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Back in the day when Walter Cronkite told us, night after night, “That’s the way it is,” we believed him. Maybe the news was being manipulated just as much then as it is now, but I don’t think so. He wasn’t the most trusted man in America because he made things up and turned every story into a slanted opinion piece. He was actually trustworthy. Before Cronkite, there was Murrow. Tell me Sean Hannity has anything in common with Edward R. Murrow. Yeah, that’s what I thought.
That’s why I’ve withdrawn, for the most part, from the news cycle. I don’t watch Fox News (obviously), and I tell everyone who will let me not to watch it. I’m mostly preaching to the choir, and I don’t really expect to convert any true believers. It’s hard to conceive of anyone thinking Fox News is “fair” or “balanced,” much less “news.”
I do read Salon, to find out in some kind of rational context what people are saying over there in the world of made-up news. That’s as close as I get. I don’t even watch MSNBC or The Daily Show any more, because when I do, it makes me mad at both sides. There shouldn’t be “sides” in journalism, unless there is a believable voice out there, somewhere, telling it the way it is, and uncovering facts that aren’t deliberately taken out of context and blown out of proportion. Because that’s what cable news does these days.
This isn’t a lament for the demise of print journalism, although that is a lamentable development. Newspapers have often been just as slanted as anything you can now find on cable. But the good ones gave us Murrow and his kind of reporting that made us look more closely and see more clearly. While Murrow exposed McCarthy, Fox now promotes the likes of Michele Bachmann and other nut jobs. See the difference? |
