Lost forever.

Here is one of my favorite pieces of music.

It’s called “The Mission” and it was created for NBC News in 1985 by celebrated American composer John Williams, who also gave us the theme music for movies such as Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark and ET.

Williams said that his goal for The Mission theme was to convey, “the concepts of nobility of purpose, consistency and dignity.” He more than succeeded.

I was in New York not long after NBC started using The Mission theme for the NBC Nightly News. Tom Brokaw was early in his nearly 20-year tenure as the sole anchor of NBC’s flagship newscast. I was the guest of a friend who worked at the now long-gone NBC Radio Network and prior to us going to dinner, he took me to the studio from which the NBC Nightly News originated. I will confess to getting a mild case of goose bumps standing there in the studio and hearing The Mission theme roll as the broadcast began. For years afterward, my heart skipped a beat whenever I had occasion to walk by 30 Rockefeller Center in New York.

That was 40 years ago but it seems like 10 lifetimes. Hard as it is to imagine, when NBC began using John Williams’s stately, dignified and beautifully melodic composition to open its newscasts, most Americans actually trusted NBC News. They also trusted its two main competitors, ABC and CBS. The evening newscasts of the Big Three networks stood collectively as the worldwide gold standard in news reporting.

The Big Three of that era were unmatched in their skills at gathering, photographing, recording, editing, distilling and finally reporting – in an interesting, compelling and comprehensible way – the day’s events from every corner of the globe. The reporters, writers, editors, and photographers, that worked at ABC, CBS and NBC were the very best of the very best. In my career I have had several occasions to be around them at big stories and it was always a thing of beauty to watch them work.

My how things have changed.

These once revered organizations have devolved into predictable, boring, monolithically left-wing propaganda organs where agenda has taken the place of mission.

How else do you explain the Media Research Center’s finding that 59 percent of the reporting on the Biden administration – an administration that was objectively one of the worst in our history – was positive. This despite Biden’s obvious declining mental state, the Afghanistan disaster, crushing inflation, the catastrophic consequences of an open southern border and the outbreak of two very nasty wars in Europe and the Middle East?

The Big Three let their endemic leftward tilt – amplified by their visceral hatred of Donald Trump – so thoroughly cloud their judgment that they were willing to fully abandon any pretense of objectivity or fairness. As a result, they managed to squander nearly a century’s worth of accumulated experience, expertise and goodwill.

When I juxtapose that inescapable fact against the admiration I once had, it makes me sad.