While I doubt this is [biographer] Brinkley’s goal, because of Cronkite’s longevity as first a reporter and then a television newsreader, Brinkley reveals numerous examples of plenty of hypocrisy from his subject, as Cronkite internalizes leftwing pose after leftwing pose.
For example, in December of 1973, “the Gay Raiders,” a protest group designed to generate a more sympathetic portrayal of gays on both fictional and news TV programs, sent Mark Allan Segal and Harry Langhorne, two of its representatives, to sneak into Cronkite’s TV newsroom set in New York under false premises, to hold up a sign saying, “Gays Protest CBS Prejudice” while Cronkite was live and on the air nationwide with an audience of over 60 million viewers.
While they succeeded, the CBS cameras quickly went black.
A few months later, while the pair of Gay Raiders were being tried for second-degree criminal trespassing as a result of their stunt, Cronkite struck up a conversation with Segal, and expressed his sympathy for his cause.
