Cronkite, Communist

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From TPM Reader AH

Not everyone loved Walter Conkrite. I remember when I was in college in the mid-’70s one of my classmates earnestly telling me that Walter Conkrite was a communist. His proof?? Before Nixon went to Peking (it was still Peking back then), Conkrite referred to the country as “Red China” – but afterwards, he referred to is as “the People’s Republic of China” (Conkrite wasn’t alone – most of the US media made this shift once Nixon took his trip). And that was the proof that Conkrite had been brainwashed and was now a communist and couldn’t be trusted.

One of my very first introductions to wingnut thinking….

From one standpoint, this probably surprises no one. But it is worth recalling that with all the deserved encomiums for Cronkite, it was as much as anyone else, Cronkite who was the target of the decades long right wing assault against the “liberal media.” In some ways, he represents the pre-cowed establishment media.

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