WHERE IS UNCLE WALTER?

Pierre Fontenot Thursday, August 20, 2015 Comments Off on WHERE IS UNCLE WALTER?
WHERE IS UNCLE WALTER?

Who speaks the truth out there?  Where do I go for facts?  Who are these people dressing up like reporters and authorities, and these sites that pose as news sources?

Walter Cronkite removing his glasses after telling America President Kennedy had died.

Walter Cronkite removing his glasses after telling America President Kennedy had died.

Who should I trust?  Where are the professionals on a righteous mission, to get all-the-news, sort it out, prioritize it, vett it for me, and then present it, with order, urgency saved for only that which merits urgency?  Where is Uncle Walter?

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As a little kid I spent many hours with my little green army men, having wars in the no-grass area under the swing we had chained to an oak limb in the back yard.  I wanted to be Sergeant Alvin York in WWI and Audie Murphy in WWII.

As I got older here came Watergate, and the bride no longer deserved to walk the aisle in white.  I was patriotic, but now with conditions.  I’d risk my life for All Men Are Created Equal, I’d risk my life for Abe Lincoln, and I’d risk my life to stop Hitler, but I wasn’t In if I didn’t believe in the cause.  To put it simply, I wasn’t gonna die for cheaper gas at the pump.

But curious, curious, as I thought about this in the privacy of my own mind, there was this One Thing that I thought was worth my life – Freedom Of The Press.

I remember standing in line at a grocery store in the 80’s, and there on the cover of the National Enquirer was a story about an Elvis love child, an alien abduction, and a new weight loss breakthrough centered around celery, and I thought, ‘In the whole history of civilization we’ve only had Freedom of the Press for two centuries, and already, look how they defile it…’ and I asked myself, ‘Would you give your life to defend their right to do this?’ and the answer was yes.

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I hold it near to sacred, that I was blessed to be alive when there was something between those in power and those without, an entire industry of journalism, a process, to vet facts, and a platform, where whosoever could hear it, read it, and see it.

It wasn’t perfect.  Nor should it be.  American journalism had only been around for a few generations.  It was good, on its way to great.  So I thought.

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Once Upon A Time…there was only ABC, CBS and NBC.  There was news in the morning, there was news at noon, but for serious grownups, the news that mattered came at 5:30PM CST.  Each network saved its star journalists for the evening news: Chet Huntley and David Brinkley on NBC, Frank Reynolds, Howard K. Smith and Harry Reasoner on ABC, and the one you’d see at our home, Uncle Walter, Walter Cronkite, on CBS.

Uncle Walter was your uncle, your grandfather, the elder in your church.  They’d do these polls back in the day, Most Trusted Man in America, and Uncle Walter was always way up there, often higher than the President.

When he choked up, breaking the news that President Kennedy had died, it meant it was okay for the rest of us to cry us a river.  And when he returned from a look-see in Vietnam and said it was a war we couldn’t win, we shut it down.

And now…?

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We’ve lost the gatekeepers.  Now its roosters crowing before dawn and monkeys howling in the jungle.

Still: with Obama and his birth certificate!  There are people out there that think the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School was part of a complicated government conspiracy to pass gun control!

Last week a lion was shot by a dentist and it was a Big Deal.  My knee jerked too and I was mad for a day.  And then here came the voices in the choir: all this fuss over one lion and what about the starving kids in Africa; what about abortion; what about the seven people shot per hour in America; and what about global warming…

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I’m pushing sixty.  Never in my life have I been less informed and more confused.  I get more truth from comedians than I do from journalists.

All the old formats of delivering news are wounded shells of what they used to be…replaced by…what?  There’s a democracy about news via social media, but there’s too many voices, each raising theirs to be heard over the others, and it’s become this haystack and I don’t have the energy to try to find the needle.

When I was a school kid we were told that America was a place where “anyone” could grow up and be President, and we all looked around the room, and inside ourselves.  As a grownup I can’t imagine why anybody would want to be President.

Just as when I was a kid, the news seems above me, away from me, apart from me.  I don’t have enough ears for all the yelling, don’t have enough patience to listen to people speaking who should never be allowed a microphone.

I feel out of place in this big, rowdy, disorganized America.  Die for Freedom of the Press?  I don’t know anymore.  Who’s who and what’s what, and is any of it worthy of respect?

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This edition of Uncle P’s Bedtime Stories is brought to you by Eighty-one, where we hope all your facts are friendly and all your news is nice.

Uncle P can be reached at 81creativity@gmail.com. 

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