I agree that Rachel Maddow and Dan Rather's discussion about icon Walter Cronkite was well done. I think the fact that they adressed the changes in the news industry, that it's become personality driven debunks all those who've posted here saying Cronkite will turn over in his grave with Maddow's success. Cronkite knew that it's now an era of opinion, Fox News started this trajectory towards opinion based news programming so for anyone to criticize MSNBC's Maddow mostly due to not sharing her opinions is ludicrous. She and railroaded Rather did a respectful insightful show which I enjoyed. I'll always choose the intelligence, charm and authenticity of Rachel Maddow...and that's the way it is.

""The authenticity of these documents was quickly called into question by a small group of bloggers, initially based on their being proportionally printed and displaying other modern typographic conventions with limited availability on military typewriters of the time. This led to claims that the memos were forgeries.""

That is a lie.

Font Ball Technology.

"The ability to change fonts, combined with the neat regular appearance of the typed page, was revolutionary, and marked the beginning of desktop publishing. Later models with dual pitch (10/12) and built-in correcting tape carried the trend even further. Any typist could produce a polished manuscript. By 1966, a full typesetting version with justification and proportional spacing was released."

"Selectrics and their descendants eventually captured 75 percent of the United States market for electric typewriters used in business.[1]"

As long as the lie got rid of Rather you have no problem with the lie, do you?

The IBM Selectric II typewriter could do all those things that the blogger claimed could only be done with a word processor and since the news rooms didn't have IBM Selectrics no one checked it out.

The blogger was an out right liar and was taken as a factual source without question.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Selectric_typewriter

"Selectrics and their descendants eventually captured 75 percent of the United States market for electric typewriters used in business.[1]"

"The ability to change fonts, combined with the neat regular appearance of the typed page, was revolutionary, and marked the beginning of desktop publishing. Later models with dual pitch (10/12) and built-in correcting tape carried the trend even further. Any typist could produce a polished manuscript. By 1966, a full typesetting version with justification and proportional spacing was released."

The same MSM that covered up the truth with a lie sells a 2007 laser printed document as a 1961 typewritten original with the same level of journalist integrity as was used to get rid of Dan Rather and portray George Bush as something he clearly was not.

People prefer lies to truth.

Hey Walsh--Nothing about Sarah today? She must have done something stupid yesterday-Hugged her child? Made breakfast?Sang in the shower? Surely something we can howl about--Oh,you're a Rachael Maddow fan? Now,how did I already know that?

Did you really have to plug your leftist buddies at MSNBC by actually citing good ole gal Rachel Maddow's name even before Cronkite's in your piece ? Yeh, right, Maddow "a trusted voice for truth" - what a croc - she's as biased as her pals Olbermann, Schultz, O'Donnel, Shuster etc as they are on Fox for the conservatives. Oops, I forgot - aren't you also one of the former ?

I don't know much about Cronkite (if he was still broadcasting in my childhood, I was too young to remember it). But I think the years between ~1950 and ~1990 were an anomaly.

In my childhood, everyone watched the same 3 networks (chosen from 5 or 6 channels), and learned about new music mostly from a handful of radio stations which were playing the same music in every city in the country. It does make me feel a little nostalgic some days (I tell my kids that when I was a kid if you wanted to watch the Wizard of Oz, you stayed up that one night a year when it was on, along with all the other 8 year olds in the country. And if you missed that, you had to wait until next year.)

But if you think about it, the fragmentation we have now, although new to us, is probably more representative of how humans experienced new things throughout the rest of our history.

In any case - is there a place for a nationally-respected figure, respected for his or her integrity today? Yes, of course. They probably exist now. But is there someone who, ( as Cronkite was said to have done) can snap their fingers and wake Americans up when we've been swallowing stupid lies? Nah. (and I'm not so sure it worked for Cronkite, judging by the current right-wing ideas about Vietnam.)

or I can make my original comment regarding Cronkite (and bemoan why these boards aren't moderated to take ALL lying Right-Wing, but I repeat myself, comments off here soon as they're posted!):

Cronkite was an actual journalist, and better than most - but at the end of the day, he was as beholden to his Corporate Masters at Brit Hume or ::contemptuous spit!:: Tom "Of COURSE Richard Jewell is guilty - the FBI wouldn't have leaked it to me otherwise!" Brokaw. He only mentioned the antiwar protests when they erupted into violence, and only then to marginalize them - same as he did with the civil rights protests. His straight-down-the middle, "objective journalism" approach never acknowledged all the things that were going on outside the camera's range - which was why so many younger people turned away from trusting "Uncle Walter" and to Hunter S. Thompson and the "gonzo journalism" of ROLLING STONE and the VILLAGE VOICE.

After listening to all of Cronkite's C-SPAN interviews today, I concluded he wasn't all that special. I'm equally convinced that he didn't think he was. The times were just better when he was on the air.

So Joan's question is better phrased as: "What would it take for there to be niches again for the Cronkites of the world to fill?"

Based on his remarks in these interviews and my own experience of those times, here are a few suggestions:

1. Make it again fashionable (i.e. "cool") to be an informed citizen. Make it pathetic (uncool) to be obsessed with celebrity gossip.

2. Make the national debate one about how social-democratic we should become, not about whether a given reform is "socialist." In a word, relegate Reaganism to the bad past that includes robber barons, segregation, McCarthyism, and waterboarding (I know). That will make our political debates serious once again, since this is how real debates are carried out around the world.

3. Stop watching, reading, or even whining about, pundits and journalists whose ideas and dittos have been discredited. This can be done wholesale for Fox News. That means: Just stop. Discuss serious things offline if need be, i.e., online. Feel and speak the way Russians did about the USSR's mass media, even if it has to be done in code.

4. Cut the salaries of news anchors so that dedicated people take these jobs again. This will follow from 3.

5. Break "thinktank" into two words and don't apply the term to an institution unless each word fits.

6. Stop treating ourselves as exceptional and exempt from laws and mandates that bind every other nation. Make ours a voice the world should listen to for the right reasons.

7. Realize (a) that we've been a laughingstock because 1-6 sound farfetched and (b) that our best days are behind us unless we stop thinking of 1-6 nostalgically.