RIP Walter Cronkite

[PeaveyFury]

The "most trusted man in America" died today at age 92:

 

http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/07/17/walter.cronkite.dead/index.html

[hawing]

 

I know a lot of you like the movie Anchorman...but Walter Cronkite was an Anchorman.

 

[RayKingsForemanGrill]

It's sad watching this because, all politics aside, today's newsmen and women are mere caricatures of what Cronkite was. There are a few out there who I think still "get it": Bob Schieffer, Brian Williams, Tim Russert before he died, Tom Brokaw, etc. But I think you can drill down and see what is largely wrong with America today by the fact that people look to people like Bill O'Reilly, Keith olbermann, Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity for their news. It has become partisan and vitriolic.

 

We need more Walter Cronkites.

 

RIP

[JoeHova]

Lewis Lapham took Tim Russert down so beautifully after he died, I get chills just thinking about it. Talk about dancing on someone's grave ("Elegy For A Rubber Stamp" was the name of the article).

 

Cronkite retired when I was still young (I've never gotten much of my news from TV anyway, because of the preponderance of people like the aforementioned Russert), but if he really was cut from the Russert cloth, it would be hard to see why anybody would ever have trusted him. Fortunately, from what I've read, Cronkite actually had journalistic standards, as well as dignity and self-awareness, all of which set him apart from any television journalist working today.

[Invader3K]

It was funny. Yesterday morning on CNN, one of their female anchors was talking to a CNN employee who had done an intenship (I think) under Cronkite. He mentioned how Cronkite would have him call all over the world just to get the spellings and pronunciations of the names of people he was doing stories on correct. The woman seemed almost shocked a journalist would go to those lengths to get the story right. Kind of sad if you think about it.