PrintWe're too stoopid to run our own affairs
Our frequent contributor Noel Sheppard also blogs at Newsbusters, an essential service of the Media Research Center. Noel is on the case of Walter Cronkite who thinks Americans are too damn ignorant to know what's good for ourselves.
Too bad he didn't tell us so when he was the "most trusted man in America" and serving up bad news on the war in Vietnam.
In a tirade about America not paying its teachers enough, Cronkite said:
'We're an ignorant nation right now. We're not really capable I do not think the majority of our people of making the decisions that have to be made at election time and particularly in the selection of their legislatures and their Congress and the presidency of course.'
A reader who must remain anonymous adds:
Oh so disingenuous, considering that his grandson, Walter Cronkite III, attends one of the finest private secondary schools in the country, where teachers are well paid and enjoy excellent benefits, and whose graduates move on to some of the most prestigious achievements in business, arts & culture, medicine, and government.
And that's in a city whose public school elementary and secondary teachers are paid handsomely compared to private industry salaries, benefits, and work hours for people with comparable degrees and experience. It's obvious, too, that the old fogey hasn't bothered to check out the salaries of professors at the private and public universities of that same city, such as Columbia, NYU, and CUNY.
As with his erstwhile heavily slanted news reporting, the geezer undoubtedly knows better but wants to manipulate information to persuade others to share his political beliefs.
