from Nightlife, 10/09/03

Walter Cronkite:
An Exclusive Interview with the Most Trusted Man in America

introduction and interview by Chris Wissmann

Walter Cronkite, who appears Thursday, October 9 at 7:30 p.m. at the SIU Arena, stands as a man of extraordinary integrity, even by the standards of the cloth from which he was cut. Beginning his career in high school as a newspaper reporter, in 1936 Cronkite helped pioneer broadcast journalism at a Kansas City radio station before moving in l939 to the United Press International. Thus began a career in which Cronkite would cover nearly every major world event for the next thirty-nine years, during which time he would set the standard for hard-hitting but honest, objective reporting.

As a UPI correspondent, Cronkite covered many of World War II's most significant events alongside giants like CBS's Edward R. Murrow.

In 1950 Cronkite came aboard CBS, and in 1962 he became the anchor of the CBS Evening News, a position he held until 1980. From 1967 until his retirement, helped by some of the greatest names in broadcast journalism-- Eric Sevareid, Roger Mudd, Dan Rather, Daniel Schorr, and Bill Moyers were among CBS's reporters and commentators during Cronkite's tenure-- Cronkite led CBS to the top of the Nielsen ratings. One poll famously named him the most trusted man in America.

Cronkite's SIU appearance will consist in part of an interview with former U.S. Sen. Paul Simon, followed by a question-and-answer session with the audience. Senator Simon, of course, heads the SIU Public Policy Institute, which is sponsoring the event. Admission is free.

Nightlife spoke with Cronkite twice last week, on October 1 and 2, and here's what he had to say:

I think you've been to Carbondale before. I have a photo of you in 1960 interviewing Buckminster Fuller, who was a professor here at Southern Illinois University, though I'm not certain where it was taken. Do you recall the interview or its subject?
[W]hat we were talking about [was] the geodesic dome, almost solely. And of course, he was so interesting on all views of the progress of mankind, that we indulged him a lot. Just a wonderful conversation.
(l-r): Walter Cronkite interviews the late, great
SIU professor R. Buckminster Fuller in 1960
in his geodesic dome at
407 South Forest Avenue in Carbondale.
Courtesy SIU Media and Communication Resources.
I don't know it was so much a wonderful conversation as much as kind of a wonderful lecture, but it was a delight for me

And he came up with the greatest idea, that I started trying to promote. It didn't get anywhere at all. He wanted to put the bicentennial [celebration] in Philadelphia under a geodesic dome-- the entire downtown area, the old historic area of Philadelphia, he claimed could be put under one great geodesic dome. Not only would it therefore attract historically minded people to help celebrate the American bicentennial, but people would come from all over the world to see the world's largest geodesic dome, under which much of the modern city would be protected from the elements.

Right now I'm reading a book called Understanding Power by MIT professor Noam Chomsky. He theorizes that reporters who ask "the wrong questions" just can't find work in the mainstream media. Do you see any truth to that?
I think that's a prejudiced view, clearly, and no-- a reporter's job is to ask the tough questions, and most reporters, I find, are fair about their questions. They may seem to be prejudiced when they're [asking questions], because clearly, any top official, particularly a president of the United States, or someone of that huge a responsibility, is very, I don't want to say "temperamental," although that might be the right word, in the sense that any question that challenges their decisions seems to them to be a dangerous question [in] the first place, and a question that indicates prejudice.

I don't think that that's the case....

It takes a certain fearlessness to stand there against a president of the United States, or any other top official, and require them to defend themselves in action they've taken. [Politicians] don't like doing that, that's not what they're used to. They're used to yes people surrounding them and telling them, "That's a wonderful thing you've just done, Mister President or Senator." They don't like people saying, "How can you possibly do that when it's going to cause this kind of unemployment problem or that problem?" They don't accept that.

Do you see the major media outlets ignoring any major stories or subjects, because of concentration on issues like Iraq, and if so, what are they?
I think that the major news media are doing a good job of covering the stories of the moment. If there are stories out there that I haven't read in the papers, then I don't know that they're there. [chuckling] I'm not a full-time White House correspondent these days, nor even a Washington correspondent, so I'm not hearing the rumors as much as I might otherwise. I don't hear of anything that the press is not covering.

I think our the press is a quite good press in this country. I'm not concerned about it either showing political bias in its basic reporting... or sloth in failure to cover the stories of the day. I think we're getting pretty good reporting.

Embedded reporters in Iraq created some controversy. How is that different from what Murrow's boys and you did during World War II in terms of collaborating with the military?
Well, the situation up to the time of this Iraq war was a very serious and dangerous one for the American democracy following Vietnam. The military was so upset at the nightly television coverage of the war in Vietnam that they thereafter, for the next three of our wars [Grenada, Panama, and the first Gulf War], as small as they were-- which includes the first Iraq war, which was not so small-- but on all three of them they denied us the ability to cover the military activities at all.

The first Iraq war was a particularly onerous example of a complete blackout, denying the American people the right to know what their boys and girls, sent on the most dangerous assignment that our people could be in-- a war, a battle. We were not permitted to report on how they performed at all, either good or bad. We were not able to send our correspondents with the troops, or our photographers with the troops, at all. They did a pretense of selecting a pool of reporters, but then they didn't give the pool of reporters facilities to go along with the troops.

This time, I was very pleased, that after our considerable complaints about that lack of coverage of the first Iraq war, they developed this embedment program. And while there were some flaws it it, it was a vast improvement over no coverage at all, and as a matter of fact [it] pleased me greatly, because I would have doubted that we ever would have been showing live television coverage of our troops in action.

I had assumed that we would never have been able to do that because I was mistaken as to the degree of our technical achievements. I thought that any picture that you tried to relay by satellite over the battlefield would be intercepted by the opposing general in his bunker a couple miles away, and we would never be able to transmit that to the states without that interception, which would of course give the enemy information that they could never get any other way.

But actually, the technicians found a way to sanitize that information, so it couldn't be intercepted, apparently. So we got a look at the war in a real live fashion that we've never seen before.

One of the disappointments in it for many of the correspondents and for us as viewers was the determination that these correspondents would be assigned to units, one to a unit, and some of those units weren't in action. And because the networks, particularly cable networks, had expended a lot of money to embed those correspondents, why, because they were concerned about the morale of the correspondents themselves, giving them all a chance, they put a lot of these correspondents on the air when they had nothing to report, and there was a lot of wasted airtime because of that, I felt.

How do you feel about the Federal Communications Commission's decision to lift some of the broadcast-ownership restrictions, and do you think that's going to have an impact on how the networks and other broadcasting chains are going to cover the news?
Well, it certainly could have [an impact]. The elimination of competition is a very bad thing in a democracy that depends on a free press to advise the electorate as to how their government is performing for them, and the problems within the government and within this nation itself.

The democracy is going to be best informed by as much news competition as we can possibly afford. I think it's much better if you have competitive news sources in every community.

I think one of the weaknesses in our democratic press these days, and that's a small d of course, is that so many cities really are without any newspaper competition at all. The number of single-newspaper cities has grown immensely over the last couple of decades, and now there are very few cities that have more than one newspaper. That's much to be amended, I think. The competition of newspapers is an insurance policy against monolithic editorial policy, and also competition is a guardian against sloth and careless reporting.

How important do you think objectivity is in news reporting? Is it important to take a stand in reporting? If so, when?
Oh, no-- it's very important not to take a stand in reporting, and impartiality is an absolute, fundamental principle of good journalism, if you're talking, of course, and I assume you are, of the news pages. Of course, that does not apply to the editorial pages, the op/ed pages of what so many papers have today-- that is something else again. That's where opinion is supposed to be expressed. But not in the news columns.

How about news-magazine shows like Sixty Minutes or Now with Bill Moyers? Do you see more room in there for subjectivity?
Well, yes, I think so, because I think those programs, and you named two of the best, are meant to be and are understood by the audience to have a point of view in their reporting-- although that applies more to Moyers than it does to Sixty Minutes. I think Sixty Minutes tries, and succeeds most of the time, in giving both sides of a story.

The difference of Sixty Minutes from the others is that their reporters are hard-hitting. They go after a story with all guns firing. That appears, I think, to the audience to be at times taking sides. But I think as you examine the stories as covered, they really get around to both sides of the issue.

Can you tell me a little about the Interfaith Alliance and what prompted your involvement in it?
.... The problem was that the alliance between the conservative right and religious organizations had grown particularly offensive to many of us who consider ourselves, if not good churchgoers, at least basically good Christians.... And we were being accused of not being good Christians by not being good conservatives. That was a hideous charge to lay against most of the American people, I think.

As a consequence, many of us felt that we should stand up and answer that kind of a charge and that kind of an assault and that was the basics of the groundwork of the Interfaith Alliance. The major objective was to [promote the belief that] one's religious feelings were not indicative of one's political opinions necessarily. [Editor's note: for more about the Interfaith Alliance, log on to <http://www.InterfaithAlliance.org/>.]

I've heard conservatives try to smear you for your involvement in the Interfaith Alliance, particularly your fundraising activities, and using that to call into question the credibility and objectivity of your entire news career. Your response?
That's exactly what we were fighting against [through the Interfaith Alliance]. That's typical of their twisting the facts to the degree that they cannot be recognized any longer.

You were widely rumored to have been courted by the Democrat Party to run for president in 1984. Was that true, and what motivated your decision not to enter politics?
One of my proudest claims to impartiality is that I've been invited by both parties to run for high office. I've been visited by delegations from both parties to run for various offices, and that I think is some indication of the fact that party honchos don't know what I stand for, either. [chuckling]

If history repeats itself, as someone who's had a front-row seat to so many major world events, what do you believe are the most important issues that the United States is likely to face in the coming years?
Well, I think there are two that are so evident today on every front page almost every day, and that is our foreign policy and now our exceedingly great and increasing deficit

The deficit is going to plague this democracy of ours through our grandchildren's and our grandchildren's grandchildren's generations. It is immense. It is going to prevent us from doing many of the things which we should be doing in this country to better our own nation. Even the care of our infrastructure-- it needs a lot of attention. Our highways, our bridges, our dams, all of our natural resources need attention, they do need it right now, we don't have the money to take care of it. We don't have the money to build the schools we should build. We don't have the money to pay the teachers what we should be paying them. We don't have the money to organize the healthcare that we believe today that a civilized, progressive people are entitled to.

All of those things are denied to us by this terrible deficit. I think it's going to be a long, long time before we recover from that. The most advanced economic years are still going to pile up into quite a number before we have the money to do the things we really should do for our country.

And in the foreign policy, we are going to have to retreat from this arrogance that has created an enmity around the world for American people and... the country as a whole. We have flaunted our military strength in these last couple of years of this [presidential] administration, and to a degree that we are looked upon with great suspicion by most of the peoples of the world, and that is something we are going to have to remedy in the years to come.

As a matter of fact, the New York Times has revealed the coming document... from the committee, the panel that indeed the White House organized, to study why people around the world view us with some alarm these days. And the panel says the alarm is certainly the way people view us, that they view us with great enmity, and this is particularly true of the Arab nations, of course.

(l-r): Walter Cronkite with former
U.S. Sen. Paul Simon at a press conference
before his SIU speaking engagement.
Do you think it's possible for us to back away from that, though? We've kind of drawn a line in the sand, and were we to back away, certain leaders in our country would probably view that as a big loss of face.
Well, I'm not saying we have to cut and run from Iraq. I hope we can get out of there soon, but with a little bit of our reputation intact. The more of that we can salvage the better, obviously.

No-- there will be a loss of face....

Well, let me put it another way: There need not be a loss of face if we adopt the kind of policy that would again impress the peoples of the world with our faith in them and our willingness to share our riches with them, our willingness to share our abilities, our... technical capabilities with the rest of the world, so that we can help uplift the rest of the world, and not simply threaten them with our aggression if they don't comply with what we think is right.

What role can the media play, if indeed it is the media's role, to motivate the American public, or to motivate the government of the United States, to pursue that kind of policy?
Well, what the press has to do is to write the editorials if they're trying to influence policy. You don't influence policy by deliberately casting the front pages and the evening news broadcast with that news which will push one policy or another. That's not the impartiality and the fairness that news principles dictate.

What we do by influencing people is by accurate reporting of the facts of a situation-- and the accurate reporting today is beginning to reveal, indeed, this growing enmity overseas, and it ought to be apparent that we ought to do something about it.

One thing about this country of ours-- it's a shame that so few, such a small percentage, of our qualified voters go to the polls. That is an indication that they are not well enough informed to adopt an attitude of their own, that would take them to the polls to vote for what they believe [is] right, the people they believe can put to right what they would like to see done.

You know, Tom Jefferson said, "The nation that expects to be ignorant and free expects what never can and never will be," and that is the motto we all ought to live by.

The news organizations do not have the responsibility of educating the public. We have the responsibility of informing the public of the events of the day. The education job should be assumed by our educational organizations. We've got to improve our teaching quality. We've got to improve our schools. We've got to try to live up to the [George W.] Bush promise that no child shall be left behind. We need to build schoolbuildings. We need to build better school facilities. We need, definitely, to pay our teachers more money. They are a vastly underpaid profession considering the dependance we have on them to educate our public well enough for it to take its part in our democracy, and that's what has to be done

You touched on how people are not voting as much as they used to. They're also not watching or reading the news as much as they used to. What is the key to getting more people interested and wanting to be informed?
Educational process. If we try to dumb down the news as some television operations do, if we try to dumb down the news, even some print does in the scandal press, in order to lure readers to the newspaper or to lure them to a broadcast, we are not functioning as we should. We've got to elevate them

And we have to expect that the educational institutions will deliver to the democracy people who are informed enough, educated enough, to want to know more about their democracy and how it works, and the problems of the day. That's education's job, not newspapers' job.

My last question is, what do you anticipate will be the subject of your lecture at Southern Illinois University next week?
Well, I want to talk about whatever the people want to talk about. My little appearances, like the one I'm very proud of next week out there, particularly being with Paul Simon, who is one of my absolute idols in American public life-- I think he is a great leader, he's been a great writer, and his books are really, as I have suggested, encyclopedias of democracy.

At any rate, I answer questions. It'll be up to [Senator Simon] to kind of interpret what the community would like to hear, and then I assume that the evening would be open to questions from the audience. And if that's the case, why, I would answer them as I have answered you-- as honestly and as straightforwardly as I can.