Cronkite represented a trusted source of information. Most of the kind of rubbish coming from TV personalities (I won’t call them journalists) on news networks today would be considered utterly distasteful by Cronkite’s standards. If you could reach back in time and grab Cronkite at his prime and bring him to today’s television he would be completely unwelcome and out of place. His earnestness and lack of bias would make him both an alien and a joke among his peers. Sitting in front of a camera holding the latest nonsense about what happened to a celebrity, and being asked to make pointless rebuttals against heedless inflammatory comments from a competing network, Cronkite would stare disbelievingly at the sheets of paper in his hand and become visibly sick on camera.

Whether we like it or not, journalism is an integral part of democracy because we count on journalism to ask questions to hold political leadership accountable for their actions. The moment in history when American television journalism shamelessly and gleefully sold its soul to the devil was the Iraq War. American television journalism gave the Bush administration a complete and total free ride into war without ever questioning the validity of the Bush administration’s actions. Journalism abandoned its mission for reporting the truth and took on a mission of pitching an unjust war to America. Not even did the media question having their hands tied in how they covered it, looking like an industry of penned sheep. Cronkite would never have been welcomed in that time. Reporting the Iraq War his way back in 2003, as he did with the Vietnam War, would have labeled him a traitor, and Americans by the millions would have demanded he be pulled from the air sighting “liberal bias” “unpatriotic” “We live in different times” and “right or wrong we support our president”.


Despite the fact that television journalism has since split its allegiances, it has done nothing to redeem itself. It is a muck and mire of editorial platitudes pitched recklessly back and forth among competing ideologies in a pointless game of one-up-man-ship. People may continuously argue one side of ideology is more to blame for this than the other, but it cannot be denied TV personalities use this to feed content to their programs. Self-fed self-generating controversies have reduced a news industry to an entertainment industry with no more meaning or point to them than a wrestling feud. Pragmatists may argue somewhere between all of this therein lies the truth, but how the hell is a reasonable person supposed to discern the truth among so much nonsense? We need journalists to be dispassionate, to give us news whether we like the news or not with no allegiances whatsoever to ideologies or ruling administrations. And we need one that is willing to stand up and report the truth even when (especially when) it’s not popular, such as giving negative news prelude to war.

We don’t have such a journalist today. Cronkite was the last and maybe the only of his kind and he’s dead. With him passes the last source of truth, no matter how ugly or hurtful or even unpatriotic that truth may have been, and so passes a nation that was interested in hearing it.