Walter Cronkite Quotes

Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation.

America's health care system is neither healthy, caring, nor a system.

In seeking truth you have to get both sides of a story.

I think being a liberal, in the true sense, is being nondoctrinaire, nondogmatic, non-committed to a cause - but examining each case on its merits. Being left of center is another thing; it's a political position. I think most newspapermen by definition have to be liberal; if they're not liberal, by my definition of it, then they can hardly be good newspapermen. If they're preordained dogmatists for a cause, then they can't be very good journalists; that is, if they carry it into their journalism." [Interview with Ron Powers (Chicago Sun Times) for Playboy, 1973]

We are not educated well enough to perform the necessary act of intelligently selecting our leaders.

Walter Cronkite “Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation.

Are they real fires? Or are people just reacting to something? Just because there’s an alarm going doesn’t mean it’s a fire. And I think that people are confusing the two. It’s only a fire when it offends the fans, and the fans turn on you. Tosh has fans, and they get the joke. If you’ve watched enough Tracy Morgan, you let the worst thing go by. When did Tracy Morgan become Walter Cronkite? You have to mean something to me to offend me. You can’t break up with me if we don’t date.

watched in horror until Walter Cronkite finally announced the news that Kennedy was dead. The boys didn’t try to argue about the stupidity of the ancient Hebrews again.

Freedom of the press is not just important to democracy, it is democracy.

Apparently, when Walter Cronkite reported on the Tet carnage, he’d said—on air—“What the hell is going on? I thought we were winning the war.

Her recipe for the perfect waitress was, “two parts Walter Cronkite to one part Mae West, carefully blended with a cup of Mikhail Baryshnikov and a liberal sprinkling of Mother Teresa.

We have no authoritative figure, no Walter Cronkite or Edward R. Murrow whom we all listen to and trust to sort out contradictory claims. Instead, the media is splintered into a thousand fragments, each with its own version of reality, each claiming the loyalty of a splintered nation.

When he (Walter Cronkite) drank, he had an appetite for both history and political bullshit.

It is time we accept there’s no Cronkite moment for Afghanistan. Perhaps it's time we value the hearts and minds of our own over distant Afghan tribes.

If knowing how clueless I am is the measure of wisdom, I am freaking Solomon, Walter Cronkite, and Judge Judy all rolled into one.

He [Walter Cronkite] was also a profoundly good man. I don't think we should lose sight of that. All those professional gifts emanated from a very good core and that's something that's beyond training. It's who he was.

it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could. This is Walter Cronkite. Good night.

I liked the way Walter Cronkite looked, with his black glasses and his voice that knew everything worth knowing. Here was a man who was not against books, that was plain. Take everything T. Ray was not, shape it into a person, and you would get Walter Cronkite.

But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could. This is Walter Cronkite. Good night.

The least of us is improved by the things done by the best of us, because if we are not able to land at least we are able to follow. (July 20, 1969 CBS Moon Landing Coverage)

Walter Cronkite wasn’t representing a political ideology, or even discussing politics when my father watched the news as a teenager. He was discussing the news.

If life were fattening, Walter Cronkite would weigh 500 pounds.

The least of us is improved by the things done by the best of us, because if we are not able to land at least we are able to follow. (July 20, 1969 CBS Moon Landing Coverage)” ― Walter Cronkite

No, I really don’t,” I said. “That’s the problem.” “But you know that you do not know,” Michael said. “Which is wise.” I snorted. “If knowing how clueless I am is the measure of wisdom, I am freaking Solomon, Walter Cronkite, and Judge Judy all rolled into one.” Sanya held up his hands with his fingers in a square, framing my face like a photographer. “Always thought you look more like a Judy.

In the real world, people fall out of love little by little, not all at once. They stop looking at each other. They stop talking. They stop serving lima beans. After Walter Cronkite is finished, one of them goes for a ride in a Ford Mustang, and the other goes upstairs to the bedroom. And there is a lot of quiet in the house. And late at night, the sounds of sadness creep underneath the bedroom doors and along the dark halls.

Tuesday, March 3 [Meetings with economist Arthur Burns regarding China, and with President Ford on economy; message from Pope John Paul II expressing general greetings; VFW reception for Senator Laxalt (R-NV); dinner party.] During day I did a 1 hr. interview with Walter Cronkite—his last for CBS. He spent the 1st 20 min’s. on El Salvador. He didn’t throw any slow balls but the reaction was favorable. Because of our dinner we couldn’t watch the show but I was treated to another W.H. service. They taped the program & played it back to us later in the evening.

I was tempted to start babbling crazily about Walter Cronkite: that he was heavy into the white slavery trade—sending agents to South Vietnam to adopt orphan girls, then shipping them back to his farm in Quebec to be lobotomized and sold into brothels up and down the Eastern seaboard….

Most people don’t get (or want) to look at old news footage, but we looked at thirty years of stories relating to motherhood. In the 1970s, with the exception of various welfare reform proposals, there was almost nothing in the network news about motherhood, working mothers, or childcare. And when you go back and watch news footage from 1972, for example, all you see is John Chancellor at NBC in black and white reading the news with no illustrating graphics, or Walter Cronkite sitting in front of a map of the world that one of the Rugrats could have drawn–that’s it. But by the 1980s, the explosion in the number of working mothers, the desperate need for day care, sci-fi level reproductive technologies, the discovery of how widespread child abuse was–all this was newsworthy. At the same time, the network news shows were becoming more flashy and sensationalistic in their efforts to compete with tabloid TV offerings like A Current Affair and America’s Most Wanted. NBC, for example introduced a story about day care centers in 1984 with a beat-up Raggedy Ann doll lying limp next to a chair with the huge words Child Abuse scrawled next to her in what appeared to be Charles Manson’s handwriting. So stories that were titillating, that could be really tarted up, that were about children and sex, or children and violence–well, they just got more coverage than why Senator Rope-a-Dope refused to vote for decent day care. From the McMartin day-care scandal and missing children to Susan Smith and murdering nannies, the barrage of kids-in-jeopardy, ‘innocence corrupted’ stories made mothers feel they had to guard their kids with the same intensity as the secret service guys watching POTUS.

I felt that I had been driven from the temple where for nineteen years, along with other believers, I had worshiped the great god News on a daily basis.

Όποιο και αν είναι το κόστος των βιβλιοθηκών μας, η τιμή είναι φθηνή σε σύγκριση με εκείνη ένα ανίδεου έθνους.

There are also generational knowledges in play, accessed and skilled within a history of televisual experiments in educational entertainment. For US academics schooled in the fifties, sixties, and seventies some old TV shows haunt this vignette as well. Two are Walter Cronkite’s You Are There (CBS, 1953–57) and Steve Allen’s Meeting of Minds (PBS, 1977–81). During the mid-century decades either or both could be found on the TV screen and in US secondary school classrooms. Even now the thoughtfully presentist You are There reenactments can be viewed on DVDs from Netflix; you can be personally addressed and included as Cronkite interviews Socrates about his choice to poison himself with hemlock rather than submit to exile after ostracism in ancient Athens. Cronkite’s interviews, scripted by blacklisted Hollywood writers, were specifically charged with messages against McCarthy-style witch hunts that were “felt” rather than spoken out.

Political gerrymandering fortified these trends, as both parties, with the help of voter profiles and computer technology, drew congressional districts with the explicit aim of entrenching incumbency and minimizing the number of competitive districts in any given election. Meanwhile, the splintering of the media and the emergence of conservative outlets meant voters were no longer reliant on Walter Cronkite to tell them what was true; instead, they could hew to sources that reinforced, rather than challenged, their political preferences.

Stewart and his producers put their heads together and handpicked a roundtable of first responders to appear on a panel to tell their stories. A few days later, Congress ferried the bill through a vote and passed it. The local firemen were so thrilled that they threw a birthday party for Stewart’s daughter at the firehouse—complete with a fire truck–shaped birthday cake—and Robert J. Thompson, a professor at Syracuse University, instantly vaulted him to having the same status and influence as both Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow, veteran newsmen who used their influence to turn around, respectively, a war and a government witch hunt.

The rule of thumb for all news operations is that stories are assigned their importance on the basis of what affects or interests the greatest number of one's readers or viewers. Depending on the nature of the newspaper or broadcast, the balance between what "affects" and what "interests" is quite different. The first criteria of a responsible newspaper such as The New York Times is going to be that which their readers need to know about their world that day — those developments that in one way or another might affect their health, their pocketbooks, the future of themselves and their children. The first criterion of the tabloid is that which "interests" its readers — gossip, sex, scandal.

Our life together was filled with contrasts. One week we were croc hunting with Dateline in Cape York. Only a short time after that, Steve and I found ourselves out of our element entirely, at the CableACE Award banquet in Los Angeles. Steve was up for an award as host of the documentary Ten Deadliest Snakes in the World. He lost out to the legendary Walter Cronkite. Any time you lose to Walter Cronkite, you can’t complain too much. After the awards ceremony, we got roped into an after-party that was not our cup of tea. Everyone wore tuxedos. Steve wore khaki. Everyone drank, smoked, and made small talk, none of which Steve did at all. We got separated, and I saw him across the room looking quite claustrophobic. I sidled over. “Why don’t we just go back up to our room?” I whispered into his ear. This proved to be a terrific idea. It fit in nicely with our plans for starting a family, and it was quite possibly the best seven minutes of my life! After our stay in Los Angeles, Steve flew directly back to the zoo, while I went home by way of one my favorite places in the world, Fiji. We were very interested in working there with crested iguanas, a species under threat. I did some filming for the local TV station and checked out a population of the brilliantly patterned lizards on the Fijian island of Yadua Taba. When I got back to Queensland, I discovered that I was, in fact, expecting. Steve and I were over the moon. I couldn’t believe how thrilled he was. Then, mid-celebration, he suddenly pulled up short. He eyed me sideways. “Wait a minute,” he said. “You were just in Fiji for two weeks.” “Remember the CableACE Awards? Where you got bored in that room full of tuxedos?” He gave me a sly grin. “Ah, yes,” he said, satisfied with his paternity (as if there was ever any doubt!). We had ourselves an L.A. baby.

Όποιο κι αν είναι το κόστος των βιβλιοθηκών, το αντίτιμο είναι ελάχιστο σε σύγκριση με μια χώρα χωρίς παιδεία.

Walter Cronkite, after some introduction, came on and announced, "Good evening. Dr. Martin Luther King, the apostle of nonviolence, of the civil rights movement, has been shot in Memphis, Tennessee." "Oh my god!" I cried aloud and held my hand over my mouth. I watched in horror as awful descriptions of the assassination followed. My eyes filled with tears and my chest heaved as grief and fear flooded over me. I had seen this man speak at a march in New York only a year before. In many ways I felt almost as though I knew him personally.

September 12, 1962   Walter Cronkite @WCCBSNews When the president laid out that incredibly ambitious goal to Congress back in May last year, the American space program had yet to even match the achievement of the Soviet Union in putting a single man into low Earth orbit.

Steve was up for an award as host of the documentary Ten Deadliest Snakes in the World. He lost out to the legendary Walter Cronkite. Any time you lose to Walter Cronkite, you can’t complain too much.

Sixty years ago, Einstein spoke with the voice of God. Thirty years ago, Walter Cronkite every day told us “the way it is,” and the New York Times delivered to our doorsteps “All the news that’s fit to print.” Twenty years ago, Alan Greenspan applied infallible formulas to ensure our prosperity. When I was a boy and factual disputes arose in my family, they were settled by consulting the Encyclopedia Britannica. Back then, the world of information was shaped like a pyramid. Those at the top decided signal from noise, knowledge from fraud, certainty from uncertainty. The public and mass media embraced this arrangement. All things being equal, authority was trusted and relied on. Today we drown in data, yet thirst for meaning. That world-transforming tidal wave of information has disproportionately worsened the noise-to-signal ratio. According to Taleb, “The more data you get, the less you know what’s going on.”67 And the more you know, the less you trust, as the gap between reality and the authorities’ claims of competence becomes impossible to ignore. If the IPCC climatologists fear a dispute with skeptics, how can they be believed? If the Risk Commission seismologists can’t warn us about catastrophic risk, who will? As I tried to show in this chapter, the public has lost faith in the people on whom it relied to make sense of the world—journalists, scientists, experts of every stripe. By the same process, the elites have lost faith in themselves.

Meanwhile, the splintering of the media and the emergence of conservative outlets meant voters were no longer reliant on Walter Cronkite to tell them what was true; instead, they could hew to sources that reinforced, rather than challenged, their political preferences.

What was it like before?” Sophia asked Enoch a few minutes later, after they had all got drinks at the drive-thru. The autopilot was back in effect and they were heading toward the relatively bright lights of Moab, still a couple of miles distant. She was thinking about the woman reading the book in the information center. About the whole idea of information centers. About information. “Depends on how far back you want to go,” Enoch pointed out. “Just saying that for everyone else in this car the post-Moab world is basically all we’ve ever known. Where people can’t even agree that this town exists.” “What was it like when people agreed on facts, you mean?” Enoch asked. He seemed a little amused by the question. Not in a condescending way. More charmed. “Yeah. Because they did, right? Walter Cronkite and all that?” Enoch pondered it for a bit. “I would say that the ability of people to agree on matters of fact not immediately visible—states of affairs removed from them in space and time—ramped up from a baseline of approximately zero to a pretty high level around the time of the scientific revolution and all that, and stayed there and became more globally distributed up through the Cronkite era, and then dropped to zero incredibly quickly when the Internet came along. And I think that the main thing it conferred on people was social mobility, so that if you were a smart kid growing up on a farm in Kansas or a slum in India you had a chance to do something interesting with your life. Before it—before that three-hundred-year run when there was a way for people to agree on facts—we had kings and warlords and rigid social hierarchy. During it, a lot of brainpower got unlocked and things got a lot better materially. A lot better. Now we’re back in a situation where the people who have the power and the money can get what they want by dictating what the mass of people ought to believe.

Not coincidentally, the growing popularity of globalism is linked to an anti-biblical worldview that involves the push for same-sex marriage, dismantling the institution of marriage, abortion, New Age and occult beliefs, and a decline in morals. “The biblical perspective that God has laid out is very antithetical to the kinds of things that globalists aspire to,” Missler says. “But it’s no surprise because the Bible talks about how this globalism appeal is going to be the very instrument that will be used to enslave people.” The widespread acceptance of globalism and its anti-biblical positions didn’t appear out of nowhere. Some of the world’s most prominent figures have promoted globalism and the creation of a world government, including iconic broadcast journalist Walter Cronkite, theoretical physicist Albert Einstein, author and biochemistry professor Isaac Asimov, Soviet statesman Mikhail Gorbachev, UN assistant secretary-general Robert

Twenty years after D-Day, Walter Cronkite interviewed Eisenhower on a bench in the US military cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer in Normandy, where 9,000 American bodies were buried. Gazing at the gravestones, Eisenhower explained to Cronkite, “These people gave us a chance, and they bought time for us, so that we can do better than we have before. . . . So every time I come back to these beaches, or any day when I think about that day 20 years ago now, I say once more we must find some way to work to peace, and really to gain an eternal peace for this world.

It has grown terribly difficult to separate objective journalism from opinion journalism. Back in the days when evening news anchor Walter Cronkite was considered ‘the most trusted man in America,’ there was a well-defined separation between news and opinion. Today they have bled into each other. This exacerbates division and resentment. Whereas we have long understood that Fox News leans right and MSNBC leans left, the rest of the news networks still try to pass themselves off as objective nonpartisans. This frustrates conservatives the most, since networks like CNN still proclaim to be ‘just the facts’ or ‘news analysis,’ when in fact most hosts persistently engage in left-leaning opinion journalism. It is no wonder that trust in mass media has been edging lower and lower over the past twenty years, down to 41 percent in September 2019, according to Gallup.

the splintering of the media and the emergence of conservative outlets meant voters were no longer reliant on Walter Cronkite to tell them what was true;

In seeking truth, you have to get both sides of a story.” – WALTER CRONKITE One

One of the greatest journalists of all time was Walter Cronkite, whose integrity was never questioned. Although his political leanings were decidedly left-wing, you would have had great difficulty detecting it because of his balanced treatment of the news.

Gravitas was always problematic. To the extent that it implied its owner was above the shits and giggles and nervous jiggles of the rest of us, gravitas was a bluff, and a dangerous one at that. It put leaders of institutions- or as Vonnegut rightly called them, "persuasive guessers"- in the position of dads, and it allowed citizens to comfortably revert to their familiar and comfortable role as children. "That's the way it is," Walter Cronkite told us, and we were grateful he didn't send us to bed without dinner.

he made his declaration two weeks before Easter in the most public fashion possible for the age: on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. 'I'm in favor of disarmament and I'm in favor of trust,' he [Billy Graham] said. 'I'm in favor of having agreements not only to reduce but to eliminate. Why should any nation have atomic bombs?

The previous year, on February 27, 1968, Walter Cronkite returned from Vietnam. In his editorial report, Cronkite broadcasted to the American people that “the war could not be won.” That put the nail into the coffin of victory. President Johnson said, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.” Several weeks later, Johnson announced he would not be running for re-election.

he saw that young people were not only not watching television news each night, but they were watching less and less TV, period. The high point for television news audiences came in the 1960s. In 1985 almost 50 million Americans watched a nightly network news program, but by 2008, when VBS was attempting to invent a new kind of documentary news, the number had declined sharply, to 29 million. The combined viewership of NBC, ABC, and CBS was about what Walter Cronkite’s was when he sat in the anchor’s chair and was the most trusted man in America

America’s health care system is neither healthy, caring, nor a system. —WALTER CRONKITE, former anchor for CBS Evening News

There is no such thing as waste, there are only resources we are too stupid to know how to use.” So aid Arthur C. Clarke – to Walter Cronkite during launch of Apollo 13.

Sixty years ago, Einstein spoke with the voice of God. Thirty years ago, Walter Cronkite every day told us “the way it is,” and the New York Times delivered to our doorsteps “All the news that’s fit to print.” Twenty years ago, Alan Greenspan applied infallible formulas to ensure our prosperity. When I was a boy and factual disputes arose in my family, they were settled by consulting the Encyclopedia Britannica. Back then, the world of information was shaped like a pyramid. Those at the top decided signal from noise, knowledge from fraud, certainty from uncertainty. The public and mass media embraced this arrangement. All things being equal, authority was trusted and relied on. Today we drown in data, yet thirst for meaning. That world-transforming tidal wave of information has disproportionately worsened the noise-to-signal ratio. According to Taleb, “The more data you get, the less you know what’s going on.”67 And the more you know, the less you trust, as the gap between reality and the authorities’ claims of competence becomes impossible to ignore. If

Why does the United States, the strongest nation in the world with the latest technology, weapons and equipment and the best fighting forces in the world, run away when the going gets tough?  Just imagine the aftermath of leaving Afghanistan when the Taliban return with a vengeance. The answer lies with the leadership of this country and the infiltration of socialist and communist values into our society. The constant brainwashing of the American people by the left wing news media including such icons as Walter Cronkite and the influence of liberal colleges on our youth become insurmountable and we find ourselves where we are today, 2013.

Novins had a great impact on my way of thinking and the journalist I became. Although also a friend of Walter Cronkite, he spoke to us mostly about Murrow. He had high expectations for his students.

We’re no longer basing our opinions on the same data,” Naughton said. “It used to be that we got our facts from the front pages of our local newspapers or the wire services or the networks. “Maybe we agreed or disagreed with their editorials or opinion pieces, but we accepted what was on the front pages or what Walter Cronkite reported as true and we based our own opinions on that. “Now,” he said, “we’re no longer basing our opinions on the same stuff—some folks get one set of facts from one outlet and other folks get another set of facts from another outlet, no wonder they come to different conclusions.” Naughton’s prescient observation about the changing face of journalism has only intensified in the age of digital streaming and social media.