Open Thread: Walter Cronkite Has Died
By Bronwyn's Harbor on July 17, 2009 at 9:00 PM in Current Affairs
Among the most influential journalists to affect how news became an integral and once noble part of television program, Walter Cronkite led generations of Americans through the most important stories as anchor of the CBS Evening News from 1962 to 1981, and thereafter with his frequent commentaries, interviews and speeches.
Share your memories of this icon of the once respectable, literate television news programming.
Where I grew up, we only got NBC programming but I still knew who Walter Cronkite was. Like the NBC news anchor team of Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, Cronkite delivered a sober, dignified news program that doesn’t exist any longer.
In the days of Huntley/Brinkley and Conkrite, there never would have been the hours of “news” programming devoted to Anna Nicole Smith or Michael Jackson. Instead, the television networks felt compelled to deliver the most learned and informative news about the most critical subjects of the day.
In those days, TV networks competed to have as many foreign correspondents as possible and to report news stories from every corner of the globe. Local TV news departments felt similarly compelled to investigate and report on serious news that truly affected citizens’ lives.
This was all done without a fixation on money. Back then, TV networks found pride in the quality of news programming, not in the ads that they sold. Once news became a commercial product, the quality of programming suffered and has degenerated into a mad scramble for ratings, no matter how shoddy the subjects that are featured on the news. I cringe when I see longtime reporters like Lou Dobbs reporting the latest on Michael Jackson at the top of his daily CNN show. For those of us who’ve lived long enough to recall what TV news once was, it is astonishing.
Here is a New York Times report on Walter Conkrite’s death: “Walter Cronkite, Iconic Anchorman, Dies.”
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