On the heels of the bogus Einstein Bees quote and the bogus Thomas Jefferson Deflation quote comes news that the claim that newscasters in Sweden are named “cronkiters” after legendary newsman Walter Cronkite is also bogus.

David Halberstam gets the dubious honor of first reporting this untruth, having mentioned it in an Atlantic Weekly piece in 1976:

In the spring of 1962 Cronkite became the CBS anchorman. He was rooted in a certain tradition and he was the best of that tradition. He set standards by which others were judged. In Sweden, anchormen came to be known as Cronkiters….

Cronkite himself repeated the claim in his 1996 autobiography A Reporter’s Life:

I remember hearing Paul [Levitan, CBS producer] first explain the term [“anchorman”] as referring to the person on a relay team who runs the key last lap, and then Sig said it referred to the steady anchor that holds a boat in place. In any case, the meaning had been changed forever, and I was the first bearer of it. Sweden was a little slow to adopt the term. There, for some years, anchormen were called “cronkiters.”

Amazingly, no one bothered to fact-check it until after Cronkite’s death. It illustrates the level of Cronkite’s credibility that he could (innocently) repeat this falsehood and people would take him at his word.

If Walter said it, then that’s the way it was!