Comment Roundup on the Legacy of Walter Cronkite (video)

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18 July 2009 :: Riga Listin

Pres. Obama remembers TV news “icon” Walter Cronkite

Café Sentido’s own editor and director, J.E. Robertson, wrote today:

American journalism has lost one of its elder statesmen. Walter Cronkite was one of the founders of broadcast journalism, pioneering a warm, conversational style for delivering facts with detachment and gravitas. The old-style newsman delivered news to the American viewing public about John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam war, the protests of the 1960s, the Moon landing (40 years ago Monday), Watergate and other major moments of crisis and achievement.

Robertson finished his obituary with the no word-mincing line: “He will be missed, but his example stands implacable.” We stand behind Walter Cronkite’s principled, ethical pursuit of hard facts and truth-telling reportage. We stand behind his willingness to go beyond the story to get to the underlying truth that power-brokers might consider convenient to keep hidden.

Reporter and historian David Halberstam wrote for The Atlantic, today:

He knew by instinct the balance between journalism and show biz; he knew you needed to be good at the latter, but that you must never take it too far. He was enough of an old wire-service man to be uneasy with his new success and fame. He was just sophisticated enough never to show his sophistication.

In addition, he had physical strength and durability. Iron pants, as they say in the trade. He could sit there all night under great stress and constant pressure and never wear down, never blow it. And he never seemed bored by it all, even when it got boring. When Blair Clark and Sig Mickelson recommended him for the anchorman job, that durability, what they called the farm boy in him, was a key factor. He was the workhorse.

Pres. Barack Obama lauded Cronkite’s “integrity” in a video statement released to the press (embedded above), saying:

He was someone we could trust to guide us through the most important issues of the day, a voice of certainty in an uncertain world. He was family. In moments of tragedy, Walter looked us in the eye and shared our pain … and he brought us all those stories large and small which would come to define the 20th century.

That’s why we loved Walter, because in an era before blogs and email, cell-phones and cable, he was the news. Walter invited us to believe in him, and he never let us down.

Frazier Moore, writing for the Associated Press, says of Cronkite that he spoke nightly to a “nationwide community gathered to watch [him]“, and that he:

… clearly embraced the possibilities of new media. He had plied his trade in newspapers, radio and at a wire service when, in the early 1950s, he answered the call of a cutting-edge but primitive emerging media platform called television.

Even for Americans who remember Cronkite declaring “and that’s the way it is” every evening in his heyday, it’s hard to fully recall the heights to which he took TV news. And vice versa. Simply put, at CBS News, he invented the role of anchorman and prevailed in that role until his retirement …

Walter Cronkite had openly lamented the direction of television and print news and the corrosive effects of the “24-hour news cycle”, which he felt drained the news business of thought and deliberation, creating a landscape of snap reporting with less and less depth and little to no background to give perspective.

But many in the news business have touted Cronkite’s passionate interest in new technologies and his willingness to take the work of the field reporter to the cutting edge of radio and television media, despite his early start in the business of ink and newsprint. More than oppose emerging media which had shifted the news culture away from his principles, he urged fellow reporters to be rigorous, thoughtful and given to probing investigation, so that the service they provided would be worthy of the expectations the public invests in the free press.

Ted Anthony, also writing for the AP, observes:

Barely a generation has passed since Walter Cronkite disappeared from our evenings. But the notion of one man — a single, authoritative, empathetic man, morally reassuring and mild of temper — wrapping up the world after dinner for America seems incalculably quaint in the technological coliseum that is 21st-century communications.

Many of the network farewells to the CBS anchorman, who died Friday at 92, seemed built around the notion of the father figure. Anchors and reporters who are part of another age — a still-unfolding era of community feedback, viewer outreach and social-media interaction — struggled to summon the idea of anchor as monolith.

NPR’s Scott Simon called Cronkite “a trusted voice of reason”:

Cronkite was a great broadcaster. He spoke to masses, not niches. He grasped that when the news was urgent, people would turn to the broadcaster not only for information, but for sincerity and calm.

Millions of people felt better to hear from this man who seemed experienced, but not jaded. He had a visible sense of grief in tragedies, and a little boy’s delight in the glory of space shots. He had gray hair and hound-dog bags under his eyes, but ageless sincerity.

Al Jazeera said the legendary anchor’s death is “the end of an era”, noting how “his legendary voice became associate with key events” during his long years at CBS. The video tribute notes the rare courage of a mainstream news anchor telling it like it is, giving in one of his most influential broadcasts his assessment as an independent observer of the ill-fated war-effort in Vietnam, in which he said:

… it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out, then, will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people, who lived up to their pledge to defend to democracy, and did the best they could.

Praised by news organizations around the world for his simple and straightforward way of delivering the facts of the day, the Al Jazeera montage gives Cronkite the last word, signing off in his signature style with the phrase “And that’s the way it is”. The online video does not note this, but the message is implicit that 24-hour TV news organizations like Al Jazeera, or CNN or France 24, owe their existence in part to this incomparable pioneer of the medium.

Howard Kurtz observes, in his piece for the Washington Post, that:

It is hard to remember, in this age of niche cable channels feeding every obsession, how dominant CBS and NBC (and, much later, ABC) were in their heydays. Every senior member of Cronkite’s news team — including, at various times, Dan Rather, Bob Schieffer, Roger Mudd, Marvin Kalb, Bernard Kalb, Fred Graham, Daniel Schorr — was a recognizable celebrity in his own right. (They were almost all men.) You got your morning paper, and then you watched Cronkite or Huntley and Brinkley at night, perhaps while eating a TV dinner.

Kurtz delves into the reverence so many in the news business had for Walter Cronkite, for his legendary status, but also for his humanity, his principles, his professionalism, the equanimity with which he approached the work of trying to find out what was true:

[Tom] Brokaw has called Cronkite the “gold standard,” and at a time when journalism commanded a whole lot more respect than it does today, he was its undeniable symbol. Perhaps it was his wire-service training, at a time when print experience was still considered valuable for broadcast journalists. Perhaps it was his calm demeanor, his mastery of understatement, his disdain for on-air showmanship.

Another write-up in the Washington Post credits Cronkite for having “shaped the medium and the nation”. Xinhua editor Wang Guanqun praised Cronkite’s “professional experience and kindly demeanor”, and quoted several American comments on his death. In the short Xinhua newsclip, Wang also wrote: “Cronkite pioneered and then mastered the role of television news anchorman with such plain-spoken grace that he was regarded as the ‘voice of TV news’ by New York Times.”

In this moving CBS video, Walter Cronkite gives an account of his long evolution as a journalist, in his own words: “I think I was a workaholic from the very beginning… it was the newspaper work for me; I just fell in love with the darn business”. He laments dropping out of college and says he always regretted it, but goes on to explain how he met his wife and achieved so much as a journalist.

Cronkite talks of how Edward R. Murrow called him and asked him to come to work at CBS, the beginning of the most significant and lasting part of his legacy. He says Murrow’s famed “Good night, and good luck” was in part the inspiration for his adopting the catch-phrase “And that’s the way it is”. He also notes that it was on one of his evening news broadcasts that the Beatles first appeared on American television. In the end, he says he’s lucky to have spent his whole life in journalism, adding “I think it all worked out pretty well”.