Walter Cronkite dead at 92

I remember Walter Cronkite on television, though I am too young to have fully appreciated his impact on 20th century America.  I was not quite ten years old when he retired.  My knowledge of him has come mostly from after-the-fact study, including some sustained research in college.  (I have a communications degree, and my coursework included some broadcast training.)

I do believe that he was the last genuine newsman to sit at a network anchor desk—the last true journalist to do network evening news.  Of those who followed, probably Tom Brokaw came closest.  But by and large, television news figures have been personalities much more than journalists for quite some time now.

Now it’s easy to sit back and get that look on your face and talk about the rise of the blogosphere, and the realization of McLuhan’s global village, and just say (essentially) that it’s a different world now.

I buy a slice of that, but reject the shank of it.  The networks got fat and lazy far before the Web came of age.  I blame Desert Storm, actually.  If you’ll remember, that was the event that gave us the current cable television news paradigm of the talking head, the visual the talking head is talking about, and the relentless crawl along the bottom.

For the 20 minutes or so that Desert Storm lasted, it was riveting.  Wow, are you kidding me?  I couldn’t wait to get home from school/work and watch the war.  Oh, man, do you see the camera in the friggin’ cruise missile?  You mean we can see all of Schwarzkopf’s briefings live?

Thing is, after it was over, they kept the paradigm, but didn’t know what to do with it.  It served well again for major events—the 2000 presidential election, the September 11 attacks, and the Columbia disaster all come immediately to mind—but the rest of the time, it’s just everybody saying almost nothing, 24 hours a day.

And the network newscasts resemble nothing so much as 30 minutes of that relentless CNN/Fox/MSNBC model.  Sound, fury, signifying nothing, &c.

Let me put it to you this way.  Do you think Katie Couric (or substitute any current name, really) has a substantially greater understanding of anything she talks about during a newscast than you do?  Do you think she’s examined the issue critically, working hard to distill its essence to fit television production demands without omitting anything important?  Do you think she’s driven to understand as much as she can about an issue before talking about it so that she’s truly informed when she makes such decisions?

OK, how about Walter Cronkite?

I rest my case.

RIP.

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