Anybody know what Walter Cronkite said the other day. Jason Lewis (live streaming here 5-8PM weekdays) pointed this out. Real dog bites man stuff:

I believe that most of us reporters are liberal, but not because we consciously have chosen that particular color in the political spectrum. More likely it is because most of us served our journalistic apprenticeships as reporters covering the seamier side of our cities - the crimes, the tenement fires, the homeless and the hungry, the underclothed and undereducated.

We reached our intellectual adulthood with daily close-ups of the inequality in a nation that was founded on the commitment to equality for all. So we are inclined to side with the powerless rather than the powerful.

Then he says some pious things about accurate reporting. Jason pointed out that, having seen the daily close-ups, the reporters then go home to their middle class (or ritzy, for some) neighborhoods where capitalism is succeeding and write their gripes about the few places it's not. It succeeds where it's not banned folks. How many entrepreneurial activities are allowed in the ghetto?

Cronkite ends with:

Incidentally, I looked up the definition of "liberal" in a Random House dictionary. It gave the synonyms for "liberal" as "progressive," "broad-minded," "unprejudiced," "beneficent." The antonyms it offered: "reactionary" and "intolerant."

I've always suspected those fine folks at Random House of being liberals. You just can't trust anybody these days.

Amen. They failed to mention the more modern definition: socialist; marxist. Oh, that's right, that's what the progressives were. Or were they racist, populist authoritarians?