Speaking of the media…old school was a great school
While I’m on my media kick, let me relate a wonderful experience I had last week. CBS News icon Bob Schieffer was at a luncheon here in Chicago, talking about his book, Bob Schieffer’s America.
Schieffer is one of the last of the old-school journalists who I grew up admiring and wanting to be like. He discussed how he takes great pride in not telling the world what his political leanings are. He goes as far as not even telling his wife how he votes in presidential elections – something he says they agreed to years ago.
That reminded me that his school of journalism stressed objective reporting, getting all sides of a debate or disagreement into a story and letting readers/listeners/viewers draw their own conclusions about the truth of a situation.
The idea that journalists can be objective seems to have gotten lost these days and I think that’s a tremendous loss for the country. Democracy needs a free flow of ideas and information to function properly. I don’t see a lot of what we’re getting today fitting that bill.
I’m really tired of watching TV types passing themselves off as journalists while they scream at me with their political leanings out in the open for all the world to see. Everyone knows that Fox News personalities will be espousing conservative views while MSNBC on-air types are screaming liberal diatribes. I find it all a bit insulting. I really don’t need them to brow-beat me into taking a position.
I hope this wave passes someday and we go back to an era of Bob Schieffers across the TV spectrum, but I fear that may not happen, especially given the vitriol the Internet projects into the public arena. A pity. Subjective journalism is serving to further divide this already divided country.
A final personal note, I was able to have Schieffer sign my copy of his book. I felt like a little kid again, telling him how I used to instruct my mother to call me in from play every night so I could watch him and all his colleagues, along with Walter Cronkite, on the evening news. To quote the old song, “those were the days, my friend, we thought they’d never end…”
