June 25, 2025

When I was a boy and up until early adulthood, I listened to the news from Walter Cronkite and, before him, Douglas Edwards and Edward R. Murrow, on CBS. I also watched Harry Reasoner, who was on ABC, and John Chancellor on NBC. Later, Diane Sawyer, Connie Chung, and Barbara Walters came aboard. For decades, I hadn’t seen any substantive differences in the news reported by the different networks. When a rocket went up from Cape Canaveral, when Khrushchev visited the White House and the UN, when Fidel Castro visited the US, and when President Kennedy was assassinated, all the networks reported the facts.