Today we take it for granted that there are conservative journals of opinions like The Weekly Standard, The American Spectator, City Journal and of course the National Review.

We also take for granted that there are dozens of conservative talk radio programs, led by Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, as well as conservative columnists like Charles Krauthammer, George Will and many others.

But these things didn't just happen. Somebody had to lead the way and that somebody was William F. Buckley. The difference today is more than quantitative. The way the liberal media operate is very different, now that there is a conservative media -- not as large, but large enough to puncture the liberals' pretensions and expose what they conceal.

There was a time when Walter Cronkite's version of what was happening in Vietnam was enough to force a change in policy more disastrous than the Communist offensive which Cronkite depicted as a big loss to American military forces, when in fact the American military inflicted a crushing defeat on the Communist guerrillas.

Imagine how differently that war might have turned out -- how many millions of people in Southeast Asia might not have been slaughtered by Communist governments there -- if there had been a sizable contingent of conservative journalists to tell a very different story from that told by Walter Cronkite and the liberal media.

By the same token, think how successful Cronkite's successor, Dan Rather, might have been with his fake documents about President Bush's National Guard service, broadcast on the eve of the 2004 elections, if the fraud had not been exposed immediately by conservatives on the Internet, on talk radio, and in newspapers.

In addition to his own personal contributions to the intellectual diversity of American life, William F. Buckley's pioneering opened the way for many others to add greatly to our intellectual diversity, the only kind of "diversity" that liberals seem to dislike, especially on our college campuses.