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Cronkite has himself admitted his bias... if you want I can Google one of his many quotes.

Oh wait, here is one of them: "Everybody knows that there's a liberal, that there's a heavy liberal persuasion among correspondents."

Well, maybe I just take this as a given. Correspondents tend to be college-educated. Colleges are known to be havens for liberal thinking, so correspondents must then be disproportionately liberal. I will email the networks and demand that they hire more high school dropouts. There are, of course exceptions, like one of Cronkite's college-based nemeses who includes that quote).

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Off the top of my head, Cronkite has opposed the Iraq war because it was a military action by the US without UN approval,

Seems like one of many good reasons.

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but never once criticized Clinton's actions in Yugoslavia (without UN approval or even Congressional approval). Yugoslavia posed no thread to the USA.

I would say this criticism is *partly* fair. My memory, though, is that there was more of a sense amond the world at large after Bosnian genocide that it was necessary to do *something*, and that Clinton would have been criticized no matter what path was pursued. Who would have criticized Bush for *not* invading Iraq?

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He also raised no concerns over France conducting action in the Ivory Coast without UN approval.

This is probably a great ball for Limbaugh to bat around on his radio show, but not comparable. A former French colony with post-colonial political and miltary ties, Ivory Coast's relation to France is more in line with Liberia's historical ties to US. Did the French rush in to secure the lucrative cocoa wells and impose a free-market utopia? Did citizens around the world march in the streets against that intervention? In a lot of cases like this I think there are no perfect courses of action (Darfur? Rwanda?), but did the French intervention turn out to be incredibly stoopid? (Like another intervention that comes to mind?)

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Your missing the point of journalism. The journalists views are not supposed to enter into the coverage or the story itself. If Tim Russert is a Democrat, that's fine, who cares. His or any journalists views should not be a factor. But, if by watching a particular journalists show reveals that person's personal views, than that person is not being a good journalist because they are letting their bias enter into it. You tend to agree with the bias so you just think it's "true".

I think I have a fairly good handle on the "point" of journalism and that my standards are pretty high -- and my opinions of US mass-media "journalism" is at an all-time low. You'd scarcely believe it, but when I was a kid, network TV news organization would frequently run 1 and 2-hour-long news programs during evening prime-time -- preempting the sacred "Friends" and "ERs" of the day. Whole programs, well researched, about, shucks, the civil-rights movement, the life of people living in poverty, the war in Indochina.

Presently, we have a sitting President who *may* have been wirelessly prompted through a Presidential debate, but the only journalists with the temerity to ask what that bulge was live within the confines of a comic strip. That's not good. Of course, to ask any such questions, the Prez would have to expose himself to them, something that just isn't in his playbook.

Jane Pauley is married to a known liberal cartoonist. What biases to you detect in her TV persona? Tim Russert *is* one of those college-educated liberals, I think. What does he do that is unfair?

My home was a Huntley-Brinkley shop during that day, but on occasion watched Cronkite during his heyday. If he was overly affected by that commie internationalism world view, it did not come across in his seemingly professional delivery. He pissed a bunch of people off by opining that the Vietnam War was not winnable, and I have to believe those words had effect in many different ways. To my amazement, there are still people who think it *was* winnable, and blame Cronkite, Fonda and others for our defeat. You?

Oh, and Edward R. Murrow was, I'm pretty certain, a liberal, thank goodness.

A gratuitous liberal link. I was excited to find today that somebody put McGovern's essay up on the Web (hope it is legal!). Strangely, liberals retreat from the label. McGovern spells out what liberalism has accomplished. What has conservatism gotten us?

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He is the Godfather because he handed the duties over to Dan Rather.

Godfathers in the sense I think you mean, usually stick around in the background and whisper like Marlon Brando to their godsons. Did Cronkite keep an office at CBS?

As far as network news has sunk (I saw an NBC "in-depth" report a few months ago and timed it at 2 minutes and 11 seconds!), it is interesting to remember that Rather had better days. MACV generals and field commanders hated him, but many did, as I think Harry Summers pointed out, respect him. Does anybody in the current Iraq command structure respect Dill O'Reilly? Oh, he's not a journalist. Or is he?

Back to some of your points in that earlier post:

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....I can tell you that Bush's strategy is to keep national security (either Iraq or the War on Terror as a whole) the main issue.

I think that is clearly the case. It leaves the pro-War-ish Kerry in a much weaker spot "We'll do a much smarter job of killing people!"

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As the polls have shown, it doesn't matter if it's good news or bad news regarding Iraq. People still trust Bush more than Kerry when it comes to Iraq and terrorism. Let's not debate who you think would do a better job. The point is the polls show that this is Bush's strong point.

NPR comsymp Daniel Schorr had an interesting off-the-cuff spin this AM -- that any mention of "Iraq" helps Kerry while any mention of "terrorism" helps Bush. I don't know.

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So, when the planted ammo cache story broke, the Republicans decided it was better to drop the UN thing and keep the cache story front and center even though it was actually the Democrat's "October Surprise". Kerry's only chance is to keep domestic issues as the main focus and I think his camp miscalculated by running with the ammo cache story. There is even speculation that Kerry knew this story was coming during the debate when he said something like "and weapons from that dump are being used against our soldiers."

Knowledge of unsecured or porrly secured dumps from which insurgents could lift large quantities of explosives, ammo, RPGs were in the news early on in the "post-war" war, weren't they? I am not sure why this one is getting so much attention other than the IAEA seals.

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A funny theory is that since Clinton's people are running the Kerry campaign now, they actually did this on purpose because a Kerry victory means that Hillary can't run until 2012. This is what a lot of Republicans think is possible, I wonder what you liberals/progressives/Democrats/etc think about that... I think it's far fetched, but "fun" to think about.

I think far-fetched as well. I think Clinton operatives are involved now because the existing campaign was in trouble. If Kerry loses I don't think any stage is necessarily set for Hillary. A Kerry defeat will signify the failure of the Democratic Party DLC-style center that disparaged Howard Dean. In some respects I rationalize some of that as the very small upside if Bush wins or prevails. A small voice in my head says "Do I want to spend the next four years listening to Republicans yell 'That Flipflopper!'" and a very tiny part of me wants to say "George, you want it? You can have it." If and when a small nuke lights up some US city, there wouldn't be any Kerry appointees around to blame, would there?

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I highly doubt that the UBL tape was planned by the Bush people. That would imply that the Republicans and Al-Jazeera are working together and that's impossible. They've already endorsed Kerry

I used to think that OBL favored a Bush presidency from the standpoint of what gifts Bush has already given to him. Also, I guess there could still be people in the Islamist terror camp who want to see Bush so that the cataclysmic confrontation can continue. The more I read, though, I don't think Bin Laden cares who wins. He says as much, and I am learning to take him at his word.

October surprise? Maybe there isn't one. At this point I think either party would consider using nursing home residents to chum the Gulf of Mexico for sharks if they thought it would help get them to 51 percent. Rove, while perhaps the most willing, is smart enough to know what works, though. His masterful reputation is well-deserved, but he isn't God. So maybe there isn't a surprise....or maybe he tried to plant some fake Kerry memos and it didn't work.... or maybe we'll only learn what it was in 2038 from a deathbed confession.
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Jim


'Tis the exceptional fellow who lies awake at night thinking of his successes.