How times have changed

MANIFESTO

From Frank Rich today:

If [Walter Cronkite] was the most trusted man in America, it wasn’t because he was a nice guy with an authoritative voice and a lived-in face. It wasn’t because he "loved a good story" or that he removed his glasses when a president died. It was because at a time of epic corruption in the most powerful precincts in Washington, Cronkite was not at the salons and not in the tank.

This just goes to show, now that Jon Stewart is America's most trusted newsman, how the chumminess of the press and those in power has

given [us] the American press’s catastrophe of our own day—its failure to unmask and often even to question the White House propaganda campaign that plunged us into Iraq.

(And, speaking of Stewart, a Slate columnist recently posed an interesting plea to him.)