News: Fiction or Truth

The question was is news fiction or factual truth of an event? During the sixties we watched Walter Cronkite report the CBS evening news daily. We never questioned that someone else might have a different viewpoint of how the event occurred. News sources at that time were limited. Today, we have numerous sources for the news. Each source has it own viewpoint and bias. If people don’t like the way one reporter see it then they simple change to another source or turn out altogether. News providers are owned by individuals who feel that the news should be reported as they see it and that the only facts should be the ones that support their view of the events. Sometime in the past years since we were children reporters stopped trying to be objective about events. What was once unthinkable is now common place. Somewhere along the line news became entertainment and the truth became fiction that is if there even was a time when it was factual. Maybe we were just too young and naïve to realize that there was never a time when the news was not propaganda.

In the sixties the war was never ending on the evening news now if it makes the news it is clean and at the end of the program so that viewers can change the channel or turn it off. We don’t see the death and dying of people who’s country we bombed into rubble because that would be too hard for the public to withstand. We don’t see our own people who have given their lives for their country or have been maimed beyond repair. Only those who remember the sixties truly feel strongly about ending the war in Iraq and that is because they do remember the horrors that they witnessed on the evening news. When did war become a clean and neat act and why?