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Remembering Walter Cronkite
Posted at: Jul/19/2009 : Posted by: mel
Related Category: Perspectives,
There have been a number of notable people who have passed on in the last few weeks. I am not big on glorifying or memorializing entertainment personalities, but Walter Cronkite was much more than that to me. The evening news we have now is a great deal different than what was broadcast 30 years ago. The so-called production value of modern news broadcasts is substantially better than decades ago. By production value I mean quality video inserts, live remote broadcasts, and timely updates, but the trust factor no longer exists. In Walter Cronkite’s era an “anchorman” actually wrote much of their own copy and could be truely considered a journalist. The familiar face you saw every evening was the face you trusted. While important news is always going to be important news, each networks team brought their own perspective to what they felt was important. Whether you adopted ABC, CBS, or NBC, you developed a trust for what the anchorman as a journalist was telling you. The trust was deep enough that the evening anchors became virtually iconic figures. The list is long, but I can remember Cronkite becoming the presumed voice of NASA as we rose from putting a man in earth orbit to seeing Neil Armstrong walk on the moon. I did not see it live, but can say that when Walter Cronkite reported on the death of President Kennedy, he paused, took off his glasses, looked at the clock and with a crack in his voice told us the bad news. That hesitation and the crack in his voice made him human and said what the country felt. While reporting from Vietnam in 1968 Walter Cronkite says that we are losing and this prompted President Johnson to lament to a staff member that 'if he has lost Cronkite, he has lost middle America'. Truly, we grew up trusting Walter Cronkite in a way that does not exist for modern television anchormen. TV newscasts have become very glitzy with lots of pop-culture features and fewer and fewer of the Washington-based, wire-service stories that Cronkite favored. I am sure that Cronkite did not approve of these changes. Getting all the facts presented on a story seems to be lost to the notion of turning the evening news into high energy entertainment. In our fast paced world a complete understanding of an event has been replaced by a high resolution 30 second video clips. The modern anchorman seldom gets to write any of their own copy, rather, they have a stately voice and read what the editors have given them to read. I personally will miss Walter Cronkite, he was the icon of an era when we trusted the evening news anchorman to not only tell us what was important, but why it was important. Even if you did not find it important, the personal side shown through and you knew it was important to him. In interviews years later he said he felt a responsibility to help people make “informed judgment as citizens." Change is inevitable, but there are things that I regret seeing changed. I will miss the man who felt an obligation to get the whole story out in a way that encouraged the audience to make informed decisions. I will miss the man once called “the most trusted man in America."
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