Mike, I answered your question and you seem to have raised yourself on your own petard with this:
"I ask again, if Fidel and Raul produced such great health care and education systems how come their stellar performance won't stand up to a free and independent press? If it was so exceptionally good why did the Castro brothers need to eliminate the independent press and replace it with a state controlled press?
"Your refusal to answer that question strongly validates my argument."
Cuba's stellar performance in the top expenditures of modern societies for welfare of their people---health and education---not only stands up to public scrutiny it's acknowledged in world statistics and reported in "the free and independent press." Look it up for yourself.
You err in your notion that news organizations are independent because they're not controlled by governments. All US newspapers, radio and television fit that category. Money, advertising, scratching elite backs portend a greater angle of influence on media than governments.
It's true journalism has influence on national affairs but since you mentioned Cronkite and Vietnam you may may not be aware of the context of media's independence, its relationship with government and how a Canadian removed American innocence and pulled the plug on the war.
It's an integral part of your history, acknowledged and unchallenged, recorded magnificently in David Halberstam's "The Powers That Be." The short of it is Morley Safer, my colleague for years in the CBC documentary unit, exposed the lying to the American people, mindless killing of civilians which Cronkite and others at first didn't know what to do with it because of certain political and commercial repercussions.
Halberstam: "It was a shattering thing; it marked the end of an era, the end of a kind of innocence. No wonder the Vietnam War cut more sharply to the inner soul of America, to questions of morality and of American culture, than anything else in this century . . ."
"There was greater receptivity . . . to there was something terribly wrong out there. Overnight, one correspondent with one cameraman could become as important as ten or fifteen or twenty senators."
"McNamara could manipulate the media . . .but he could not control the events he had set loose in Vietnam and he could not control Morley Safer. (CBS News vice-president) Friendly . . .called Vietnam "Morley Safer's War.'"
Halberstam's reporting on media's dependence and independence of government and money influences is a scary near-run thing, Mike, as was the New York Times publication of the Pentagon Papers also covered in "Powers That Be." Without mainstream media the US would be in a worse place. I don't recall anyone defending it here.
