By Pablo Manriquez:*  No one I've met from the Walter Cronkite era of broadcast journalism has claimed to me that they did not trust his reporting to be accurate and significant.  And at the heart of the public's confidence in Mr. Cronkite's reporting, I'm told, was that his name, his very persona, was synonymous with personal dignity, professionalism, fairness, and with few, necessary exceptions, objectivity. 

But objectivity has its limits, even for Cronkite who, in 2004, on the eve of the Bush-Kerry presidential election, wrote an Op-Ed that originally ran in the Philadelphia Inquirer.  It is highly-subjective, almost incendiary, over the policy inaction on global warming by what he calls the political class.

From Cronkite's Op-Ed:

The contempt of the Bush administration for environmentalists and their concerns is well known by now. While evidence of man- made environmental damage mounts, the Bush team resists its implications like a defeated army whose rear guard fights off its pursuers as it retreats. That has been especially true of its handling of the most serious of all environmental issues - global warming[...]First, the administration claimed that global warming was the work of liberal hysterics and had been discounted by "more sober scientists."  Then, it admitted that it was happening but said there was no proof humans caused it, or could fix it[....]some at the Pentagon have taken on the task of studying the national- security implications of Abrupt Climate Change...What they came up with was a world whose "carrying capacity" - the number of people the globe can sustain - is being progressively lowered, a world where war becomes the rule, not the exception, and where wars are no longer fought for ideological, religious, or geopolitical reasons - but for resources and survival[...]Global warming is at least as important as gay marriage or the cost of Social Security. And if it is not seriously debated in the general election, it will measure the irresponsibility of the entire political class. This is an issue that cannot, and must not, be ignored any longer.

Tell you what.  Wanna honor Cronkite?  Write your elected officials; site Cronkite's Op-Ed; send me what you write.  I'll be on Capitol Hill all day tomorrow and will hand-deliver whatever you have to say to their office(s).  

holla@mnrqz.com 

*props to King Kaufman & Katharine Mieszkowski this start-o-the-post formatting tidbit