Uncle Walter hangs up his spurs

Walter Cronkite has issued his parting shot at the world that no longer spins around him, griping like a geezer that in his day there wasn't any free speech except for those who owned presses and broadcast facilities. This newfangled media, the internet, makes it possible for any yahoo to spout off to the world.

It's not going over well with bloggers.

I noticed another severe case of "I'm a journalist; I'll tell you what to think" disease in a replay on C-Span's Book TV of an interview in February of Ken Auletta. He blandly asserted the myth of 'professional' journalist ethics and objectivity and said that people should only get their news from a single source. While he admitted that accuracy was important, he had no complaints about the New York Times, thinking that it is still generally the most comprehensive news source available.

It resembled a type of brain damage where a person can't see what everyone else does, or a confusion of liberal, J school dogma for reality.

If anybody needs proof that this is nuts, this election year should be enough proof, but if your assumption is that Republicans are intrinsically evil and Democrats unalloyed honest, compassionate and not the least political, you're not likely to see anything wrong with, say, the astonishing contrast between the press's nonstop fascination with Bush's National Guard service and it's resistance to examine the claims of other Vietnam era swift boat veterans that Kerry is not the hero he has portrayed himself to be. They seem to think that any questioning of Kerry's character is blasphemous, because he was awarded medals, and that his anti-war slander of everybody who served in Vietnam is just more proof of his heroism. If he gets elected, you can bet that all these charges will begin to be investigated and come back to haunt him, once the demon Bush has been dispatched.