If you follow the news business at all, you regularly come across the mythology of Walter Cronkite — the voice of the nation. He was a “giant,” the story goes, who single handedly turned the tide of public sentiment against the war in Vietnam with his coverage. In his day, Cronkite and CBS were trusted and respected.

My, how times have changed. Today, if you want to see BS “news” now, all you have to do it turn to CBS News.

Cronkite was a liberal, something he eventually admitted near the end of his life. But people knew it at the time. You can’t convey news dispassionately and be passionate about the happenings in the news. When he uttered his famous line — “But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy and did the best they could” — it was a shock. It was the first time a prominent “journalist,” something separate from a "commentator" at the time, had openly put his own personal beliefs on display in the course of his coverage.

Those beliefs had always been there, of course, in story-selection and what was and........

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