Walter Cronkite: the Fox News of the past?

The Guardian offers a sharply critical obituary of the deceased newscaster Walter Cronkite, who died on 17 July. In the piece by Harold Jackson, Cronkite is criticised for his failure to report foreign affairs:

as managing editor of the CBS evening news for 19 years, his evaluation of world events helped shape his country's electronic reporting into the extraordinarily insular and inadequate chronicle it has become. That, in turn, opened the door to Rupert Murdoch's current brand of unashamedly partisan news coverage. During Cronkite's reign, the standard television bulletin, from which most Americans drew their picture of the world, lasted for 22 minutes. The consequent pressure to condense or omit meant that events in vast tracts of the globe remained unknown across the world's most powerful nation.

For his inability to report domestic news:

Important developments for which there was no film were reduced to soundbites that barely touched the national consciousness. Nor, as became apparent in crises like Carter's dithering over the neutron bomb, had a mechanism been devised to give viewers a coherent account of policies and ideas, except to make them crudely personalised.

And his political bias:

He may have kept his voting preferences secret but the tone of voice, the pause, the lift of the shaggy eyebrows rarely left viewers in much doubt of Cronkite's editorial view. He so riled Kennedy during the 1960 presidential campaign that the candidate tried to get him removed from the CBS roster. The most famous comment he actually voiced came in a 1968 documentary, made after the Tet offensive in Vietnam, when he declared that the time had come for America to negotiate with North Vietnam "not as victors but as an honourable people". A startled President Lyndon Johnson said to his press secretary: "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America." A news magazine wrote that it was as if Lincoln himself had ambled down from his memorial and joined an anti-war demonstration.

He also helped Carter lose the 1980 presidential election. As somebody else in that line of work used to say, good night, and good luck. And that's the way it is.