The beginning of the end for TV news came with the forced retirement of Cronkite. Dan Rather, with his famous retort to Nixon (despite how much Nixon deserved it...) showed me that he was not the newsman Walter was. He was the new breed. The self-aware. The self-important. The "talent" who would be promoted...
I don't blame Rather. He was just a sign of the times, when news became a profit-center and any sense of "doing the right thing" fell to the ceaseless call for more money to go to the bottom line.
Today, from the top down, news on TV is mostly a cult of personality. A place where endless hours are spent on Jacko the Wacko to the exclusion of actual news.
For those who are too young to remember those halcyon days, trust me, this is not just the gauzy reflections of an old fart; things we better back then...
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The beginning of the end for TV news came with the forced retirement of Cronkite. Dan Rather, with his famous retort to Nixon (despite how much Nixon deserved it...) showed me that he was not the newsman Walter was. He was the new breed. The self-aware. The self-important. The "talent" who would be promoted...
I don't blame Rather. He was just a sign of the times, when news became a profit-center and any sense of "doing the right thing" fell to the ceaseless call for more money to go to the bottom line.
Today, from the top down, news on TV is mostly a cult of personality. A place where endless hours are spent on Jacko the Wacko to the exclusion of actual news.
For those who are too young to remember those halcyon days, trust me, this is not just the gauzy reflections of an old fart; things we better back then...
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