I grew up listening to the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. For many it is hard to realize that in the days before cable news and the internet we have few choices for news and information. Cronkite dominated the 60′s and 70′s in television news.
There was a problem with that which I only came to realize years later. When a few powerful and influential people control the stream of information you will only hear part of the story. Even if we respect and trust people it is a fact and inevitability that information will be filtered, selective and sometimes distorted. We are better served today if we learn how to use the information in front of us.
This article by John Podheretz in Commentary reminds us that one of the biggest reports of Cronkite’s career, of the Tet Offensive of 1968, was a distortion of the facts. But we did not know it at the time.
While we nostalgically remember Walter Cronkite’s famous sign off, “That’s the way it is…”, we must face the honest truth that his reports did not always tell us the complete story.
As Podheretz concludes, “…the passing of Walter Cronkite is a moment to remember an era that has passed, an era toward which we should not experience a moment’s nostalgia”.