The End of Journalism As We Knew It

I grew up listening to Walter Cronkite giving the evening news. The feeling of trust that some version of what had happened in the country and the world had been delivered was definitely there.

I’m stuck in O’Hare and listening to CNN now. Wolf Blitzer interviewed a pair of Trump supporters trying to bolster Trump’s bizarre statements yesterday about reading the “body language” of people giving him an intelligence briefing. Blitzer asked the latter of these, a Rep. Duncan Hunter (* missed his last name earlier, saw a reference later) (R, somewhere) about it, and Duncan asserted that certainly the top military folks were upset with Obama and Clinton, that the administration had not listened to the military’s advice. Blitzer went so far as to ask how Duncan knew this. Duncan replied that certainly the military withdrawal from Iraq was done against the military’s advice, and represented a break between the administration and the military. And Blitzer said nothing of consequence in response.

One would think that Wolf Blitzer would be familiar with the agreement for the US military withdrawal from Iraq, and how that was negotiated and signed off on by the previous president, George W. Bush, and further, that any departure from that agreement, such as a delay in timing, would have required the Iraqi government to sign off on it. One might think that, but no evidence that Blitzer was anything except a clueless cub reporter would have been apparent from his further discussion with Duncan.

Our media is letting buncombe artists have free play in conning the American people. It’s a sad time to have to admit having once had something to do with the practice of journalism.