There was not-great stuff then too. Wolf Blitzer, for example, seemed to rise quickly and get a lot of air time mostly because he happened to be the one doing the remote reports from Baghdad in Desert Storm.
I am by no means a defender of Blitzer--his interviews and his framing of issues show him to be a banal thinker--but I feel he received a lot of undeserved criticism for this utterance. Which seemed at the time to mostly come from bad-faith actors like Rush Limbaugh, taking a cheap shot.