Walter Cronkite As The Beginning Of The End Of Media Credibility

First of all, RIP.

This is not intended to disrespect the recently departed Cronkite, simply as a critique of what he embodied & what I'm not sad to see pass with him: the media establishment.

The democratization of news & opinion found on the internet, while not 100% awesome, ought to be considered nothing less than a resounding success. Consider this quote from from John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary magazine:

[The late Walter] Cronkite, the gravelly voice of accepted American wisdom, whose comportment suggested he kept his money in bonds and would never even have considered exceeding the speed limit, devastated President Lyndon Johnson in the wake of the 1968 Tet Offensive by declaring that the United States 'was mired in stalemate' in Vietnam -- when Johnson knew that Tet had been a military triumph. Had there been an Internet in 1968, and military bloggers aplenty, Cronkite's false conclusion about Tet would have been challenged immediately; we would not have had to wait for [veteran Vietnam reporter and author Peter] Braestrup to publish his enormous book ['The Big Story,' contradicting Cronkite] nine years later. So the passing of Walter Cronkite is a moment to remember an era that has passed, an era toward which we should not experience a moment's nostalgia.

I feel nostalgic about practically everything. Not for this.

(h/t Scott L.)

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Does This Surprise Anyone?

In an article in today's Washington Times, Matthew Sheffield writes about the profane difference between conservative and liberal bloggers.

Dividing the number of instances of profanity by the number of pages of the sites on which they appear, then multiplying the result by 100 yields what might be called a "profanity quotient."

The top 10 liberal sites (Daily Kos, Huffington Post, Democratic Underground, Talking Points Memo, Crooks and Liars, Think Progress, Atrios, Greenwald, MyDD and Firedoglake) have a profanity quotient of 14.6.

The top 10 conservative sites (Free Republic, Hot Air, Little Green Footballs, Townhall, NewsBusters, Lucianne.com, Wizbang, Ace of Spades, Red State and Volokh Conspiracy) have a quotient of 1.17.

(CORRECTED PARAGRAPH:) That's quite a disparity. Liberals are more than 12 times likely to use profanity than conservatives on the Web.

One thing that is interesting to note is that the profanity ratio of a particular site seems somewhat related to the writing style of the bloggers who run it.

For instance, the Ace of Spades blog has the highest profanity quotient on the right. This is likely due to the fact that "Ace," the anonymous proprietor of the site, regularly uses profanity in his own writings and therefore is much less inclined to want to crack down on readers who respond using it.

In the interest of full disclosure, we'll point out that Sheffield is our boss. However, haters, this isn't brown nosing because we're 99% sure he doesn't read this blog.


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