The new journalism

[Commentary] The house Cronkite built did many fine things. It also locked out competing points of view, buried inconvenient bodies, spun the news and racked up a formidable list of Shirley Sherrods all its own. The New York Times whitewashed Stalin's genocide. Cronkite misreported the significance of the Tet offensive to say the Vietnam War was unwinnable. Dan Rather, Cronkite's replacement, began his career falsely reporting that Dallas schoolchildren cheered JFK's murder and ended it falsely reporting on forged National Guard memos. The Rodney King video was misleadingly edited; Janet Cooke made up her stories for the Washington Post. The media environment today is so dizzying because of two revolutions. On one front we have the upheaval of the Internet, of which the WikiLeaks story -- the leaking of 92,000 government documents about the war in Afghanistan -- is Exhibit A. (The leaks weren't just private; they were official secrets! But who cares!) On the other front there's the consumer backlash -- largely conservative, with Fox News as Exhibit A -- against the old ideological media monopoly. This pincer movement can be scary. But it's progress over the Cronkite era.