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Originally Posted by roachboy
.....whether this is fascist or not is a function of the ideological contents that dominate consensus narratives.
that this environment is a type of soft authoritarian rule is evident, however: this is what american soft authoritarian rule looks like, this is how it works. this is what it is: you are in it, you are of it.
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Follow the shift in power....there was a time when a television journalist, employed by a major news network was powerful enough to call it ON THE AIR, as he saw it. In some quarters, there is no recogntion that this was not a partisan condition. It was the way I percieved as the American way.... a free press, challenging power, speaking truth to it.....
We had a thread where some posted that it was not the job of the press to find the secrets of the powerful and to publicly report them.
How do they square that belief with it's effect on their own potential to "know what they know"? Do they think their ability to be informed will be there, anyway....how could that be.....?
....In other threads, we noted a purely partisan reaction to Cronkite's power to overcome corporate control.....
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthr...ar#post2347256
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Originally Posted by Ustwo
There was once a time when Rosanne Bar was the most watched show in America. Walter was a liberal who looked conservative and respectable with a good voice. If he were to start again today he would just be another liberal pundit. Congratulations, to him for helping fuel a retreat which cost a lot of good Vietnamese their lives and subjected them to totalitarianism. Without looking I'm sure he wants the same in Iraq. Hes predictable in his liberalism.
When any president trusts a news caster for his opinion, we got issues on many levels, and thats any president, past or future.
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http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthr...on#post2448731
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Originally Posted by ottopilot
At that very moment, Cronkite ushered in the era of creating the news rather than reporting the news.
wait for it ... wait for it ... not much longer ...
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http://books.google.com/books?id=9o2...GtilHr3Q&hl=en
1968 in America: Music, Politics, Chaos ...
by Charles Kaiser -
...."To say that we are closer to vistory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unrealistic pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only reslistic; yet unsatisfactory, conclusion...It is increasingly clear to this reporter the the only rational wya out will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could."
"This Walter Cronkite. Good Night."
Never before had such an influential American identified the futility of our effort on prime-time television. The war's opponents reacted with a mixture of astonishment and glee to this battlefield conversion. Cronkite's words carried greater weight that those of any politician- and Lyndon Johnson knew better than anyone. The fact that Johnson had enjoyed a very special relationship with CBS for 30 years only increased the size of the shock. It had been Frank Stanton (then a young assistant to CBS founder William Palry) who agreed in 1938 to make the Texas congressman's radio station in Austin a CBS afiliate- and it was that decision that made the outlet the foundation of the Johnson fortune.(48)
Byt the time Stanton was president of CBS and Johnson was president of the UNited States, the two men were very close friends indeed. Stanton even redesigned the presidential desk in the Oval Office. He also provided endless technical advice in the futile effort to make the commander-in-chief look better on television.(49)
The president has unusual respect for the CBS anchor. "I can't compete with Walter Cronkite", he explained. "He knows television and he's a star. So whenI'm with him, I'm on his level, yet he knows what he's doing and so he does it better and I lose."(50) Now the president's telegenic opposite had become his avowed enemy, and Johnson was devastated by the loss of Cronkite, the personification of CBS in the public mind. The president told his aides that is he had lost Walter, he had lost the common American....
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I cannot accept how far we have descended, from the country I experienced as a high school student. I don't think it is a mystery why we are so divided and how we got to where we currently are..... a shift so far to the right, with so little recognition or protest of the shift.... as a matter of fact, it is welcomed where power and wealth are concentrated, and feeds that concentration trend.