Walter Cronkite

Watching the "remembering" special in the 60 Minutes timeslot this evening, I wondered how long this "special" had been in the can. It's not like CBS gathered George Clooney, Charlie Gibson and Bill Clinton on Saturday to stop by and offer their tributes. In fact, the Clooney stuff looks like it was taped years ago.

Actually, CBS' Sunday Morning crew did a much more nuanced and memorable tribute this morning - which included a few of the pre-taped memorials on the evening show. Taking the telecast's entire 90 minutes, they approached Cronkite's legacy from several angles.

I was at dinner this week while on vacation. The couple at the next table commented to their young teen kids that Walter Cronkite had died. "Do you know who he was?" they asked. "The TV news guy, right?" they answered, not too sure. They've grown up in the cable world where Shep Smith is "the TV news guy" too. They won't really understand how Cronkite was THE tv news guy, the most important face and voice of not just a network but an era. One that is pretty much over.

The more I read about him (I was way after his time) the more pissed off I get about the current 'tv news guys.' Here was a guy who put the news first, and we could have used him over the last couple of decades.

There are two people as trustworthy as Walter Cronkite today, and I think most people will agree with me: Jon Stewart and Amy Goodman. It's an exercise to the reader to figure out why neither of these people runs a major network news show.

I miss Walter Cronkite terribly, because his death caused me to realize just how much substance, class, integrity, and talent he really had. Comparing today's TV journalists with Cronkite's standards and unique style made me realize just how bad TV journalism has become. We've lost the measuring stick of great broadcast journalism with Cronkite's passing. Now we're left with weak hacks who rubber-stamp press-releases from our governement and politcians. We're surrounded by pretty boys and glamour girls who couldn't ask a tough question of a politican if their life depended on it. And now TV news is nothing more than sensationalism and entertainment, and is biased with constant personal editorializing. It is controlled by corporate companies that have left TV news inert and irrelevant. I didn't realize how good I had it for 20 years listening to Cronkite every night, and how good it felt to hear "And that's the way it is" at the end of each broadcast. His like will never pass our way again.