By CONRAD BLACK [The New Criterion] – The socio-cultural question that bedevils the future of newspapers is rooted in the decline of the prestige and credibility of the media. It is obvious and notorious that the traditional national media of the United States has fragmented in market share and lost ground heavily to newer forms of media opinion-leading. Special bugbears of the traditional liberal national media are the talkshow and television commentators of the Right, such as Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, Tucker Carlson, Bill O’Reilly, and many others. The great network newscasts of the 1950s to 1970s, with John Cameron Swayze, Walter Cronkite, Eric Sevareid, Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, E. P. Morgan, and Howard K. Smith, have become human interest divertissements about social work and jolly and progressive good things—that, or family medical alerts. The old group may have oversold osmotic education they received by wearing their trench coats through the great squares of Western Europe in the off-loads from the baggage train of General Eisenhower’s armies, but they at least tried to address real issues facing the country in the approximate order of their importance. Prior to Vietnam, there was no great ideological chasm that was easily detectable or a cause of widespread public disaffection.

My considered and carefully researched opinion is that the national media—in particular the major newspapers led by The Washington Post and The New York Times—that turned against official Vietnam policy, led the lynch mob against Richard Nixon, published the Pentagon Papers, and, then, after the destruction of the Nixon presidency and the defeat of the United States in Vietnam, showered themselves with awards and claimed the salvation of constitutional democracy and the shining hour of a free and fearless investigative press, suffered a mortal wound in the nation’s trust of them. It is a national intuition, and relatively few members of the public would volunteer this explanation for the rise of conservative opinion media and the erosion of the credibility of the old pundits and anchormen. (The exception, perhaps, and appropriately, is the glamorous and trusted Diane Sawyer, who loyally accompanied Richard Nixon from the White House to San Clemente, and is far more prescient than the current crop of vapidly talking pretty-faced heads of both sexes.)

Continued at The New Criterion | More Chronicle & Notices.