Ah, it was so different back then eh Rick?

“It used to be different. You never heard the late Walter Cronkite taking time on the evening news to “debunk” claims that a proposed mental health clinic in Alaska is actually a dumping ground for right-wing critics of the president’s program, or giving the people who made those claims time to explain themselves on the air. The media didn’t adjudicate the ever-present underbrush of American paranoia as a set of “conservative claims” to weigh, horse-race-style, against liberal claims. Back then, a more confident media unequivocally labeled the civic outrage represented by such discourse as “extremist” — out of bounds.”

Of course this is selective amnesia that ignores how Cronkite’s “editorializing” of the Vietnam War, calling a victory at Tet a “defeat” lead to American withdrawal and the wasted sacrifice of over 50,000.

But more, having vividly lived those times, I never remember the media doing anything other than bolster and praise left-wing outrage. The media of the 60s, as now celebrated left-wing social unrest and demonized right wing opposition. Little has changed.

But just because Americans stood to to the anti-American ideals of Socialism and Communism, didn’t make “Right-Wingers” ‘radical’, it simply showed they were right.

Just look at who is President now.

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