I would argue that even those news anchors you mentioned weren’t honest or objective. They were on the air during a time when there was no alternate ways to get the news and determine if they were being biased or not. They were free to spout one side of the news withouth objection.
Remember, even the vaunted Walter Cronkite lied about Vietnam being unwinnable after Tet.
You know this whole thing with Brian Williams really irks me on several levels. As a journalist it gives all of us a black eye. I’ve been in the civilian and/or military part of being a reporter/journalist most of my adult life and never have I felt the need to embellish or create from whole cloth anything I’ve seen, done or reported on. But then I’ve never felt the need to make myself part of the event. Like Rush said once…reporters report the news journalists put themselves in the middle of it. These days we have too many of the latter and not enough of the former.
Unlike Mr. Williams I actually have a certificate showing I met the qualifications and requirements to perform the job of a radio and tv broadcaster, perhaps if he’d stayed in college and not dropped out to go work for Jimmy Carter he would have taken the course on Ethics in Journalism and learned that integrity is everything. Whether I’m reporting a story or doing my job as an NCO leading and training soldiers, integrity is everything. You lose that and nothing else matters.
The defense of what he’s done by the likes of Bill Moyers, Geraldo and Joe Klein is equally disgusting. Goes to show they’ve learned nothing after Dan Rather and “fake but accurate”.
I thought it was interesting that Cronkite’s last name sounds almost exactly like the German word for “sickness”.
I wouldn’t call it an accident that so many Marxists got into US media during and after WWII, and beforehand as well.