It was the era of Walter Cronkite and Huntley and Brinkley. It was a time America trusted these network giants to tell us everything we needed to know about what was happening in America and around the world. Three narrow pipes, ABC, NBC and CBS, which filtered what we knew and when we knew it. I was there and I saw it all on our black and white television. They were all icons, but Cronkite was the biggest of the group and was uniformly trusted to provide the facts and tell us what the important news was.
I look back today after visiting the Huffington Post, New York Times, L.A. Times, Chicago Tribune, Jerusalem Post, English-language version of Al-Jazeera, BBC and many other online news sources over my morning coffee, all saved as favorites on my desktop, and wonder how we lived without the information we have now. Was the Cronkite era really the good old days? It really doesn’t matter because today the information is there for us to see or not. We don’t need to rely on a few status quo white Christian men to tell us what we need to know about America and the world.
My son, 22 years old, just out of college and starting a new job, asked me who Walter Cronkite was. He read the news to us in black and white, I told him. We now get to see not only the black and white, but the gray, if we want to take the time to look.
Mike Mitte
Edmonds
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