I was a kid when this holy land was tearing itself apart over civil rights, women’s liberation, and the war in Vietnam. So, from my earliest days I understood this semi-united nation was rife with hateful, violent, misogynistic, racist, war-mongering, supremacist, blissfully unread homunculi plopped before some tens of millions of TV sets.
That said, I also understood the United States was equally chock-full of caring, serious, just, peace-craving, fully-evolved human beings who, if they, too, were plopped in front of their TVs, at least had the decency to grasp that there were better things to do with their lives and felt guilty about it.
Now, of course, we carry our TVs around in our pockets, everywhere we go. We have instant access to hundreds of millions…, nay, billions of people around the world through social media, instant communications, and 24-hour news sites. And the United States is still rife with hateful, violent, misogynistic, racist, war-mongering, supremacist, blissfully unread homunculi. And it remains also chock-full of caring, serious, just, peace-craving, fully-evolved human beings.
I’m going to throw out this sliver of optimism. It seems the boundary line between the couch-dwelling homunculi and the fully-evolved Homo sapiens sits smack dab in the middle of the populace. Witness the last three presidential elections. Each was a nail-biter. Each was fought tooth and nail to the last voter in the last polling place about to close its doors at 6:00pm. Or seven. Whenever this state or that closes its voting booths on election day.
Back when I was a kid, the numerical borderline stood far to the right. In the 1968 presidential election, the hateful, violent, misogynistic, racist, war-mongering, supremacist candidate Richard Nixon, along with the even more reprehensible George Wallace, amassed nearly 60 percent of the vote. Four years later, Nixon was reelected with more than 60 percent of the vote. So six of every ten voters preferred the demonstrably more awful candidate in those years.
Now, it’s 50/50.
Huzzah.
Even so, we’re still stuck with a hateful, violent, misogynistic, racist, war-mongering, supremacist, blissfully unread homunculus in the Oval Office. And we’re way more addicted to our screens than people ever were in 1968 or ’72. At least back then people did things like go to work, go shopping, mow the lawn, and drive their cars without watching, slacked-jawed, half-lidded, and stupefied, their TVs.
And, sure, tens of millions of people in 1968 watched brain-mushing, narcoleptic fare like Gomer Pyle, USMC and The Beverly Hillbillies, but when they watched the news, they tuned to Walter Cronkite, many of them. Maybe even most of them.
Cronkite Announces Kennedy’s Death.
Walter Cronkite walked us through Alan Shepard’s space flight, the Cuban missile crisis, the JFK assassination and, yes, the Vietnam War. He explained it all calmly, authoritatively, and evenly. When he realized the Vietnam War couldn’t be won by the US, he didn’t gloat or say Gotcha! He even feared he would lose viewers by saying so. That didn’t matter. Ever the reporter, he saw something and he reported on it. Simple as that.
Cronkite was the primary news anchor for CBS. People called it the Tiffany Network back then because its reputation as a news source was sterling. CBS, for pity’s sake, had been the home of Edward R. Murrow, as dedicated, important, and effective a journalist as ever lived or even imagined. Murrow broadcast live from the rooftops of London as Nazi Luftwaffe planes bombed the city during World War II, Murrow later took on the demagogic Sen. Joseph McCarthy, exposing the rabid anti-communist as a five-star bullshitter.
Murrow In London.
CBS News. The phrase itself sounds weighty, consequential. trustworthy.
Well, that was then. Now, nah.
The superlatively breezy Bari Weiss was named editor-in-chief of CBS News in October 2025. She has never worked as a journalist. She made a name for herself as a commentator, a click-baiting, headline-grabbing, shit-slinging commentator. In fact, her vocation has never been reportage but…, well, making a name for herself. Period.
The fact that anyone knows her name is a testament to the fact that, as mentioned earlier, we carry our screens around in our pockets, everywhere we go. She’s been a genius at making her name pop up on our screens, not for anything she has done, or anything she reported on, but for things she’s said. She’s a professional loudmouth.
In that sense, she’s a sibling of the President of the United States.
Weiss and her corporate gruppenführer, Tom Cibrowski, announced Friday that CBS News was cutting some 70 jobs and, while they were at it, shutting down its radio operation. CBS Radio was where the whole Tiffany Network thing started a hundred years ago. It was where the voice of Edward R. Murrow broadcasting from London roofs in 1940 could be heard.
It is now no more.
This follows last May’s presidential ukase ending federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. You know, the money source for the broadcasters who taught you and your kids how to count, who aired Ken Burns and Carl Sagan, who made Mister Rogers and Terry Gross and Ira Glass household names.
That sliver of optimism I mentioned earlier? It’s getting harder to see each day.
He might be wearing a mask and have suddenly popped out from around a corner and shoved his snub-nosed Saturday night special into your ribs. He’d unburden you of all your valuables — your watch, your wedding ring, and necklace, too — if he was a conscientious crook.
