Can I tell you something?
I’m old enough to remember when news came in over a wire. Not a social media feed, an actual wire. I was born after the telegraph era so stop snickering, but it wasn’t that long ago a grand total of two major services, the Associated Press and United Press International, provided all the news that was fit to print or broadcast. And this will be hard for younger readers to imagine but they were providing accurate accounts of actual events involving actual people that were supported by actual facts, not simply making shit up.
At six o’clock every weekday evening, Walter Cronkite on CBS, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley on NBC, and Peter Jennings on ABC – Jennings actually smoked on air which wasn’t very healthy and set a terrible example but was pretty fucking cool – delivered compendiums of news in sonorous voices with great solemnity befitting their job title of anchorman. Women at this time weren’t trusted to give us anything more consequential than the weather report so the job of anchorwoman didn’t exist yet, but the anchormen on the big three networks gave us the straight scoop on what was happening in the world. And because what they told us was well sourced and confirmed according to strict journalistic standards, absent even the slightest hint of spin left or right, we believed them. In fact, Walter closed every telecast with his famous catch phrase, “and that’s the way it is.” And it was.