A bridge too far ...

... I would say. No, I disagree entirely on whom Cronkite was & was not the "father" of in this medium. And this after making myself watch a 2 hour program on Cronkite's most memorable years & moments, narrated by none other then Cronkite himself.

In my opinion the "father" of those such as Limbaugh & Hannitty (a clear attempt to allow me to find some reasonable middle ground on Cronkite's legacy) would be the likes of McLaughlin and Buchanan. Their argumentative, fast paced politically heavy editorial programs were, if anyone was, the precursors to conservative A.M. talk. And even then that's a tough stretch, for even if you loathe Limbaugh it was HE that pioneered a national political talk radio program. They simply did not exist prior to his success because talk radio dogma dictated "local, local, local", not to mention the "fairness" doctrine's implementation until the Reagan FCC reversed that position.

And more importantly be it Limbaugh, McLaughlin, Hannity et al, NONE of them ever purported to "report" the news or offer "unbiased" commentary. They have always maintained their equivalency to the editorial page, in other words there was no deception in the discussion, whereas Cronkite's entire presentation and long career was promoted as "down the middle" coverage, trustworthy reporting, just pick your favorite adjective. And in that 2 hours he even noted that he was quite worried at the time for adding his editorial at the end of that infamous broadcast your mother remembers. And his momentary worry further bothers me because it presumes that instance, and that instance alone, was his only example of bias.

And there we return to it - when did it become the industry STANDARD to insert an opinion into news reporting agencies that purport to be "straight news?" My contention remains that this occured during the Vietnam War era, with Cronkite as its biggest offender. NOT because he was the most biased or the only one, but because he was THE voice of the American news experience, the heir to Murrow, the most famous and watched reporter in perhaps the world. And once he allowed his feelings to be inserted into his news broadcasts he made that action permissible, indeed the standard, for all mainstream press to come ... and because of that we are all a little less informed.

Now let me opine briefly upon one other subject that stuck in my rather buff craw during that 2 hour tour through his career. He noted that more than any other action he received hate mail on broadcasting unfiltered images of the War, i.e. dead US soldiers, fire bombing, that infamous footage of an 18 year old Marine setting the thatch roof of a village's family home on fire with his Zippo, and so on. His commentary on that decision (and once CBS did it ala Cronkite every other agency felt they had the green light), was, "I don't regret it for one second. After all, if we are going to ask our young men to go to war, do we not owe it to them to witness the horrors for which we have committed them. They are after all representing us around the world, and if they misbehave, well ... we need to know that too."

Excuse me? Actually NO, we DO NOT need to broadcast the horrors of war for all to witness. In fact we send those young men into harms way so that the women, children & the elderly back home DO NOT have to witness those horrors reaching their own backyard. I can't fathom the devastating impact it would have had on the maturing of this nation into a world superpower were the horrors of Gettysburg, Antietam, Monte Cassino, Bastogne, North Africa, and on and on and on were broadcast in living color direct to the homes where each of these boys and their neighbors lived (albeit the Civil War brought that reality into many a home without the aide of TV). This also presumes that prior to "the Cronkites" & the advent of the television set that Americans in the 200 years prior NEVER properly shared in the horrors of her many wars. I'd say that every mother, father, son, daughter, brother and sister that had that military car pull up in front of their house, the flag presented or letter sent, "shared" and bore witness to the horrors of war. It is madness to insist that "seeing" the horror is necessary for a waring nation to properly judge the worth of the conflict. In fact perhaps even the opposite is true. And in that vein I certainly blame the White House & the DoD for dropping the previously strict rules of media access into theaters of operation. During a time that the television anchor & the broadcast news program was coming into its own, competing for ratings like any other show, surely it was inevitable that visceral images would eventually reach the nightly broadcast if access of the media was to be unlimited.

And let me close with this ... Cronkite, in this special (that had to be filmed in the 1990's I'm guessing), was rather amused about his various titles of "TV's best dressed", fans seeking autographs, being on celebrity magazines & in gossip columns, etc. And it occurred to me that he is also the father of the modern premadonna anchor, the "rock star" journalist ... and that evolution has been such a valuable informational tool for us all as well, hasn't it?