Killiana1a said:
I do have my moments where I get wistful like some fringe right-wing conservative hearkening back to the good ole days of the 1950s. I would say a discussion on camera that catches each men at their worst is more polite than a media, which will take 30 to 45 seconds of a long speech by Shirley Sherrod and sound bite it to make it sound as if she is racist. Neither Gore Vidal in calling William F. Buckley Jr. a "crypto-nazi" nor Buckley's response of calling him a "queer" and threatening to punch him in the face so that "he will stay plastered" was polite. However, the way the media handled it by showing both sides in it's entirety is more polite than Fox News or MSNBC taking a couple of words or a sentence out of context and sound biting it. |
Yes, because Walter Cronkite could give everything its full due and place it in its full context in his half hour news show. And Lord knows that even though he was a screaming liberal, he was a 100% honest broker of information and would never ignore, spin, or diminish a story that didn't fit his worldview.
Whatever the manifold flaws of the 24 hour news cycle, you're dreaming if you think things were better back then. The difference is, if Shirley Sherrod got railroaded back then, it would have stuck. Especially if the powers that be decided it should stick. In reality, it was sorted out within a matter of days once the full video came out.
