MountainMornings

I remember Walter Cronkite, the “most trusted man in America.”. My foster parents tuned into CBS Evening News every night after dinner in the 1960s and 70s. He told us when our President was assassinated; he took off his glasses, looked up at the clock on a wall, and told us the moment JFK was pronounced dead. Cronkite helped us make sense of Vietnam. In fact, when he returned from a trip to Vietnam his usual objectivity had changed – he told us the war would end in a stalemate. This prompted LBJ to say, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America,”

Tuning into his broadcast was a ritual, like putting the kettle on for tea. But In this information age, where breaking news is lightning fast (and rarely newsworthy btw) on a phone buzzing in our pocket, the idea of gathering around a television set at a certain time is nostalgic at best. Like the Flapper hearing about the end of WWII on a radio in my father’s pharmacy. For my parents’ black and white TV generation, former war correspondent and CBS journalist Edward R. Murrow was must-hear-and-see on their nightly “…wires and lights in a box.” Murrow wrote about television:

“This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and even it can inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise, it’s nothing but wires and lights in a box. There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance and indifference. This weapon of television could be useful. Stonewall Jackson, who is generally believed to have known something about weapons, is reported to have said, “When war comes, you must draw the sword and throw away the scabbard.” The trouble with television is that it is rusting in the scabbard during a battle for survival. Thank you for your patience.” https://www.rtdna.org/murrows-famous-wires-and-lights-in-a-box

Then he would say, “Good Night, and Good Luck!” Of course he had no idea what technological innovations would be battling for our grandchildrens’ attention.

Which is why Bob and I looked forward to Saturday night’s live broadcast of the Broadway play, “Good Night and Good Luck” for weeks. Remember we’d befriended Anne Brandt in California, the mother of one of the cast members. I emphasized the CNN show on my family group text chain, I told our Germantown friends all about it at a dinner party last Friday. George Clooney played Murrow during the McCarthy era, when a junior senator from Wisconsin turned Congress and much of the country into a Red-baiting, anti-Soviet court of fear and suspicion. He went after the Army, and even fellow senators. Many liberal, and especially Jewish artists, were black-listed in Hollywood simply for having been associated with a Communist.

For a moment during the play, time stood still. Murrow invited Joseph McCarthy to come on his show, to explain his ideology, and using McCarthy’s own words from archived footage, we listened to the hatred and outright lies of the junior senator. We could see the malice and contempt in his face. And then we heard Murrow’s response in Clooney’s calm and reassuring voice, calling out all the falsehoods. This kind of ‘advocacy’ journalism was still pretty new, it too changed the tide of public opinion. McCarthy died of alcoholism three years after counsel for the US Army asked him, “Have you no sense of decency?” 

Today another news journalist has been suspended from the air waves, “ABC News suspended the network correspondent Terry Moran on Sunday after he wrote on social media that Stephen Miller, the deputy White House chief of staff, was “a man who is richly endowed with the capacity for hatred” and called him “a world-class hater.” https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/08/business/media/abc-news-terry-moran-suspended.html

Granted this was said online on X on Moran’s own time, but beyond the First Amendment is a backdrop of ABC settling a law suit with Mr T for millions over something George Stephanopoulos said on air. I’m furious this morning after reading this NYTimes article, and after seeing what’s happening in LA with the National Guard. And yet I have to believe the American public can differentiate between opinion and the who what where when and WHY of the news business, and that free speech is still our unalienable right. It’s as American as ice cream and apple pie.

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