by Eric Peters (NAPSA)—Assuming Walter Cronkite still writes his own copy at age 87, one can only conclude that the journalist a national poll once tabbed “the most trusted man”on television is getting a bit stodgy. During his many years as the anchor of “CBS Evening News,” Cronkite carefully honed a reputation as “a fair, balanced and reliable” reporter— Eric Peters one who kept his own political prejudices wellcaged within the framework of objectivity. Now comes “Uncle Walter” to tell us that he really was a closet liberal after all, and further, the majority of his colleagues were as well. In a recent column, Cronkite openly acknowledged that he and most of his buddies in the mainstream press identify themselves as liberals. To accentuate that point, Cronkite now has joined the chorus of left-wing pundits like Ellen Goodman, Paul Krugman, Mau- reen Dowd, Marianne Means and Molly Ivins, who in their utter contempt for President Bush, have become ardent cheerleaders for John Kerry, the Senate’s foremost ultra-liberal. In his columns, Cronkite has been particularly critical of the Bush Administration’s environ- mental record—openly scolding the president for not buying into the myth of man-made global warming and for not signing the exorbitantly costly Kyoto Treaty on climate change. Yet the treaty itself is not so much an environmental document as it is a political power coup designed to transfer huge chunks of American sovereignty to the United Nations and huge amounts of American wealth to a host of socalled developing nations. The only basis for Kyoto’s mandates are two flawed 1997 computer models that print out a worse-case scenario that predicts a cataclysmic 8-10 degree Fahrenheit warming of the Earth by the end of this century. Since then new studies by respected scientists at prestigious institutions like MIT and Harvard have debunked those projections—pointing out that periods of warming and cooling have been taking place for hundreds of years, and are triggered by cycles of solar activity rather than human-induced emissions of greenhouse gasses like carbon dioxide. In his desire to castigate a con- servative president, Cronkite simply ignores the scientific evidence. He apparently is also oblivious to projections by the U.S. Energy Information Administration that the 30 percent cutbacks in energy consumption required by Kyoto would decimate the economy and plunge the country into a prolonged depression. Tf truth be told, the real motive of global warming enthusiasts is to disadvanatge America in the global marketplace. That same kind of hypocrisy has been evident during Cronkite’s 60 years masquerading as an objective, unbiased journalist. You may love or loathe Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity, but they never disguised their views as anything but conservative. Unfortunately, “Mr. Believable” spent seven decades in journalism denying he was what he was—an unblinking zealot of the left. Now at last, his fledgling newspaper column has provided us with “the rest of the story.” Eric Peters is a Washington Journalist and a contributing editor to Consumers Research magazine.
