{"id":5110,"date":"2009-07-20T07:28:34","date_gmt":"2009-07-20T12:28:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=5110"},"modified":"2009-07-20T10:56:28","modified_gmt":"2009-07-20T15:56:28","slug":"the-day-the-media-died","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=5110","title":{"rendered":"The Day The Media Died"},"content":{"rendered":"

I don’t know if I was the last generation to grow up believing that the media had a sense of collective integrity – that the media really did observe the whole myth of “objectivity”, that the mainstream media (the only kind we had at the time) was honest and detached and really had integrity.\u00a0 But there can’t have been too many after me who honestly believed, growing up and getting to learn how the world works, that the media could be trusted to just tell you the story, <\/em>without larding it up with all kinds of agendas.\u00a0 People who could <\/em>be “believe in” someone like a Walter Cronkite.<\/p>\n

Walter Cronkite, who (perhaps you heard)\u00a0 passed away last week.<\/a><\/p>\n

Cronkite died at 7:42 p.m. with his family by his side at his Manhattan home after a long illness, CBS vice president Linda Mason said. Marlene Adler, Cronkite’s chief of staff, said Cronkite died of cerebrovascular disease.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Cronkite was both the last person in the American media to be imbued with that legend of integrity, and the first – to my own admittedly incomplete memory, anyway – to be accused of flouting it. He was the poster boy for “the media”; in a way, he still is:<\/p>\n

Morley Safer, a longtime “60 Minutes” correspondent, called Cronkite “the father of television news.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Let’s run with that “Father” metaphor for a bit.<\/p>\n

How many kids have you know who were the children of boundless privilege, who oozed that boundless sense of entitlement that the overprivileged have?\u00a0 Who never had to do what their forebears had to do to earn<\/em> the privileges that the kids took for granted?<\/p>\n

If you’re talking the children of dentists flitting around in BMWs and abusing waiters, that’s one thing.<\/p>\n

If you’re talking an industry and institution that grew up over two generations believing that people owed them\u00a0 – the likes of Anderson Cooper and Lori Sturdevant and Dan Rather and Nick Coleman – respect and a presumption of detachment and integrity because, for whatever reason, the media had gotten that reputation a generation or two earlier?<\/p>\n

Cronkite should have disowned the brats.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I don’t know if I was the last generation to grow up believing that the media had a sense of collective integrity – that the media really did observe the whole myth of “objectivity”, that the mainstream media (the only kind we had at the time) was honest and detached and really had integrity.\u00a0 But […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5110","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-memoriam"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5110","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5110"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5110\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}