I have to say that I’ve always thought that the main reason Walter Cronkite was so trusted was his avuncular appearance and demeanor–kind of like Captain Kangaroo.
No-one is accusing Brian Williams of a crime. His job is to be credible and the role of the press is to hold others accountable. I agree with Hunt that it is largely a myth anyway but he shattered the myth completely and I don’t see many of his coworkers stepping up in his defense. Why? Because what he did is just indefensible. It’s not a contest.
Having grown up on Captain Kangaroo, I would much prefer him to BW. And I seriously doubt that HE ever claimed to have come under RPG fire.
Edit: In reply to Hunt’s post #240
Al Gore won though of course he lost. Best estimate I’ve seen is he actually won FL by as much as 25,000 votes, so people didn’t care all that much about his tendency to invent. I’ve already noted that people don’t seem to care much about Rand Paul’s tendency to not only invent stories but to inflate and manipulate his credentials: not only did he claim 2 bachelor degrees he didn’t have - which would get him fired from a lot of jobs - but since KY doesn’t require certification of his medical specialty, he set up his own private certification company which certified him so he could hold himself out to the public as something he wasn’t. This came out before he was elected.
So again, in general, people care more about a person who reads a teleprompter than an actual politician’s credibility.
Again, people who read teleprompters are supposed to be providing accurate information to people who vote. That is changing, of course. I don’t think news anchors are ever going back to the time when they were trusted which probably officially ended with the demise of the Rather/Jennings/Brokaw triumvirate. If a news anchor is standing on the White House lawn telling viewers what happened it is not too much to expect some basic level of believability. Why people are comparing him to mostly irrelevant politicians they apparently dislike I do not know. He is not running for anything, yet.
Well, perhaps SOME people cared enough, and we will never know if a more attractive candidate would not have won in a landslide! In a politically divided country, it is obvious that the less objective and partisanship-loaded is happy to overlook fibs or outright lies. That might account for the type of government filled with spineless activists turning into teleprompter kings, wafflers, and perennial flip-floppers we have to live with!
In the end, we also have to deal with people who redefine the word “is” or “initiative to creating!” Little wonder our new generations of students seem to remain hopelessly confused by exercises of critical reading on the SAT.
However, when it comes to the daily national news teleprompting, there is still hope that the national networks might prefer a tiny bit of objectivity in the reporting and perhaps with the required credibility. Obviously, most NO longer expect --let alone demand-- that from the partisan outfits a la MSNBC, CNN, or Fox. Frankly, nobody cares about the credibility of Anderson, Blitzer, Hannity, and the rest of them! Even the coverage of events that SHOULD be objective because not directly relevant to the US daily lives is twisted along the “partisan lines.” The recent coverage of the Charlie Hebdo was such a travesty that all hope for the CNN might best be abandoned.
Lergnom, people might care more about the teleprompter readers, but all in all, the expectations for objectivity with a modicum of integrity might a relic of a distant past. People like them as long as they utter the words that please their ears. And the rest does not matter much!
One wonders where people think the information loaded into the teleprompter comes from. BW was managing editor of the news division. While spin is inevitable, it is not meant to be an entertainment production. Personally, I admittedly did not find him at all entertaining because all the noise from my buzzing BS detector is very distracting when he is on the screen. But, that’s just me I guess.
With Stewart and Colbert stepping away, where will we get our news…
Well, if that’s where people are getting their news then it doesn’t much matter, since that is not news at all.
It was a joke, marie.
Yeah, I know. However as is true with any good joke there is a lot of truth in it. And, the number of people these days who cannot separate fact from fiction is an endless source of my daily amazement and fascination. The merging of news, opinion, PR, advocacy, and entertainment has just claimed it’s first high-profile casualty who made the mistake of drifting out of his lane. There are still lanes even though most people seem to be unaware of exactly where the lines are drawn. Oh well.
Well, Oliver North was able to get a gig hosting a show on Fox after admitting that he lied to Congress, so I don’t see why Brian Williams shouldn’t be able to recover from a much less serious transgression.
“endless source of my daily amazement and fascination” – time to stop watching TV, marie, and go to real sources of news. That way you’ll come across many people who CAN separate fact from fiction.
Because Oliver North is not an anchorman. Different lane.
Oh, it’s not just TV. Look at the mess at Rolling Stone due to advocacy journalism. It took people forever to get that the UVA story was false. I could go on but I won’t. There are countless examples.
No, North is a criminal. I guess that’s different.
Ummm… maybe the fact that The Daily Show and The Colbert Report were on a network called Comedy Central clues in most people.
But yes, it’s a place where a lot of young adults get their news. I wonder why (please read the sarcasm intended here)?
The reason people go to Jon Stewart for news is that he provides critical analysis of the news (in a funny way, of course). He doesn’t make things up, because he doesn’t need to.
Yup, the stuff is absurd and ripe for satire already. Hunt, have you watched John Oliver? I don’t get HBO, so I haven’t, but people say it’s deadly funny and totally on point. Thoughts?
I don’t watch any of them. I get most of my news from an actual newspaper.
What I like(d) most about John Stewart and the Daily Show is not the gags or the skits, but just how he shows the hypocrisy of our elected officials. Time after time, Stewart would show a clip of some politician saying “I believe that X is the worst thing ever and I will fight it to the death.” Then he’d run a clip from 5 or 6 years ago with the same politician saying “I think that X is the best idea ever and I"ll support it till I die.” The hypocrisy is staggering - and no jokes or gags are necessary.
What I don’t understand is why politicians blithely contradict themselves all the time. Don’t they realize that their previous opinions and speeches are all recorded and can be broadcast at any time? Maybe they just figure that no one ever checks - and usually they’re right.
By the way - John Oliver’s show is very funny and actually more “investigative” than the Daily Show. He tends to find a serious topic and produce a funny/serious 30-minute show about that topic (like smoking and how cigarette companies are aggressively marketing their products overseas).