Eh, I won’t defend the echo chambers on right and left, but nor am I enamored with the golden era of gatekeeping and its patron saint, Walter Cronkite. Cronkite lied through his teeth on air about Barry Goldwater’s response to JFK’s assassination and also blamed “right-wing extremism” in Dallas, when the assassination was actually carried out by a literal communist. Cronkite was sympathetic to the Soviet Union himself, so he carried water for the left.
W. F. Buckley Jr. founded National Review explicitly as an alternative to the enforced groupthink of “vital center liberalism.” One of the reasons the right lost its mind is that the right had to develop an alternative media ecosystem because the established one was so bad. That in turn gave permission for the NPR’s of this world to become leftist propaganda outlets and the Washington Posts of the world to become anti-anti-Hamas.
Eh, I won’t defend the echo chambers on right and left, but nor am I enamored with the golden era of gatekeeping and its patron saint, Walter Cronkite. Cronkite lied through his teeth on air about Barry Goldwater’s response to JFK’s assassination and also blamed “right-wing extremism” in Dallas, when the assassination was actually carried out by a literal communist. Cronkite was sympathetic to the Soviet Union himself, so he carried water for the left.
W. F. Buckley Jr. founded National Review explicitly as an alternative to the enforced groupthink of “vital center liberalism.” One of the reasons the right lost its mind is that the right had to develop an alternative media ecosystem because the established one was so bad. That in turn gave permission for the NPR’s of this world to become leftist propaganda outlets and the Washington Posts of the world to become anti-anti-Hamas.