"Good night, David." "Good night, Chet." Good night the true "fair and balanced" era of the media.
After a delicious rotisserie chicken salad last night, Dad and I were doing the dishes while watching the end of the NBC News, and a clip came on of David Brinkley in 1969 talking about the impending moon landing, how he couldn't quite believe it was happening. It wasn't poetry, but it was an emotional touch, not the phony-baloney human interest the news often offers today. Dad paused a moment when that was over and said, "After Murrow, David Brinkley was probably the best TV newsman there was."
I thought about Murrow and Brinkley and Chet Huntley and Walter Cronkite and drew a line of comparison...like the Mexican villagers with Chris Adams, Americans looked at them and saw men they could trust. I said that to Dad, leaving out the Magnificent Seven analogy.
"It was a different time back then," Dad said to me while we gathered the recycling and tended to the Japanese beetle traps. "There were only three networks and a little bit of news every night. We knew that whatever they told us was going to be important. And I'm sure they knew things like how Kennedy was philandering, but and this may have been wrong, but it was also sort of right, they didn't have to tell us that."
I'd read an essay earlier that day on the 150th anniversary of On Liberty, and a chord just like the ones Tyler mastered long ago rang. One of Mill's central ideas is that the government is here to protect our rights to near-complete individual liberty and step in only when our actions will harm or infringe on the liberty of others. Maybe that was why Huntley, Brinkley, and Cronkite didn't want to report on JFK and others' private misdeeds. They may have been imperfect human beings, but their personal lives were not affecting the good they were doing for society, so did the public really need to know?
Dad agreed with me, and so did Mom, who took it a step further. "My grandmother knew that whatever Walter said was the truth. He could have gone on the CBS News and said the grass was blue, and we'd have pointed out how green it was, and she would have said 'But Walter says it's blue.'"
I can't imagine anyone on TV or any source of print journalism I would put my trust in the way my parents and grandparents' generation trusted Huntley-Brinkley and Walter Cronkite. On the networks...Katie Couric is NOT the same. And CNN, MSNBC, Fox News...they're filling us in one every single unimportant or trivial detail to fill up a 24-hour day, and they want to break the sensational stories their ancestors never wanted to touch. And yes, we have a right to know the truth, but especially in the post-Watergate era and our desire to keep unearthing scandal, the truth has led us to an erosion of faith in politicians. That's why we fell in love with Obama and why we are now becoming disillusioned to various degrees...he seemed above the warmongerers and double-dealers and sex-obsessed Congressmen, but even having a clean personal bill of health doesn't mean he's immune from promising more than he can deliver. But the press still loves him because, again, that spotless biography stands out from Sanford, Ensign, Cheney, et al...
Worse, the networks all are biased to various degrees. On consecutive nights I heard Rachel Maddow and Bill O'Reilly comment on the latest CIA scandal. It was like having Da Vinci and Monet paint the same landscape and put the results side by side.
Print and on-line journalism have similar agendas. As much as everyone swears they're unbiased (except the ones who are proudly liberal and conservative and herald such a splintering battle cry on their front pages), it's almost impossible not to let personal moods enter your writing. Newsweek recently acknowledged this by moving from their decades-old traditional reporting format to an essay-based periodical in the Addison-and-Steele mode, or the papers Anthony Trollope described in the novels to which Jon Meacham is as devoted to as I. It's entertaining and very, very smart and informative, but at the price of kissing their last traces of impartiality goodbye.
The most impartial news source today is The Economist, and even that extraordinary paper is biased as well. But they are neither liberal nor conservative...that's the secret. They are pro-any working financial system which benefits all who labor and create under it. They'll slam America, but they'll also slam, Russia, China, the EU, and their home country.
The Murrow-Huntley-Brinkley-Cronkite era wasn't bias-free...they knew too much and could get more genuinely emotional back then. But by having only a limited time to deliver the news and choosing the information they felt we needed to here and delivering it straightforwardly without bells, whistles, and flashy human-interest sagas, and in terms any viewer could understand, they presented the news with authority. They were almost like our uncles or even fathers...I'm sure my parents watched their parents and older relatives tear up at the assassinations of the sixties, just as Cronkite did when JFK died.
They were personal but always spoke with sincere, direct, efficient reportage. Nothing else. And for trusting us to take it all in and come away with our own decisions, not needing magazines and web sites and blogs and fifty talking heads to make us think one way or another...we trusted them in return. The democratizing of the media is in many ways a good thing, but among the costs is a loss of that trust in almost every part of our existence. And that may make us the poorer for it.
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