At this point in our country, great reporting isn’t a craft or a talent. It is a patriotic act. It presents the facts on which we can build a serviceable picture of what happened, of right and wrong. This steadies the civic mind.
What reporters do is hard—find human beings in the thicket, in the wild, earn their trust, convince them to speak, read opaque documents, decipher things, restrain their own views, get the facts accurately and then let those facts speak for themselves.
A little side trip here to Walter Cronkite, whose name is being mentioned a lot. “Everyone trusted Cronkite.” True. I knew him, he was human, and he wasn’t trusted because he had nice eyes or a nice way or a well-lit set or smoked a pipe.
People trusted him because for much of his career he’d been a workaday reporter at United Press International. And it formed him, shaped his journalism. UPI, the Associated Press and other wire services told America what was happening each day in the country and the world.
Here is what the wires taught you. Their product was purchased and had to be acceptable to every newspaper in the country—liberal and conservative, big city and small. So wire service reporters had to play it straight—get it first but get it right, facts are gettable, verification necessary. You disciplined yourself out of the story. Accuracy was all.
Because of that training, viewers could tell Cronkite was a professional operating under clear and continuing standards.
People think journalism is hopelessly tainted, just another partisan player, can never get its reputation back. Wrong. You can build it each day. You can open up a new account in the credibility bank, see it grow. When Cronkite said Vietnam was a failure, he was believed because he had a big personal account to draw on.
Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal on January 31, 2026
Tag: media
The times they are a-changin’
I shared with Simon Owens, who covers the media industry, the significant change we’re seeing when it comes to weather coverage in our corner of the world. First came Matt Laubhan’s departure from WTVA earlier this month after more than a decade as chief meteorologist to start an all-digital weather service. Now comes word that James Spann is doing the same thing. However, he says he will remain with ABC 33/40 in Birmingham as its chief meteorologist when his service launches August 11.
Of course, changes in the media landscape are nothing new. I grew up in a world where Top 40 music formats transitioned from AM to FM radio. There was no such thing as cable television for me until I moved from suburban New Orleans to Amory in the 1980s. And the internet, smartphones and social media were not available at the start of my broadcast journalism career. Some of the content for my newscasts came from phone calls, faxes and the AP wire on a printer where I reused ribbon to save money.
And here we are with change again as more and more people try to find a way to make a living doing news in a digital world rather than through legacy media. The retired me is relieved that I’m getting to sit this one out, but my younger self would look forward to the challenge that’s ahead. Regardless of which path is taken, godspeed to those who are on the journey.
craigford.tv 