One of the people I really loathe is reporter Daniel Schorr who is now with National Public Radio. Gregory Bresiger has a nice review that slams Schorr’s recent autobiography, Staying Tuned: A Life In Journalism.
The interesting thing in the review is Schorr’s continuing prevarication over one of the more audacious lies in broadcast news. Prior to his party’s convention, Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater travelled to Germany for a vacation. Schorr went on-air and reported that while in Germany, Goldwater had been forging links with right wing extremists, going so far as to visit an old vacation spot used by the Nazis.
According to Bresiger, Schorr claims in his autobiography that, “In reporting that right-wing German groups were rallying to Goldwater, I had not intended to suggest that he was cultivating ties with them.”
That is a bit hard to swallow since what Schorr told CBS viewers was that, “It is now clear that Senator Goldwater’s interview with Der Spiegel with its hard line appealing to right-wing elements in Germany was only the start of a move to link up with his opposite numbers in Germany.”
The odd thing is this distortion was relatively mild compared to Walter Cronkite’s bogus on-air report that Goldwater would skip John F. Kennedy’s funeral in order to make a speech to political supporters in Indiana. In fact Goldwater was there to attend the funeral of his mother-in-law (Goldwater almost stayed out of the presidential race due to such blatant media attacks).