Walter Cronkite

CBS News put its disturbing love for censorship on display this weekend on its two premiere programs, Face the Nation and 60 Minutes. The network offered a preview of the affection the authoritarian left is likely to exercise during the next four years for just shutting up everyone they disagree with at the point of the bayonet. When J.D. Vance took the stage in Munich to offer a calculated and well-crafted critique of our European allies for their betrayal of shared Western values of free speech, he had to expect there would be a response.

Once upon a time, in a land faraway, CBS was called the “Tiffany Network.” The network’s glittering jewel was its news division. This is the story of that division’s decline and fall, driven by partisan goals and leftist ideology. CBS News gained its fame in the 1940s, under the leadership of Edward R. Murrow, who not only painted a vivid word-picture of London during the Blitz, but also recruited the best broadcast journalists in the business. For decades, they formed the core of CBS News, first on radio and then on television. That tradition continued through the 1960s, when tens of millions of Americans turned to Walter Cronkite for an honest report of the day’s news. If the newscast included editorial comments, as it sometimes did, they were offered by Eric Sevareid.

It's no secret that mainstream journalism awards have gone to the dogs. The Washington Post and the New York Times both received Pulitzer Prizes for their "reporting" on Russiagate, for example, though their stories desperately hinted at a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia that didn't actually exist. The NYT's Nikole Hannah-Jones received a Pulitzer for the widely debunked 1619 Project. The Walter Cronkite Award has previously been given to NBC News's Chuck Todd for excluding so-called "climate deniers" from his broadcasts, a CNN journalist who described the 2020 riots in Kenosha as "fiery but mostly peaceful" was nominated for an Emmy, and the New York Press bestowed CNN's Jim Acosta with a "Truth to Power" award.