I remember Walter Cronkite. I remember when Walter Cronkite's voice was like the voice of the Deity in my home. I was very young when he was still the anchorman for CBS. But he was, in those days, like your grandfather. A distinguished, firm but quiet man with the most soothing and clear voice and a totally unflappable presence in your living room. It was a time when people actually gathered around their single television set and listened to the evening news together, as a family, because well, because that was what you did in those days.
At the same time I was getting to be familiar with Mr. Cronkite, while I was growing up in East Orange, NJ, my family introduced me to a collection of records by Fred W. Friendly and Edward R. Murrow. Well, not by them really, but recordings of them and other broadcast journalists of the time. It was called "I Can Hear It Now." I listened more or less in awe to the quality of the reporting. There was no shading, no spin. It was the straight rendition of facts, often reported as the events were in progress - the explosion of the Hindenburg, Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling, the Scopes Trial verdict, the Trial of Bruno Richard Hauptmann for the kidnap and murder of the Lindbergh baby, and so on and on. These men, who more or less established broadcast journalism on the radio and, at the time, the primacy of CBS News among its few competitors, became heroes to me. They were not heroes because of their opinions, but because they stood close to danger and forces of nature and political change and reported straight out what they saw. Their language was clear and unequivocal. You could almost see what they were describing. And they never seemed to need to have an opinion to get their story across.
Later, as Vietnam took over the evening news, we began to learn of the public's obsession with television coverage of the war and, subsequently, other disasters and calamities, and something changed. Mr. Cronkite, Messrs. Huntley and Brinkley, and a variety of then lesser lights at ABC began to shade the news with emotional details about the Vietnam War. Not amazingly, given the power of this still nascent medium in those days, people began to share those attitudes. The government was slow to react to this, not having anticipated the change in society that could be effected by this approach.
I like to think that for Walter Cronkite, this was a little like the Curse of the Body Snatchers. One night he went to sleep, avuncular, wise and knowledgeable. Before he awoke, some alien pod had been substituted for him and he gradually went over to the darker side of existence, where integrity and objectivity meant a lot less. Arrogance was suddenly the currency where Truth and Accuracy had once reigned. It was clear that Americans needed to have difficult concepts explained to them, that mere reporting of the facts would not quite do. And it seemed equally clear to the networks, I suppose, that they had the responsibility to do that educational task for the not-too-bright viewers who nightly camped in front of their anchor desks.
(Mr. Cronkite most recently distinguished himself by assigning blame for Osama Bin Laden's Election Eve threat video to Karl Rove. Aside from the fact that this sadly demonstrates how far from his high perch Mr. Cronkite has tumbled, I believe it also reveals an inner bias that ultimately won out over his ability to interpret facts objectively.)
Dan Rather is the successor to Walter Cronkite. Dan's first rise to national prominence (that I recall) was as a Dallas reporter during the events surrounding John Kennedy's assassination in 1963. With the rise of Lyndon Johnson's Texas-bred administration, Dan had easier access than most to the halls of power and used it well. All of that is, I suppose, rather well documented at this point (no pun intended).
Dan is but the tip of the iceberg, as they say. His fall (and he has fallen, regardless of how CBS chooses to jettison him from his post) contains elements of real Aristotelean tragedy in that his hubris led to this, not external events.
In an equally large sense, his fall is just a metaphor for what has happened to the mainstream media. News organizations are now geared to producing non-stop anxiety and calamity for their viewers. Winter snowstorms are covered for days in advance on local stations while warnings about shrinking supplies of bread and milk are repeated hourly. Hot spells in the summer are characterized as killers of the old and young. The truth (and all sense of proportion and responsibility) be damned! How are we going to attract viewers tonight?
How will they stop the madness? How will they recover their place in American life?
Perhaps the larger question is how will they ever preserve their First Amendment rights if it can be shown that they have routinely failed to do their ordained duty? And what will become of our democratic republic if they continue to so fail?
Make no mistake, this is a watershed day in American history. Our constitutional liberties are very much in play and at risk. What the broadcast and cable networks do next is of great import and we must all pay close attention and continue to try to push them back toward responsible journalism and away from the cliff that they seem to be drawn toward with increasing regularity.
UPDATE:
Isn't the difference between the media today and the media we used to have (and would profit by having back) beautifully summed up in Mary Mapes' phrase, "...the segment presented to the American people facts they were free to accept or reject..."?
If you present facts, there is no acceptance or rejection and this is where the MSM gets lost.
You can present part of a story, a story that is partly factual, or a story that is based in fact but has major flaws in it. None of those presentations is journalism.
Good journalism presents facts that are no longer in dispute as a result of the work of the correspondent, and allows the audience to reach their own conclusion. If you listen to the recordings of Edward R. Murrow and others of his generation, you will hear the facts and be allowed to conclude on your own what they mean or portend.
In the end, it is CBS' hubris that caused this problem, more than any other single factor, including Dan's estimable ego.
And I find the cowardly acts of Messrs. Heyward and Rather to be the most despicable postscript to any story in recent memory - perfectly in line, though, with their arrogant attitudes and decayed moral compasses.
