Power to the People, Not Cronkite-Wannabes

Conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg says the democratization of the media is an improvement over alleged moral gatekeepers like Walter Cronkite, the ‘saint of bourgeois America.’ “The media environment today is so dizzying because of two revolutions,” says Goldberg. “On one front we have the upheaval of the Internet, of which the WikiLeaks story—the leaking of 92,000 government documents about the war in Afghanistan—is Exhibit A. On the other front there’s the consumer backlash—largely conservative, with Fox News as Exhibit A—against the old ideological media monopoly. This pincer movement can be scary. But it’s progress over the Cronkite era.”