When Walter Cronkite closed his show with “And that’s the way it is.” we believed him.
When did the news stop being about the truth? The sports broadcasters don’t just make up scores and tell us one team won when the other really did. The weather forecasters might not get it right every time, but they never try to tell us it’s hot outside when we can look out the window and see it’s snowing. What happened to the political coverage: and how did so many things get political?
Every cable news broadcast has panels so they can present all sides of the story; often surrogates who spin events to sound like their candidate is always right and every other candidate is always wrong; and if they can’t answer the question, they just answer some other question of their own choosing. Having surrogates come on the air and lie is not presenting all sides of the story; it’s not the news; it’s just people lying.
I watched a disagreement about a point of fact; a demonstrable fact; there was video tape of what actually happened. In this disagreement, one person is describing what happened, and the other is saying what we were looking at didn’t happen, and sticking to that talking point in the face of incontrovertible evidence. The newscaster had to go to break and ended the exchange with “Well then, we’ll just agree to disagree.” It wasn’t a disagreement! One person was telling the truth and the other was lying. Wrong does not deserve equal time with right.
The news is so predictably infused with opinion, that we can choose the slant we want just by choosing a particular channel. I don’t want to watch the conservative news or the liberal news; I just want to watch the news.
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