SOME TIME in the morning of April 9, 2003, as the statue of Saddam Hussein was being hauled down in Baghdad, another statue–of Walter Cronkite, famed CBS newsman–hacked at with hammers by various bloggers, also came crashing down. Cronkite, once called “the most trusted man in America,” was believed by President Lyndon B. Johnson to have turned the American public against the Vietnam War. This time, Cronkite had done his best to turn the American public against the war in Iraq, but no one paid any attention. Of course, he had been out of public life for quite a long time, but this fails to explain it: His network successors did their best to turn the public against it, and no one had listened to them, either. In fact, as Cronkite’s statue was falling, reports came in that millions of former supporters of Dan Rather and Peter Jennings had put their arms down and melted back into the populace, some finding shelter in the arms of Fox News. At the same time, word came in from numerous generals embedded in networks that the New York Times, like the city of Baghdad, might also “fall from within”–in this case, meaning that it would continue to sell and publish, but few would believe a word in it. These experts explained that while the Times had been softened up by years of sniping by Andrew Sullivan and other bloggers, the main blows were inflicted by “friendly fire”–large bombs set off within its own fortifications, by R.W. Apple and by Maureen Dowd.

This sudden collapse of the media giants is part of a culture-wide trend. As Victor Davis Hanson noted recently, a vast chasm of sense has been opened between teachers and taught, preachers and preached-at, people who make the films and people who see them, people who write books and people who read them, those who produce news and those who consume it. This calls into question a guiding belief of the culture: that power resides in the mouth of the bullhorn, if not in the barrels of guns. It is possible that people are not, after all, very malleable. It is possible that in the past, when “opinion leaders” tracked more closely with public opinion, that they were reflecting the public’s ideas, and not leading it.