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Tom Jackson is in a 12-step program for recovering sports writers; as part of his rehabilitation, he writes a column centered on the people, politics, passions and peculiarities of Pasco County. Email

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Pasco County News | Breaking News

Rowdy rise of ‘New Journalism’ eclipses Cronkite

Posted Jul 28, 2010 by Tom Jackson

Updated Jul 28, 2010 at 10:36 PM

Dismembering the silliness within Sunday’s New York Times column by notorious former “green jobs” czar Van Jones, syndicated columnist Jonah Goldberg waxes eloquent on the welcome rise of “New Journalism” and its eclipse of of the House of Cronkite.

A Facebook friend, the incredibly bright salutatorian from the King High School Class of 1971, sniffs that Goldberg couldn’t “carry Walter Cronkite’s shoes.” To which the fellow who graduated 17th says: Could too—nyaah—although I’m not sure if Goldberg could smoke Cronkite’s pipe.

Here’s some of the good stuff:

You’ve just got to love a former member of STORM (Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement), a Mao-influenced organization with a professed “commitment to the fundamental principles of Marxism-Leninism,” giving Walter Cronkite — the dashboard saint of American bourgeois conformity — his due as the bulwark of decency. Yes, yes, Jones says he’s grown and is no longer the Red he was even a few years ago. But come on.

For generations, conservatives lamented the decline in standards. When Hollywood portrayed glandular instincts as the new moral compass of the secular age, conservatives waxed nostalgic over the lost decency of the “studio system.” When the education industry shelved the great books in favor of hugs, conservatives lamented the demise of the three R’s and the “closing of the American mind.” When the Left became enamored with a “riot ideology” that mistook lawlessness for political protest, conservatives invoked “law and order.” Name a front in the political and culture wars, and conservatives defended the authority of authority and the tradition of tradition, while liberals and leftists defended sticking it to the man.

But now that the legacy media is one of the last resources the Left still has at its disposal, even Comrade Jones isn’t immune to mossy nostalgia for Walter Cronkite (who, by the way, is easily one of the most overrated American icons).

And now, the money graf:

The house Cronkite built did many fine and noble things. It also locked out competing points of view, buried inconvenient bodies, spun the news with centrifugal force, and racked up a formidable list of Shirley Sherrods all its own. The New York Times whitewashed Stalin’s genocide. Cronkite misreported the significance of the Tet Offensive to say the Vietnam War was unwinnable. Dan Rather, Cronkite’s replacement, began his career falsely reporting that Dallas schoolchildren cheered JFK’s murder and ended it falsely reporting on forged National Guard memos. The Rodney King video was misleadingly edited; the Tailwind story was not true. And that’s only a snippet of the list.

Happily, the worst excesses of the paleo-media (including your humble, ink-stained correspondent) no longer reign unchecked or unchallenged (even as the paleo-media practitioners attempt to ignore the revolution). It’s messy sometimes, but the relentless and rowdy pursuit of accuracy and accountability emboldened and facilitated by the Internet and assorted cable news upstarts, is all to the good.