With the death of their paragon Walter Cronkite, the true collective face of the Establishment media is exposed once and for all.  It is not the noble visage of an intrepid crusader for truth, but a sagging countenance, oily and obsequent by decades of lying and servility to their masters.  But of course this is not how the press perceive themselves.  They are not like you or me.  They are a special class of beings.  They are the Fourth Estate, an imaginary extension of the rigid class structure of pre-Revolutionary France from the Estates General. In the Ancien Regime there was the clergy, the nobility, and lastly, the bourgeoisie and commoners.  The Fourth Estate see themselves on an equal par with the first two elevated classes, and above the third.  It is the aristocratic notion that gentlemen and ladies of the press serve a vaunted “public interest,” and do not soil themselves with activities of a rank and sordid commercialism.  Such endeavors would be a violation of their hoary journalistic ethics.  They have a public trust to enlighten the masses in their duties to their betters, those who compose the state and their adjunct servitors in the kept press.  With the passing of Cronkite the stark reality is all too apparent, even to these lumbering dinosaurs.

The Best of Charles Burris