The journalism world lost one if it’s few heroes tonight. Walter Cronkite, journalist and CBS Evening News anchor for nearly 20 years, died at the age of 92.
The name might not be familiar to viewers today. What with our numerous networks of 24-hour coverage and up-to-the second updating online, it would be surprising if anyone under the age of 30 could name just two network news anchors. But there was a time when a significant portion of the population got their news from one source: Walter.
Maybe that was why Cronkite was completely objective in his reporting. Or maybe that was just the way journalism was back then. The proof of his objectivity? Just look at his most memorable anchoring moments…
There was the Apollo 11 lunar landing. Cronkite was a huge believer in the space program, and guided American without condescension through the complicated technologies behind NASA’s launches. And when those astronauts finally set foot on the moon, Walter looked on with admiration as a tear came to his eye, a happy tear.
But a sad tear came when Cronkite reported the devastating news of the death of JFK. Walter had only been on CBS for a little over a year at that point. And it proved to be his defining moment, a moment that would follow him throughout his career. Solemnly, he told the nation that the President of the United States had died. He didn’t break down. He took in the news with the rest of the country, but he was visibly upset by the news. He was simply reflecting what the rest of the country was feeling – that this was tragedy.
One of Cronkite’s boldest moves was in 1968 after he toured Vietnam on a “fact finding” mission. The war was not going well. A backlash was slowly brewing in the public. When Walter arrived back, he made a special commentary where he deemed the war a stalemate, at best, for the US. This was a huge step away from the rigid objectivity he practiced. Not long afterward, Lyndon Johnson announced he would not run for reelection. Johnson’s reason? “If I lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.”
These moments were memorable not only because of the sheer newsworthiness of the events, but because they were a few brief televised moments where Cronkite’s unshakable anchoring was clearly shaken.
We have no singular anchor figure today. The closest we had was in the eighties and nineties with Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, and Peter Jennings anchoring their network news desks. They stayed with us through 9/11, offering their familiar voices and faces to help a nation understand what had happened. But after that, the “anchor” image shattered, split into a million little pieces across cable channels and Internet videos.
Journalism today is all about the immediate, the opinions, and the entertainment value. That could simply be a repercussion of the media today. The Internet is now. Everyone can communicate with everyone else in a heartbeat. Pundits snapping at one another pull in ratings. Now, in a time where the country is divided by petty politics, where we’re at war in the Middle East for reasons we still don’t know, where our economy is down, we need a figure like Walter Cronkite to trust. To tell us exactly what’s going on without bias or fact-skewing. Cronkite made his break at a time where America was very skeptical. We need someone with the same integrity and the same values in journalism to help us through these times. To keep us together.
There was only one Walter Cronkite. We can only hope this generation finds that one media figure to trust.
