Who's your Cronkite?

There is no Cronkite. I'm old enough (54) to remember when most of the folks I knew stopped and sat down to watch Uncle Walter or, in our house, Huntley and Brinkley. Now, I check the evening news like you do, Rod, to get the Official Truth as promulgated by the dinosaurs who think that they still matter. For me, it's Real Clear Politics, Instapundit, you, Orthodox Chritian for Accountability, Touchstone's Mere Comments, The Anchoress and Pajamas Media. I read what y'all have to say and then follow the more interesting links. I think I'm much better informed than I used to be, and, consequently, struggle with a bear of a case of clinical depression :-)

Yeah, this is a huge deal - by way of example: My 63 year-old Father, the same man who threatened to throw me out of the house for getting a mohawk 20 years ago, now calls me on the weekends to tell me excitedly about who was just on the Henry Rollins Show on IFC. Strange times we live in.

There is no Conkite today. I get my news from dozens of sources, mostly online, ranging from liberal and conservative blogs to mainstream new sites (Fox, CNN, NYT). I don't consistently agree with any of them, nor do I consistently trust any of them the way people used to trust Cronkite.

For MSM, I still try to catch The News Hour with Lehrer at least once a week or so. I like the summary and the in depth piece.

Science Fridays on NPR.

Nova.

Occasionally Brian Williams.

NECN (New England Cable News) for the weather and local reports.

I only get basic cable so the 24hr news stations are out.

But then it's mostly the blogs. No more newspapers. Except the Christian Science Monitor online.

No Cronkite. But there is a political reporter named Alison King on NECN who I actually trust. She's very insightful. Doesn't come across as a strong virulent Dem. which is highly unusual up here. She'd be the only one.

Hey Rod, You missed most of America's New Cronkite . . .Ryan Seacrest.

He's back on the air tonight.

E.J. Dionne and Gene Robinson -- two WaPo liberals (and I know you personally admire if rarely agree with Dionne, Rod) who most definitely have NOT received the talking points from the Dem campaigns that we liberals joke conservative talking heads have gotten from the White House.

On the conservative side -- Rod, you're always intriguing, but the one I most RESPECT (simply from long experience -- I've been reading him since I was a kid) is Michael Barone. Even if I'm slightly dismayed we've made opposite ideological evolutions during that time :-)

A combination of Drudge and Instapundit. RCP is obviously very important. For meta-observation, I use CNN.com. They seem to nail The Top Story as well as anyone.

jaybird's vignette of his once-censorious father now watching ex-punk Henry Rollins with glee on cable, recalls other Byrds (lyrics via that prime Byrd-feeder Dylan, natch') forty years on -

"I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now." ["My Back Pages"]

So now me Pop, 68, takes as his audio caffeine weekday mornings the man
who was prime shockjock in my high-school daze c. 1979, Don Imus, who, after all, is less than a year his junior...with recent forays into Howard Stern and "Talk Sex With Sue Johanson"...while I'm listening to moonlit 1930s torch songs on XM with reverse-rebel abandon. Strange times, indeed.

This thread on old-media deliquescence recalls Rod's thread "And speaking of change" from an entire six days ago, which latter, in blog years anyway, makes any critique it contains seem like a Jurassic Carp by Crunchy-Contrast...

But back to TV "news". One signal reason why print and now web media will always blast broadcast news out of the water: built-in choice, item by item. Read. Skip. Skip. Skip. Read. Skip, &c.

With TV or radio, however, to get the one story I really care about, say a new scientific discovery or the death of a beloved musician, I have to sit through 20 minutes I'll never get back of The George and Dick and Hillary and Bill Show, because the newsies at Viacom, GE, Disney and NewsCorp (i.e., showbiz cloaking itself as heroic frontline tribune of Truth & Justice) decided what's good for me? Even when reading the best books, the freedom to ditch at will the longueurs is precious beyond reckoning.

And what's with this 20th-century talking-swollen-head celeb-anchor disease, with portentious martial-music lead-in themes? It would be like having, atop every story in the New York Times, an 8 1/2 X 11 head-shot of Rosenthal, Raines or Keller with a giant speech-balloon - "Turning now to Baghdad, Times reporter John Burns reports..." - with an "embedded" greeting-card soundchip blasting the 1812 Overture. No thanks. And with print/web, I have the freedom to not only "edit" my own paper, I can archive and pass to friends cost-free the keepers amid the instantly yellowed. This fetish for moving lips and dancing shadows has got to stop.

The cable "news" channels find more than ninety percent of their schedules devoted to (1) A roster of refried celebrified (though never *cerebrified*) "top(less) stories" on repeat for each wave of channel surfers; (2) Egotist shockjocks and corner-stool barroom brawlers racing for the least-common-denominator in both politics and culture (when I see an ad for an "LCD" TV, I assume its program range extends no further than The O'Biley Faxed Her and shiny-lipped anchorettes, i.e., All Boobs, all Th' Time); and (3) "Serious" squawking-head panel discussions trading in "expert" Beltway speculation too embarrassing to unearth a week later.

A closing snippet on useless news, gathered from that least useless of online treasure-houses, the archives of the great postwar humanist weekly MANAS (manasjournal.org):

"Oh for a Thoreauvian world - a world in which we do not waste each others' time with useless concerns! A world without newspapers, or very few of them, and those which exist devoted only to matters that matter. Must we wait for thousands of years before such utopian times can come about?"

[Quoting from The Unadjusted Man by Peter Viereck]: "Liberty
depends on a substratum of fixed archetypes, as opposed to the arbitrary shuffling about of laws and institutions...The contrast between institutions grown organically and those shuffled out of arbitrary rationalist liberalism was summed up by a British librarian on being asked for the French constitution: 'Sorry, sir, but we don't keep periodicals.'"

[resuming after Viereck, from MANAS] "The proper work of a review is to help readers to find their way through the wilderness of too many books, magazines, and newspapers. The reason for reading the Times along with the Eternities is to keep track of how far away we still are from the archetypes of meaning—known only in Eternity — and to locate the paths that may close somewhat the gap."

I'm 22, and I get most of my news from Drudge. I watch The Situation Room on CNN, if only because there's nothing else, and Jack Cafferty is funny. Broadcast news is worthless. I also read the paper everyday at work on lunch, which is rare for someone my age. And I browse Fark.com, but that isn't really serious. Kinda like the Daily Show of the Internet, serious news presented as a joke. To get my in-depth analysis, of course, I come to Rod!

Drudge (national news alerts), Tyler Morning Telegraph (online, my area newspaper), Dreher, Touchstone's Mere Comments, Colbert, Diane Sawyer & Crew on GMA (not as good since Charlie left), Dale Hansen (regional sports), and Paul Burka (when the Texas Legislature is in session).

Meta news comes from NPR: Morning Edition and All Things Considered; also Charlie Gibson on ABC's WNT.

Again, the point is not that I agree with the figure all, or even most of the time; the point is I trust him or her to tell me what I should be thinking about.

How about you? Who's your Cronkite?

Definitely, my husband. If it was up to me, we'd have a nice garden, read some good books, read a little on the internet, spend too much time on b-net, do some crafts, get a little exercise, and forget about everything else.

Sigh.

You need a good news source if you're in the business of writing for a living like Rod. Other than that, reading and thinking about the news and politics and worrying about all of this stuff just becomes another hobby or distraction that keeps us away from doing things that matter or make a difference in life.

I second the vote for Pat Buchanan. And he didn't even come to mind 'til Bugg mentioned him. Brilliant choice!

Scott Lahti's transposition of the TV news paradigm to print had me laughing out loud.

My wife & I went for many years with no cable, thus no CNN etc., and very little TV news at all, which gave us an odd perspective on the news--we never had much idea of the TV pseudo-events (so-and-so's gaffe, etc.) that drove so many things, didn't recognize parodies of politicos or catch-phrases, had little idea of the TV presence of major figures. Then we got cable and for a year or two switched between CNN and Fox at breakfast. It was fun for a while, but then one day we said to each other "I'm really sick of these people"--their ginned-up urgency, their saturation coverage of the trivial and superficial coverage of the serious, their endless teasing of some big story "coming up soon," their self-importance, and of course the damned commercials. Now we read the morning paper at breakfast. It's very pleasant. It's mostly local stuff. For non-local news we browse multiple sources on the net.

Younger people (younger than, I would guess, 40 or so--I'm pushing 60) may not realize the stranglehold that Cronkite and a handful of others had on the news for so long. It was a very tendentious, to say the least, view of the world, and it literally defined reality for millions of people, or rather that part of reality outside their local environment. Good riddance to them.

Reading from (Mac) Horton here a boo at cable-"news" vulgarians after my own scornful heart, I felt like extending my gloved hand from my side of the screen toward his, Robin to his Batman in good-game-we-sure-knocked-the-stuffing outta-the-bad-guys solidarity after their onomatopoeiac fisticuffed dispatch of the minions of the dark. Then I dug up Rod's old CC @ NRO blog-post on Mac, 3-23-06, and fortified my hail-fellow-well-met in his critique of hedonism, though faith yet eludes my own search, in stoic, (smallest-p) pagan Nockian resignation, for something more on the morrow than Gomorrah as we know it, given the way GOP "culture" and pop culture are chased tails to each other's snakes.

Just above Mac, Soop's on to truth in thumbing-up "Sunday Morning" on CBS, that throwback to a time in decades past when the networks at least made an effort to crack the shutters open a sliver toward the sunlit dawn of art and craft and beauty, in implicit submission to a hierarchical order. I'm sorry I've not watched it more, for it does seem like the Last of the Homed Beacons of grace among the Big-Three stooges of old-network broadcast "news".

Mine is William F. Buckley, Jr.

I never liked Cronkite, especially after Tet, when he lied just like the rest of them--for political reasons. Dan Rather then perfected the process of the MSM acting as a political fifth column.

Andrew Sullivan is one.
Dan Froomkin's blog on WashPost, and Eugene Robinson in print. At the NYTimes David Brooks and Frank Rich are my go-to columnists.

Terry Gross on NPR, and Bill Moyers on PBS, are two people who produce "the story behind the story" most consistently.

And last but certainly not least, Glenn Greenwald has reached demi-god status in my eyes. So brilliant, so scathing, so compulsively readable.