Which Walter Cronkite is which? The Cronkite who complains,
I am dumbfounded that there hasn’t been a crackdown with the libel and slander laws on some of these would-be writers and reporters on the Internet. I expect that to develop in the fairly near future.
Or the Cronkite who complains (emphasis added),
Corporate censorship is just as dangerous as government censorship, you know, and self-censorship can be the most insidious form of pulling punches. Pressures to go along, to get along, or to place the needs of advertisers or companies above the public’s need for reliable information distort a free press and threaten democracy itself.
A “crackdown” on Internet speech would, of course, increase self-censorship.
Cronkite apparently had a bad experience with an unfunny Internet parody that targeted him. Cronkite threatened to sue the maintainers of a site called “Walter Cronkite Spit In My Soup,” and the site shut down rather than take on the millionaire reporter.