Brokaw and Baron

Tom Brokaw and Marty Baron announced their retirements from the news business last week and this.

You know Brokaw, the most trusted TV news anchor since Walter Kronkite, especially since his blockbuster The Greatest Generation (1998) about how our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents won World War II. (Although Dan Rather and Peter Jennings were up there.)

You probably don’t know Baron, who is barely known for his Pulitzer-garnering leadership of news operations at the Miami Herald, the Boston Globe and the Washington Post. But you may have seen “Spotlight” (2015) or any of the movies (among them “Citizenfour,” 2014, and “Snowden,” 2016). If so you were introduced to the Catholic Church’s long coverup of priestly pedofilia and NSA spying everywhere; and perhaps know that Baron played supporting roles in bringing these topics to light.

At any rate, a Brokaw-Baron partnership could similarly expose the corporate media’s virtual ban since 2002 on common-sense reporting and commenting on details of the crime of the century — the September 2001 attacks known as 9/11 — effectively burying the topic and making this the news industry’s worst generation.

However unlikely such an alliance of stars may be (Brokaw is 80 and has cancer, but Baron is only 66), it’s an example of what may be needed to further the work of “truthers” who have plugged away mostly, thanks to the ban, in obscurity.

— Mark Channing Miller