Walter Cronkite

Walter Cronkite was a fixture in my family. Everyday his CBS News nightly broadcasts were eagerly watched. Each Saturday my best friend in high school and I would view the weekly body count deaths from the escalating war in Vietnam (wondering if soon we would be on that list). We called him “Uncle Walter.” Only later did we find out that virtually everyone else in the country did so also. He was considered “the most trusted man in America.” Here is something I wrote upon his death after my eyes had been opened.

Cronkite and the Fourth Estate

With the death of their paragon Walter Cronkite, the true collective face of the Establishment media is exposed once and for all. It is not the noble visage of an intrepid crusader for truth, but a sagging countenance, oily and obsequent by decades of lying and servility to their masters. But of course this is not how the press perceive themselves. They are not like you or me. They are a special class of beings. They are the Fourth Estate, an imaginary extension of the rigid class structure of pre-Revolutionary France from the Estates General.

In the Ancien Regime there was the clergy, the nobility, and lastly, the bourgeoisie and commoners.

The Fourth Estate see themselves on an equal par with the first two elevated classes, and above the third. It is the aristocratic notion that gentlemen and ladies of the press serve a vaunted “public interest,” and do not soil themselves with activities of a rank and sordid commercialism. Such endeavors would be a violation of their hoary journalistic ethics. They have a public trust to enlighten the masses in their duties to their betters, those who compose the state and their adjunct servitors in the kept press. With the passing of Cronkite the stark reality is all too apparent, even to these lumbering dinosaurs.

Much of the crucial development of the mass communications industry and its powerful impact in the 20th Century can be traced back to three pivotal men, the three Walters: Walter Lippmann, Walter Winchell, and Walter Cronkite. Each came to dominate their respective fields in mainstream journalism, and each had solid ties to the intelligence apparat of their times. Both Lippmann and Cronkite served as military intelligence officers in wartime, while columnist and broadcaster Winchell had many of his contributions secretly penned by intelligence operatives.

That age of the staid lumbering dinosaurs has truly past into obscurity. It has been succeeded by the present media era of shrill carnivorous ideologues and unctuous, ubiquitous regime stenographers. But the fundamental profit-making base objective has never changed: disseminate disinformation masking as news for their elite ownership – the military-industrial complex and its adjuncts of defense contractors, Wall Street banks, Big Pharma, etc. which form the Corporatocracy of ruling oligopolies seeking control of governance, domination, and surveillance of its lowly vassals and useless eaters.

Through it all the establishment corporate media of presstitutes and regime stenographers have piled lie upon duplicitous lie, as craven adjuncts of the deep state.

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