My old friend Bill O’Reilly wrote an interesting column recently about the demise of network news — a once noble institution inhabited over the years by my two favorite reporters: Bill … and me.

O’Reilly writes that, “My young adult children never watch network news. Not in the evening, not in the morning. In addition, they don’t watch cable news even if I’m on. It’s boring to them. They can thumb through information on the internet anytime they want. Television news is not even considered a ‘thing’ anymore.”

Now, I realize we live in an age where change comes fast — sometimes too fast — and the news business is no exception. But think about what Bill is saying. His own kids — not exactly strangers to the media world — don’t even flip on the TV when their father is on the screen. And he’s the guy who paid for college!

Television news, once the national campfire, is now something between a museum piece and background noise in a doctor’s waiting room. There was a time when the whole country turned to one of three networks — CBS, NBC or ABC (and let’s be honest, for a long time ABC was the minor leagues) — to find out what was going on in the world. Walter Cronkite didn’t just report the news, he practically handed it down like Moses on the mountain.

During national crises, television became a cathedral — not for worship, but for mourning, for unity, for clarity. We watched the moon landing, the Vietnam War, the Challenger disaster, and 9/11 through that glowing box. It brought us together.

FAST WEATHER HIT 12/23/2025

Now? If something horrific enough happens, we’ll tune in again — but only briefly, and only until TikTok has a better angle.

Once upon a time, you had Cronkite on CBS, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley on NBC, and not much else, at least on national TV. There was a kind of order to it all. These days, you can get your news — or at least something that vaguely resembles it — from a million different places. Cable. Streaming. Social media. Podcasts. And by the way, if you didn’t have a podcast in 2025, you might be the only one who didn’t.

As for cable news, the audience is aging fast. Bill puts it this way: The average age watching is “around 70 years old. Now you know why there are so many commercials for medicine.” He’s not wrong. Watch five minutes of any primetime slot on cable and you’ll learn more about bladder control, arthritis, and reverse mortgages than you will about geopolitics.

And here’s where the absurdity comes in. Walter Cronkite, who I had the privilege to work with when I joined CBS News in 1972, died in 2009. But his name lives on — not in the way you’d think. O’Reilly notes that the University of Southern California now gives out annual “Cronkite Awards” for “demonstrating fairness without succumbing to false equivalence or bothsidesism.”

Read that again … slowly. Fairness, but not too much fairness. “We certainly don’t want any of that each side might have a point stuff,” as Bill nicely put it.

Recently, they gave these awards to Rachel Maddow, Scott Pelley and Jon Stewart. These are all smart people, but they share one thing in common — they loathe Donald Trump. And in today’s elite media circles, that apparently qualifies as “fairness.” Maybe that’s what passes for balance in Pyongyang, as O’Reilly wrote, but here in America, it’s supposed to be a little more complicated.

USC, like so many institutions that hand out awards these days, exists inside a safe, liberal bubble. In that bubble, there’s only one acceptable worldview. Dissent isn’t challenged — it’s downplayed if not flat out dismissed. If you dare to suggest that maybe, just maybe, the other side has a point — you’re accused of promoting “false equivalence.” Or worse, “platforming misinformation.” The horror!

And so here we are. The news business — at least the one we used to know — is on life support. Cronkite was once called “the most trusted man in America.” Who holds that title now?

I don’t know, either.