If you follow the news business at all, you regularly come across the mythology of Walter Cronkite — the voice of the nation. He was a “giant,” the story goes, who single handedly turned the tide of public sentiment against the war in Vietnam with his coverage. In his day, Cronkite and CBS were trusted and respected.
My, how times have changed. Today, if you want to see BS “news” now, all you have to do it turn to CBS News.
Cronkite was a liberal, something he eventually admitted near the end of his life. But people knew it at the time. You can’t convey news dispassionately and be passionate about the happenings in the news. When he uttered his famous line — “But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy and did the best they could” — it was a shock. It was the first time a prominent “journalist,” something separate from a “commentator” at the time, had openly put his own personal beliefs on display in the course of his coverage.
Those beliefs had always been there, of course, in story-selection and what was and was not reported, but they never owned it in that way. Now, journalism has been reduced to nothing but the sharing of journalists’ opinions and crafted narratives.
What has changed most recently is that the left has lost its monopoly on information. Now, it flows freely from everywhere, leaving people to decide for themselves. We still do not have unbiased media, but we have all manner of biased media that empowers audiences to sift through the facts and draw their own conclusions.
The reason the establishment media hated the late, great Rush Limbaugh so much was that he began the process of killing their monopoly. Rush showed the world what was on the cutting room floor — the things liberal media found inconvenient or didn’t want the public to see — and he shared it with tens of millions of listeners every day. He paved the way for Fox News, the Drudge Report, X (formerly Twitter) and every conservative outlet bringing eyes to, as Paul Harvey used to say, the rest of the story.
When they whole story became available, the truth was exposed about just how biased the media had always been. Rather than correct course and become the “unbiased truth-tellers” they’d always pretended to be, most ran headlong to the left. The news as reported by NBC News and MSNBC today is often indistinguishable from a DNC press release.
The chief anchor at ABC News is someone who helped run Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign and served as press secretary for the Democrat. Later, while a journalist at ABC, he participated in weekly phone calls with former President Barack Obama’s chief of staff to talk strategy.
Knowing this, and so much more — that CNN and MSNBC basically serve as golden parachutes for Democratic administration officials — it came as no surprise when CBS News dedicated last Sunday to advocacy for canceling the freedom of speech.
It started with “Face the Nation” host Margaret Brennan embarrassing herself by claiming the Nazis’ Holocaust was caused by the freedom of speech. It was shocking in its abject ignorance.
But it got worse. That evening, “60 Minutes” spent most of its show highlighting, in a positive way, German authorities’ criminalization of “hate speech,” which they define in such a nebulous way as to include anything that might upset the sensibilities of any Ivy League sophomore.
During her ride-along with Germany’s Thought Police, “60 Minutes” correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi only accidentally wandered close to asking a critical question about their work suppressing non-conforming opinions.
“You’re doing all this work,” she said. “You’re launching all these investigations. You’re fining people, sometimes putting them in jail. Does it make a difference if it’s a worldwide web and there’s a lot of hate out there?”
Walter Cronkite would surely regret to know that he served as the tip of the spear for this disgraceful transformation of his former employer and his profession into what it is today. The primary work of CBS, NBC and ABC News is now to spread propaganda and skewed narratives, and to wall off their audiences from differing perspectives and inconvenient facts.
This is why their audiences are dwindling and their organizations are dying — and it cannot happen fast enough.
Derek Hunter is host of the Derek Hunter Podcast and a former staffer for the late Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.).
