I’m old enough to remember when Walter Cronkite could tell Americans that the Vietnam war had become a stalemate and president Johnson said If I’ve lost Cronkite I’ve lost middle America. I remember a press that followed Watergate right to Nixon’s doorstep. The commercial news media back then was in no way a liberal bastion. If anything it was moderately conservative, and spoke mostly to the middle class. But it would speak truth to power fearlessly when push came to shove. I wonder now in retrospect if all that courage came from having a supreme court that was always on the side of freedom of the press.

In any case, all you young’uns feeling a constant sense of outrage these days, I can relate…in a way. Except I was there when Johnson lost Cronkite, and The Washington Post and The New York Times ran stories about The Pentagon Papers.

“It’s true. All of it. The Force, the Jedi. All of it. It’s all true.”

It’s true. All of it. Walter Cronkite, Huntley and Brinkley, Dan Rather, Eric Sevareid. All of it. It’s all true.

I was there.