Walter Cronkite, last of the Decepticons

I was listening to On Point with Tom Ashbrook on WBUR for the drive home today and the story was about Walter Cronkite.

The first guest was Lee Thornton and she ably described the news media at a time when one of them could be rightly called the most trusted man in America. Tom asked her how it is that now it is inconceivable for a news man to even be trusted, let alone to the extent Cronkite was. Professor Thornton blamed this on talk radio and the Internet for politicising the news. Before they came along there was just the media and it was trusted for being professional and unbiased. Good Jupiter! does this woman have a blind spot! People stopped trusting the media when they lost their monopoly. You could hear an alternative take on things and to the extent that this take made sense, one lost trust in the main stream media.

It's not like the MSM just suddenly became 90% Democrat, it is that the public became aware of this. This is not a bad thing. We as a nation should never have trusted Walter Cronkite. He wasn't a bad man so far as I know, but he was a man with a liberal outlook and we as a nation made poor choices because we thought of him as objective when he wasn't. Further guests decried that had someone like that been in place before the Iraq war, then the war could have been averted. What a bizzaro world: The truth is, had the Internet existed during Vietnam we would have known what a victory Tet was for our side and we wouldn't have let the North enslave the South. The same liberals who wish a cronkite could have kept us from Iraq seem to forget that they and the current President all claimed with utmost confidence two years ago how Iraq was unwinnable.