Comments on: Walter Cronkite and True Journalism

By: pawheel

pawheel — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 14:18:08 +0000

To Indodiver34;

The things you describe are horrible beyond belief. However I would respectfully ask you, would the US staying there longer done anything more than delayed that psychotic behavior? I have also read that the war was fought by the U.S. in a way that made it impossible to actually win; we would drive the opposing forces from whatever area we were fighting them in, then leave it so they could come right back. I guess I'll never understand what happened there. I do remember Walter Cronkite and other newspeople giving the nightly body counts as though it were a baseball game the highest number loses. I was a child then.

By: pawheel

pawheel — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 12:18:08 +0000

To Indodiver34;

By: indodiver34

indodiver34 — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 15:36:04 +0000

On April 8th of 1975 the U.S. began the final pullout of troops from Saigon. In April 1975 the Cambodian communists had circled Phnom Penh and the American backed regime. When the hippies, leftists and peacemongers succeeded in stopping the Vietnam war the support of the Cambodian regime in Phnom Penh stopped and the U.S. pulled out leaving the country at the mercy of the Cambodian communists. The U.S. pulled out of the “pointless war” and while all the hippies in the U.S. celebrated peace the Cambodian communists executed anyone that could read and write, killed anyone with an education, Killed all Christians, killed anyone with glasses, outlawed money, killed all foreigners, blew up the banks, killed everyone from the old regime, took babies away from their parents, cut out peoples livers and ate them, threw babies in the air and caught them on bayonets, gave 10 year old kids ak-47's, grabbed babies by the ankles and whacked them against trees, outlawed religion, appointed people man and wife, made people breed for the “organization”, made kids spy on their parents, made mosques into pig styes, outlawed all modern medicine, marched all city people into the countryside, and ultimately killed almost a third of the Cambodian population. They never did succeed in their vision for an agrarian Utopia where everyone shares, farms together, does away with modern things, and they never did make a country where there “are no servants and there are no masters.”

So while you preach peace, don't forget what happened after the U.S. pulled out of Cambodia and Vietnam. I still see the effects of it every day in Cambodia.

By: Eric77

Eric77 — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 15:07:14 +0000

I agree. I'm too young to have watched Cronkite, but I get the feeling from what people say about him his style was much more PBS than what CBS/NBC/ABC are today. Jim Lehrer's show is the most informative out there.

I don't watch evening news anymore, because as pawheel mentioned, it's mostly fluff.

By: RachelK

RachelK — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 18:52:00 +0000

Knowing this will invite potshots, I suggest that Jim Lehrer and the News Hour, and PBS news shows generally, do a good job of covering issues, rather than the polls about issues. At least they have more than one viewpoint represented, and talk for more than 30 seconds at a time about a subject.

By: SisterMarie

SisterMarie — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 18:23:39 +0000

I will always remember and respect Cronkite because he recognized early the futility of our intervention there. The soldiers who fought there were from my generation and I respect their service. I had hoped that we would never ever get involved in another needless conflict because I though the politicians had learned a lesson from that conflict. I was wrong. Unfortunately.

By: pawheel

pawheel — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 13:36:30 +0000

We have lost a lot in the nightly news in this era. Not as much research is done, information handed out from the Government is often assumed to be fact and reported without further research. Many people, myself included, look to news sources from overseas to hear another side of the story, which may or may not be accurate for the same reasons.
I personally rarely watch the evening news. I watched it for the last few days, and when they discuss the Healthcare debate for example, they discuss the politics of it, not the issues that need to be decided. An uninformed country cannot make informed decisions.

By: TedVothJr

TedVothJr — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 02:11:03 +0000

With a name like 'Cronkite' his family were probably some of the first wave of German immigrants, 'Pennsylvania Dutch'. (,Krankheit' is German for 'Sickness', of all things; why any family would call itself that is beyond me.) So I've always supposed that the man might have 'Peace Church' connections, Mennonite or Brethren. That might account for a lot of his character…

By: Joe_Allen_Doty

Joe_Allen_Doty — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 21:23:52 +0000

Walter Cronkite went to South Vietnam in 1968 after the Tet Holiday Offensive was over.

The "Holiday Truce" started on January 31 and I left Chu Lai, S. Vietnam on February 13, 1968. I was with the US Army's Americal Division from November 1, 1967 until the day I left.

I told my sisters this morning that I wish he had gone there in 1966 and saw what was really going on then. I had been with the 196th Light Infantry Brigade from February 19, '67 until I was transferred to Americal.

People around here in Oklahoma and elsewhere say that "We lost the war in Vietnam." Well, we weren't even fighting our own war; we were fighting South Vietnam's war with North Vietnam and the Viet Cong of South Vietnam.

We have no military solution with the war in Iraq which was declared by the George W. Bush Administration. The Christians in that country are being harassed and/or killed and their churches being bombed, too.

In spite of what the returning US Military are told to say, we haven't taken democracy to Iraq and the freedom religion doesn't exist their either.

I told both of my sisters that with the passing of Walter Cronkite and the CBS news programs on him on Saturday and in the CBS' 60 Minutes show time period, I had tears come to my eyes while watching those shows while those who knew him talked about their relationship with him.