Yes, Virginia, there used to be real journalists in television.
Perhaps it only lived for a short time in the 50s. It started right with Edward R. Murrow – whose unflinching spotlight of attention burned through hypocrisy and bullshit. He took down demi-gods like Senator Joe McCarthy, the red-baiting drunken senator who was finally shut up by another senator who finally asked, “Sir, have you no shame? At long last, have you no shame?”
Every night all three television networks do stories about extreme weather around the country and around the world. Extreme drought in the west, extreme cold and record-breaking snow blizzards in the east, rising sea water, melting glaciers and polar caps.
But, do they EVER tie it to Global Climate Change? No. Why?
Because their largest advertisers are oil companies, whose profits might be hurt if the news pointed out that they are ruining the planet we live on. It’s just that simple – networks are putting profits over the lives of the human beings on our planet.
Is there any other way to look at it. Please try to picture one of the three network anchors saying these things today, that their hero Edward R. Morrow said over 50 years ago:
To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; credible we must be truthful.
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We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. When the loyal opposition dies, I think the soul of America dies with it.
We cannot make good news out of bad practice.
We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.
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Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn't mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar.
If we were to do the Second Coming of Christ in color for a full hour, there would be a considerable number of stations which would decline to carry it on the grounds that a Western or a quiz show would be more profitable.
Just once in a while let us exalt the importance of ideas and information.
No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices.
Our major obligation is not to mistake slogans for solutions.
Most truths are so naked that people feel sorry for them and cover them up, at least a little bit.
Difficulty is the excuse history never accepts.
And my favorite…
The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer.