see bias. I think their news columns are as straightforward as you can make them. Their editorial pages are very biased, as they should be. That doesn't bother me at all.
Let me point out, however, that it depends on how you define "bias." A newspaper might appear to show bias based on what it decides to cover, but this isn't bias. It is the editorial direction of the newspaper, and it should be clearly known by the reader. I don't think the reader buys the Washington Post with an expectation to get the same reporting as the Washington Times and vice versa. The reader of the Wall Street Journal expects the reporting to be biased, if you please, toward the success of capitalism and a favorable performance by the business world. These things are part of journalism.
I want to ask you about FOX specifically. Maybe you see it as similar to the Wall Street Journal or the Washington Times, but there's been all this talk about how FOX is so biased. And the people who run FOX will say, "We're just counteracting the liberal bias in the rest of the news business." What do you make of that?
I was very disturbed at first when FOX came on line saying it was going to be a right-wing news source. Having been a foreign correspondent for a time, I'm familiar with the fact that across the world, most countries have newspapers that are spokespersons for a religion or a political party. They don't pretend to be impartial. I hated to see that come into practice in American journalism. It seems to me that this threatens to turn journalism into advocacy, and that is dangerous. We may make our mistakes, we may slip a little bit from time to time, but we're not out-and-out advocates. We provide, as nearly as humans can, an honest attempt at impartiality. If the FOX mode is contagious and somebody else has to come along now and say, "We're the liberal network," the dam is weakened and we could get into a situation where you can't depend on anybody to give you an impartial news report. So this bothered me about FOX.
Now, I don't watch them that much, quite honestly, but I've occasionally turned to them and found they're doing a pretty good job. If you know what their basic politics are, you can say, "Well, this is a very good explanation of what they think about these things." So maybe there is some value there.
I saw where Bill O'Reilly, who's one of the FOX people, read your first couple of columns and jumped on you for announcing that you're a liberal.
Yeah. O'Reilly said that I was an internationalist! My God, what a terrible thing to be.
What I wonder is, why is it wrong for you to be a liberal in your column but okay for O'Reilly and his friends at FOX to be openly conservative?
That's the inconsistency you find with the all-out propagandists. I don't find any reason or rationality in that at all. The O'Reilly attacks on me, I think, are almost a compliment. I like the fact that he feels that I'm important enough and what I say is enticing enough to the populace that he has to attack it.
Do you ever watch his show?
No. I try to avoid it if possible.
I want to ask you about your column. Why did you decide to write one?
Because I was concerned about the way things were going in the world, and I thought maybe, in a terribly egotistical flash, I had something to say that might be of some help. But I'll tell you, the column, as it turns out, is a physical hardship. I read the papers, but the reading now is much more time-consuming. My eyesight is an old man's eyesight. After two or three hours of newspaper scanning and trying to get stuff off the Internet in that small type, my eyes are tired. And my hearing is very bad; that's a handicap in getting on the phone with a source.
Why, after so many years of perceived neutrality, was it necessary to attach an ideological label to yourself?
Because this column of mine was going to be from a liberal standpoint, and I thought it was fair to let people know. I regret the fact that I've lost perhaps millions of loyal followers by telling them that. But during all those years of doing the evening news, and at UPI before that, I was always the newsman, not the commentator. I didn't do analysis or commentary. Eric Sevareid played that role for us; I was playing a different role. With this column, I'm an advocate. I'm a critic. As such, I thought people ought to know whence I come. I also took the opportunity to define what I think a liberal is. A liberal is not necessarily a leftist; a liberal is someone who sees both sides of an issue, makes up his or her mind on the basis of facts, and is not beholden to a philosophy or political party.
In the last couple of minutes we have, let's talk about the Kennedy assassination. Does it seem like forty years ago? How clear are your memories of that day?
About as clear as my memories of anything in my past. It was a day that left an impression almost minute by minute. There was no day like it in my reporting on the air—nothing even close to it as a dramatic story to be told and, at the same time, as one that hit close to home in our psyche and sympathy for the situation. A lot of that, I think, was his popularity, but his youth was one of the reasons it made such an impact. The thought of the years of service he could have rendered to us—to be cut short in this ridiculous way . . .
People so clearly remember you on the air reporting the news that day. What was going through your mind as you were sitting there? How hard was it to balance your role as a journalist and your status as an American citizen?
Journalists function like others who have a major role to play in a tragedy: the police, the medical people, the firemen. We're busy doing our jobs, and a form of professionalism kicks in throughout—the need for us to be on duty. In recent years psychiatrists have determined that these emergency workers experience a definite trauma in the aftermath. They're deep in blood, tragedy, and horror for a number of hours, but only when they get off duty does the impact hit, because they've been so busy concentrating on what they have to do. That, I think, was exactly what happened to me. Not until I finally got home much later, as I was having a sleepless night, as tired as I was, did I think about the horror of the situation. It had an impact. It still does today. I can get tearful when I discuss it. As I am right now, thinking of it again.
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