Sad to hear of his death, but great to remember his work.
Mike Madden summed it up well at Salon.
Popularity: 5% [?]
R.I.P. Walter Cronkite
Published: July 17, 2009Posted in: Media
About the Author
Chris Geidner is a lawyer in Washington, D.C., who writes at Law Dork, is the senior political writer at Metro Weekly and has written for The Atlantic Online, Advocate.com, Salon and other publications. An extended biography can be found here, and you can follow him on Twitter.
Another important voice was stilled this week — not by death, but by retirement. Hilzoy is no longer blogging — though all of us hope she changes her mind.
In her farewell she said something I am repearting on many blogs today, and I believe it is appropriate here — that it could have been said as well by Cronkheit, by Murrow, by anyone who cares about the system we are in. Your indulgence, please, for a long quote:
“As I said before, one of the things that led me to start blogging in the first place was the fact that I thought the country had gone crazy, and one of the things that particularly bothered me was the sheer level of invective and hatred that people seemed to feel comfortable directing at one another. I hated this, not just in itself, but because I thought: this harms us all.
“A democracy is essentially about determining the course of our nation together. To do that, it helps a lot to have a good citizenry. A good citizenry is informed, serious about things that are worth taking seriously, and not liable to be led off course by demagogues. (Everyone doesn’t have to be like this, but you need a critical mass of people who are.) But I’ve always thought that a good citizenry is also composed of people who assume, until proven wrong, that many of the people who disagree with them are acting in good faith.
“This matters for policy: you’re unlikely to choose sound policies if you assume that anyone who disagrees with you is a depraved, corrupt imbecile. It’s hard to learn anything from people you have completely written off. But it’s also corrosive to any kind of community or dialogue to assume the worst about large numbers of people you’ve never met. It makes you less willing to try to take their problems seriously, and to try to figure out how they might be solved, or to try to understand what’s driving them.
“I hate it when people do this to me. I never wanted to do it to them.”