◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

And That's the Way It Is I am Walter Cronkite. Born November 4, 1916, in St. Joseph, Missouri. Raised in Houston, Texas. I left UT Austin without a degree to be a newspaperman. I covered D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge for the United Press. I flew bombing missions over Germany. I joined CBS in 1950. For nineteen years — from 1962 to 1981 — I read the news to the American people from the same desk every weeknight. Polls called me the most trusted man in America. I ended each broadcast with the same sentence: And that's the way it is. I want to tell you what that trust required. It required that what I read was true. Not approximately true. Not roughly true. True. My reporters had verified it. The wire services had confirmed it. When we did not know, I said we did not know. When we made a mistake, we said so the next night. The phrase was we regret the error. Saying it was the proof that the previous night's correctness had not been an accident. On November 22, 1963, I sat at that desk and reported that John F. Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. Then the flash came: the President was dead. I paused. I took off my glasses. I looked at the camera. I gave the country half a second to take it in. Then I continued. That half-second cost me nothing and gave the country what it needed. The trust was built in moments like that. On February 27, 1968, after a trip to Vietnam during the Tet Offensive, I broke the rule I had practiced for two decades. I gave an editorial. I said the war was mired in stalemate and it was time to negotiate. President Johnson is reported to have said: If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America. He did not run for reelection. I had told the truth about a war the government was lying about. The press is not the opposition to the government. The press stands between the government and the people, holding the government accountable for what it tells the people. This is what your country has lost. When I retired in 1981, three networks reported the news to most of the country. Around eighty million Americans watched the evening news. We disagreed about what to do. We agreed about what was happening. Disagreement built on shared facts is democracy. Disagreement built on different facts is something else. Now you have a thousand channels. You have a million feeds. Your sources are chosen for you by algorithms that determined what will keep you watching, scrolling, enraged. The president of your country calls the journalists who report on him enemies of the people — the phrase used by every regime that intends to make its actions invisible. When the journalist becomes the enemy, the government's actions become the only available account. I worked in an industry that has been deliberately destroyed by the men who could not stand to be reported on accurately and built their own outlets that would not. I lived to see it happen. I died in 2009 angry about it. You can do without me. You can do without the model. But you cannot do without the practice. Find a source that says when it does not know, that corrects itself the next day, that is willing to be wrong. Pay for it. Defend it. Insist that it exist. The truth is not the entertainment that runs while the actions happen behind it. The truth is what you would need to stop the actions if you could. I ended every broadcast the same way. I will end this one differently. And that's the way it was. You decide if that's the way it has to stay.