We want just the facts, Jack!

Have you ever seen the Betty White meme about taking a pounding? :)

Betty white meme eh?

Wow 5 months ago. Time Flies when you're having memes lol
imgflip.com/i/13kp2z

I'm surprised you remembered :)

Thats been making the rounds so long it has its own Snopes page.

I appreciate your comment and agree that it's not very pleasing to the eye (pun intended). I chose to favor the message over the look of the meme.

Sorry, couldn't resist.

[image deleted]

sorry for some reason this didn't post

Whenever I think about how ridiculous the current situation is, I also think about Cronkite as the gold standard of how it was and should be. You never knew how he felt personally about whatever he was reporting, unless it was to add a kind word on occasion. He just stuck to the facts.

It was rare that he put bias on his reporting. The most memorable time was when he choked up announcing the assassination of JFK. He never held back on his excitement when he reported on our space program.

He was the most trusted man in America for a reason: he reported facts.

A decade before the fairness doctrine was scrapped, I was in high school, and part of my English program included Journalism classes. I shake my head on much of what passes for news. A reporter creating a story from thin air, reporting it as fact, lost their entire career for that.

I ride my local papers when they report an event and fail to inform. Most of it comes from police press releases. They are not journalists. If you don't have all the facts, advise the reader so it shows that you are doing your job.

A new story needs facts. Who was involved. What happened. Where did it occur? When did it happen? How did it happen. Why did it happen?

News suppression is also a major problem.

Mark Twain saw the problem with the Yellow Journalism of his time. I don't remember his exact quote, but it along the line of, "if a man doesn't read the newspaper, he is uninformed. If a man reads a newspaper, he is misinformed."

Yes, Cronkite could teach a lot of journalists a few things.

Be careful who you idolize. There's always more than meets the eye in "journalism."

Beyond being wrong about Vietnam, Cronkite got it wrong on one of the big issues-freedom versus Soviet communism. In the 1974 book, TV and National Defense, Dr. Ernest Lefever examined how CBS News programs for two years had covered national security issues and concluded that the news organization was “an active advocate of several national defense positions which were frequently critical of U.S. policy, and usually from a perspective that implied or called for a lesser military commitment and lower defense expenditures.”

In 1972, for instance, the CBS Evening News aired nearly 1,400 presentations supporting the dovish view. Contrary or hawkish positions were aired only 79 times.

Asked about the charges, Cronkite displayed the bias that guided his news program, saying that “There are always groups in Washington expressing views of alarm over the state of our defenses. We don’t carry those stories. The story is that there are those who want to cut defense spending.” The “most trusted man in America” didn’t deserve our trust.

In 1979, he gave an interview to the Soviet magazine, Literary Gazette, and told Vitaly Kobysh that the “Soviet threat” was “most likely…a myth.” According to the magazine, Cronkite went on to say that “I will never believe in a ‘Soviet threat.'”

Shortly after the interview was published, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan.

http://www.aim.org/aim-column/the-terrible-truth-about-walter-cronkite/

Okay, let's start from the top: Vietnam. Kennedy saw we were in a no win situation. He had already had ordered a withdrawal of troops which had started the autumn of his death in '63. Johnson, upon taking office, immediately reversed that order. Fast forward to the Tet offensive, and Cronkite's comments that it was at best, a stalemate, but that it was unwinnable. It prompted Lyndon Johnson to say, "If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America." And he was right. Less than a decade earlier, Eisenhower warned us of the Military Industrial Complex, and he was right.

Cronkite didn't pull his opinion out of his ass: he went into the field and got the story directly. As we've seen, the DOD fudged the numbers of US & Vietcong casualties to make it look like we were winning the war.

No, Cronkite was correct on Vietnam. He was correct to report the truth of the boondoggle our government and the MIL that Ike warned us about.

You point to an article where Cronkite stated that he did not believe there was a Soviet threat. He's not the first one to say that. Once tourism opened up in the USSR, Robert Heinlein and his wife visited the country. As she had learned to speak Russian, she was able to speak with Russian citizens about the state of their country. Bob also made his own observations. Smaller families were the norm, while the population was far from its pre WWII number. It's a good article and you can find it in his collection EXPANDED UNIVERSE, under the chapter "Pravda Means Truth"

No, Walter earned his title the most trusted man in America.

Oh, as far as the military budget, we spend more on defense than the next five countries combined. FDR showed how to use a military budget to improve the country in tes of peace, and to prepare for times of war. The later was an unexpected side benefit. We need to re uid our own country before we go off destroying others. But, that's another issue. One Trump would be better at achieving than Hillary.

Thanks for proving my point.
Cronkite DID give his opinion and was a new world order kinda guy...just like 99% of all "journalists."

Remember: opinions contrary to his were only given 5.6% of the time ... but he was 100% objective ..... lol riiiiiiiight.

Did you know that "gullible" isn't even in the dictionary???

I watch the BBC news simply because there is a world of newsworthy stories outside of the USA. Sometimes the PBS News Hour but they have bias.

Fox and CNN seem to be the worst offenders...

Perhaps, but every new day in this election reveals more and more media bias. For instance NBC is said to have sat on the "grab em by the pussy" tape since this summer, waiting for the perfect time. It's really not just one or two, I can't think of any that have integrity anymore.