Liberals weep for the icon whose unwholesome admixture of news and personal opinion was the first step in the transmogrification of a somewhat free and independent press into the State-run media we’re now saddled with:

Los Angeles (E! Online) – George Clooney, Hollywood’s unofficial spokesman for everything, was among the first to pay tribute to that other great voice of a generation, Walter Cronkite.

“He was the most important voice in our lives for thirty years,” the Oscar winner, who delved into the history of the CBS newsroom when he directed and costarred in Good Night and Good Luck, said in a statement Friday night.

“And that voice made people reach for the stars. I hate the world without Walter Cronkite. ”

Leaving aside the maudlin hyperbole, I’m sure 4 million Southeast Asians murdered by the communist jackals Cronkite helped to unleash on them would disagree.

Diane Sawyer could identify, actually.

“A call, a note, a compliment from Walter was pretty much the Nobel Prize for a young reporter,” the Good Morning America host said. “I am so lucky to know what it was to be part of the Cronkite team.”

Calling him the “defining anchor of America’s story,” Sawyer said he reminded us “of what we can be at our best.”

Yeah: blind propagandists for a proven-failure ideology — one that destroys prosperity, usurps Constitutional government, restricts liberty, punishes success, stifles creativity, and has murdered hundreds of millions of its own hapless subjects throughout the world. Some “honor.”

Cronkite was, of course, not only the estimable predecessor of the big three, Rather, Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings, as well as the trio that followed them, including ABC World News anchor Charles Gibson.

“Walter Cronkite was and always will be the gold standard,” Gibson said. “His objectivity, his evenhandedness, his news judgment are all great examples. He, as much as anyone, is responsible for developing network television news. He set the standard. He told it ‘the way it is’ and all of us who are privileged to work in this business owe him an enormous debt of gratitude.”

Well, the rest of us owe him a whole lot less than that. Here’s who and what Cronkite really was, absent the hagiography and genuflection:

Walter Cronkite was not an active agent of the North Vietnamese, in the sense Jane Fonda was. He spent the rest of his life steadfastly insisting his editorial judgment on Vietnam represented his honest and heartfelt opinion. When measuring an event of such enormous importance, it hardly matters what his deeply felt personal reasons were. What he did not do was simply and clearly report on the outcome of the Tet offensive, and allow his viewers to decide what they made of it. The Communists came to understand the value of their propaganda victory, with General Giap later saying “The most important result of the Tet offensive was it made you de-escalate the bombing, and it brought you to the negotiation table. It was, therefore, a victory…The war was fought on many fronts. At that time the most important one was American public opinion.” (Contrary to Internet rumors that will probably start floating around again this weekend, Giap did not specifically credit Walter Cronkite with making this “victory” possible.)

Cronkite’s career saw the rise of advocacy journalism in the modern sense, along with the birth of terror warfare. The two developments are not unrelated. Terrorism benefits from access to a media that sees itself as international and “open-minded,” rather than aligned with the patriotic interests of its mother country. Journalists of Edward R. Murrow’s day would have named al-Qaeda killers as vermin, without hesitation, and applauded American soldiers for exterminating them. Cronkite decided the vermin were invincible. His descendants give interviews where they proudly state they would not warn American troops of an impending terror attack, pass along terrorist propaganda and doctored photographs as news, and dispatch reporters to search for signs of defeat when victory is imminent…provided a President of the wrong party sits in the White House, of course. Say this much for Cronkite: he didn’t care that Johnson had a (D) after his name. To Keith Olbermann, nothing else would matter.

After Cronkite came the deluge.

And a most noisome and toxic deluge at that, one that continues to plague, poison, and diminish a once-great nation.