Anchor Walter Cronkite speaks at Heinz Hall

As a young war correspondent for the Associated Press during World War II, Walter Cronkite… As a young war correspondent for the Associated Press during World War II, Walter Cronkite parachuted in the Netherlands, waded ashore at Normandy, and sat through the Nuremberg trials of top Nazis responsible for the Holocaust.

“I wanted to spit on ’em, and I’m not a spitter,” Cronkite said of his reaction to the war criminals he described as “the most evil men of all time.”

Entering and leaving to standing ovations, Cronkite spoke to a full audience of mostly older adults in Heinz Hall Wednesday night. He was the second guest in the inaugural season of the Pittsburgh Speaker Series, sponsored by Robert Morris University.

Cronkite, who anchored the CBS Evening News until retiring in 1981, delivered the daily news every evening in television’s first half hour, weeknight new broadcast for 18 years.

He worked with every American president since Eisenhower, and was so respected that, during the Vietnam War, President Lyndon B. Johnson said, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.”

“In the case of Vietnam, the people were so terribly confused,” Cronkite said of his war coverage during the ’60s. “I think it was the most severe division of our people since the Civil War.”

Cronkite said Americans’ confusion led him to offer one of the first news editorials in history, calling for America’s withdrawal from Vietnam after a televised feature on the war. Though he said his producers generally prohibited reporters from giving opinions on air, the network ratings increased overwhelmingly after his commentary.

The power of televised news surprised him when he began, he said.

“We were so new that people didn’t have television sets,” he said of offering one of the first televised news programs. “We didn’t have a set at home when I started,” he said, adding that he quickly bought one.

Televised news focuses too much on features and scandals today, and the many stories and pictures networks run are overwhelming, in Cronkite’s opinion.

“As a member of the older generation, I can’t absorb all the junk,” he said of the “mess” that networks today present during news shows. “We simply do not get enough news information in nine minutes of newscast.”

Cronkite blames lack of information and knowledge of historical knowledge for shutting much of America’s population out of the democratic process.

“We’re actually an oligarchy of the educated and the informed in this country,” he said, suggesting that the nation is run by a select, educated few. “The whole education system, mostly in the lower grades, is not doing the job.”

Cronkite said if television news networks used their hour-long prime time programs to “amplify news stories” instead of regurgitating scandal and speculation, they could “make the public really as informed as it could be if television set its mind to it.”

Though Cronkite believes a reporter must inform the public when a politician’s lifestyles inhibit his or her ability to lead, he thinks the media is “filled too much with scandal.”

“Among elected officials there’s a certain impiety, alcoholism and presence of women,” he said. “We the press would gossip about it, but we never used any of it.”

Supporting President George W. Bush in his quest to “stop Saddam Hussein in his tracks,” Cronkite added that he fears a unilateralist policy of ignoring international opinion could lead to World War III.

Cronkite said he doesn’t think the media favor liberal issues too strongly, though

“It kind of embarrasses me that we are so arrogant to tell other nations how to run their countries,” he said, criticizing America’s policy of intervention in other nations’ affairs. “We wouldn’t put up with that.”