What would ‘the most trusted man’ think of his alma mater?

CBS News was once the gold standard in broadcast journalism. With Walter Cronkite sitting in the anchor chair, CBS dominated TV news ratings throughout the 1970s.

Though Walter Cronkite was a committed liberal, he largely succeeded in keeping his personal politics out of his reporting. As a result, he earned the title, “the most trusted man in America.”

What, then, would he think of the version of CBS News that we are suffering today?

In the span of a couple of weeks CBS has incinerated any remaining trace of its once sterling reputation.

Let’s start with CBS getting caught editing the answers that Vice President Kamala Harris gave in a “60 Minutes” interview. It was an apparent effort to clean up Harris’s word salad responses to good questions posed by Bill Whitaker.

Since when do news organizations clean up presidential candidate interviews? When did CBS ever try to clean up for Donald Trump (or any Republican)?

CBS denies it, of course. But calls for CBS to release a full transcript of the interview are so far being ignored.

Next, we have CBS brass sharply rebuking morning show anchor Tony Dokoupil for asking entirely appropriate questions of author Ta-Nehisi Coates. In his book, “The Message,” Coates characterizes Israel as the villain in its war with Hamas. While interviewing Coates, Dokoupil asked:

Tony Dokoupil: Why leave out that Israel is surrounded by countries that want to eliminate it? Why leave out that Israel deals with terror groups that want to eliminate it? Why not detail anything of the first and the second intifada, the cafe bombings, the bus bombings, the little kids blown to bits. And is it because you just don’t believe that Israel in any condition has a right to exist?

Plain and simple, Dokoupil did his job. He respectfully challenged an interview subject for presenting a one-sided picture.

But in the regular editorial meeting on October 7 (of all days), CBS management effectively apologized for the interview, saying that it did not meet CBS’s “editorial standards.” For doing his job, Dokoupil was called before the standards and practices team at CBS as well as the network’s “race & culture” unit.” (Can you just imagine that star chamber?)

Is CBS being unfair to Dokoupil? Well, here’s the test. Would CBS rebuke Gayle King for similarly grilling Donald Trump? (Don’t answer. It’s a rhetorical question.)

The demise of CBS mirrors that of all the American legacy news organizations that at one time set the world standard for broadcast journalism. A recent example includes ABC’s Martha Raddatz’s grotesquely inaccurate fact-checking of Trump running mate JD Vance on the impact of illegal immigration.

Walter Cronkite managed to be a liberal and “the most trusted man in America” at the same time. Today, even the pretense of objectivity is gone.

For very good reason, journalism is the one enterprise in America that enjoys explicit protection in the Constitution. But journalism in America is dead, having committed suicide.

We now live with the reality of that death in our broken politics.