Walter Cronkite ( 1916 - 2009)

Essay: Cronkite and the voice of authority gone - AP


By TED ANTHONY, AP National Writer Ted Anthony, Ap National Writer – Sun Jul 19, 12:56 am ET

WASHINGTON – "And that's the way it is," he'd say. It wasn't, but we wanted that reassurance. The idea that someone could wrangle the world each night and boil it down to a sensible, digestible half hour was so comforting.

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.

"We'd all let him watch our kids when we went out to the supermarket if we had the chance," NBC anchorman Brian Williams said. Hard to imagine Bill O'Reilly or Keith Olbermann, vigorous though they are, as national baby sitters.

"Uncle Walter," we called him. But on the Internet, there's not much use for uncles.

We are now confronted with a rushing, 24-hour river of information, much of it chaotic and raw, with no one to shepherd us through it.

Though network TV news remains popular, its demographic is older and it has struggled, losing about 1 million viewers a year in the years since Cronkite retired as anchor in 1981.

At the end of last year, according to Gallup, 31 percent of Americans considered the Internet to be a daily news source, a 50 percent gain since 2006. That's almost 100 million people actively reaching out to get their news rather than flipping on the TV and waiting for it to come to them.

At the same time, people now want a stake in their news and direct attention from the people who deliver it. They're demanding it, and they're getting it.

NBC's Williams, for example, does a daily blog. CNN anchor Rick Sanchez has built his midafternoon show around feedback from followers on Twitter and Facebook. News has become a two-way street, something to create community around.

That can be at once productive and perilous.

It gives an exhilarating voice to the voiceless. Yet it also can encourage consensus reality. If enough of us say it loudly enough, it must be true. In the 1960s and 1970s, Cronkite was accepted as the everyday incarnation of empirical truth — "a voice of certainty in an uncertain world," as President Barack Obama put it Friday night.

Cronkite's legendary assessment of Vietnam's quagmire — the one that led Lyndon Johnson to lament, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America" — is often cast as a barometer of the anchor's power at the time. What shouldn't be ignored is that, even then, the waning of that kind of power had begun.

"Middle America" then generally meant white and over 30, the very people that the young, energetic game-changers of the late 1960s were insisting shouldn't be trusted. Power to the people was upending the national hierarchy, and the Age of Many Voices was approaching.

Four decades later, cacophony reigns. What room is there for the conscience of a nation, for history's anchorman, for the father we all wanted?

In 2009, even trust, at least in the public realm, seems an uneasy notion. It's something we continue to desire. But in an age of wholesale, instantaneous, unprecedented lying, trust is something that may not be that wise when it comes to evaluating our sources of information.

That's what has changed since Cronkite's heyday.

Today's model works more like this: Everyone vies to get his personalized, customized, agenda-driven version of "that's the way it is" enshrined in the cultural canon. We shout, cajole, maneuver, horse-trade. We demonize the opposition. We brand ideas as products and send them on their way, ready to do battle in the marketplace.

Our anchors follow suit, riding the rising crest of expectation and anticipation and, sometimes, misusing it. "It's not the old voice of reassuring honesty that they cultivate, but one of perpetual anxiety," Los Angeles Times TV critic Robert Lloyd wrote in his Cronkite eulogy.

The coliseum is always open for business. If you've got a TV or a laptop, you're plugged in to the whole planet and can have your say. No one person can speak for us all — we don't even pretend that's the case anymore — and those who tried would be put in their places as fast as you can say Edward R. Murrow.

That can be a glorious expression of democracy, or it can lead, as it did Saturday morning, to the most e-mailed story on Yahoo! News being the one about the Oscar Mayer Weinermobile crashing into a house in Wisconsin. Democracy has a way of being quite democratic.

Nightly American comfort, Cronkite style, is a thing of the past, if it ever really existed at all. Perhaps, in the Age of Many Voices, comfort and reassurance is not meant to be our lot. Maybe that's just the way it is.

___

EDITOR'S NOTE — Ted Anthony covers American culture for The Associated Press.

____________________________________________________________________________________

OBITUARY :


Walter Cronkite (born Nov. 4, 1916)

NEW YORK (AP) - Walter Cronkite, the premier TV anchorman of the networks' golden age who reported a tumultuous time with reassuring authority and came to be called "the most trusted man in America," died Friday. He was 92.

Cronkite's longtime chief of staff, Marlene Adler, said Cronkite died at 7:42 p.m. at his Manhattan home surrounded by family. She said the cause of death was cerebral vascular disease.

Adler said, "I have to go now" before breaking down into what sounded like a sob. She said she had no further comment.

Cronkite was the face of the "CBS Evening News" from 1962 to 1981, when stories ranged from the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to racial and anti-war riots, Watergate and the Iranian hostage crisis.

It was Cronkite who read the bulletins coming from Dallas when Kennedy was shot Nov. 22, 1963, interrupting a live CBS-TV broadcast of the soap opera "As the World Turns."

Cronkite was the broadcaster to whom the title "anchorman" was first applied, and he came so identified in that role that eventually his own name became the term for the job in other languages. (Swedish anchors are known as Kronkiters; In Holland, they are Cronkiters.)

"He was a great broadcaster and a gentleman whose experience, honesty, professionalism and style defined the role of anchor and commentator," CBS Corp. chief executive Leslie Moonves said in a statement.

His 1968 editorial declaring the United States was "mired in stalemate" in Vietnam was seen by some as a turning point in U.S. opinion of the war. He also helped broker the 1977 invitation that took Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to Jerusalem, the breakthrough to Egypt's peace treaty with Israel.

He followed the 1960s space race with open fascination, anchoring marathon broadcasts of major flights from the first suborbital shot to the first moon landing, exclaiming, "Look at those pictu r es, wow!" as Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon's surface in 1969. In 1998, for CNN, he went back to Cape Canaveral to cover John Glenn's return to space after 36 years.

"It is impossible to imagine CBS News, journalism or indeed America without Walter Cronkite," CBS News president Sean McManus said in a statement. "More than just the best and most trusted anchor in history, he guided America through our crises, tragedies and also our victories and greatest moments."

He had been scheduled to speak last January for the 50th anniversary of the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Ala., but ill health prevented his appearance.

A former wire service reporter and war correspondent, he valued accuracy, objectivity and understated compassion. He expressed liberal views in more recent writings but said he had always aimed to be fair and professional in his judgments on the air.

Off camera, his stamina and admittedly demanding ways brought him the nic k name "Old Ironpants." But to viewers, he was "Uncle Walter," with his jowls and grainy baritone, his warm, direct expression and his trim mustache.

When he summed up the news each evening by stating, "And THAT's the way it is," millions agreed. His reputation survived accusations of bias by Richard Nixon's vice president, Spiro Agnew, and being labeled a "pinko" in the tirades of a fictional icon, Archie Bunker of CBS's "All in the Family."

Two polls pronounced Cronkite the "most trusted man in America": a 1972 "trust index" survey in which he finished No. 1, about 15 points higher than leading politicians, and a 1974 survey in which people chose him as the most trusted television newscaster.

Like fellow Midwesterner Johnny Carson, Cronkite seemed to embody the nation's mainstream. When he broke down as he announced Kennedy's death, removing his glasses and fighting back tears, the times seemed to break down with him.

And when Cronkite took sides, he h elped shape the times. After the 1968 Tet offensive, he visited Vietnam and wrote and narrated a "speculative, personal" report advocating negotiations leading to the withdrawal of American troops.

"We have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders, both in Vietnam and Washington, to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds," he said, and concluded, "We are mired in stalemate."

After the broadcast, President Johnson reportedly said, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America."


Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press
_____________________________________________________________________________________

From the Chicago Tribune
Cronkite the 'standard' for broadcasters
CBS anchor known for news objectivity but shaped the times

By Frazier Moore | Associated Press
July 19, 2009

NEW YORK -- Presidents, astronauts and colleagues on Saturday paid tribute to Walter Cronkite, the iconic face of television journalism to generations of Americans.

President Barack Obama said in a statement that Cronkite set the standard by which all other news anchors have been judged, echoing sentiments from former Presidents George W. Bush and Jimmy Carter.

"He invited us to believe in him, and he never let us down," Obama said. "This country has lost an icon and a dear friend, and he will be truly missed."

Cronkite was the broadcaster to whom the title "anchorman" was first applied. In Sweden anchors were sometimes termed Kronkiters; in Holland, they were Cronkiters.

"It's hard to imagine a man for whom I had more admiration," Mike Wallace of "60 Minutes" said on CNN. "... He was a superb reporter and honorable man." Cronkite, who became the "most trusted man in America," died Friday in his Manhattan home at age 92.

Cronkite was the face of the "CBS Evening News" from 1962 to 1981, when stories ranged from the assassinations of President John Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to racial and anti-war riots, Watergate and the Iranian hostage crisis.

It was Cronkite who read the bulletins coming from Dallas when Kennedy was shot Nov. 22, 1963, interrupting a live CBS-TV broadcast of a soap opera.

"Walter was who I wanted to be when I grew up," said CBS' "Face the Nation" host Bob Schieffer, 72, who began working at CBS News in 1969. "He set a standard for all of us. He made television news what it became."

Cronkite died just three days before the 40th anniversary of the moon landing, a moment of history linked with his reporting.

"He had a passion for human space exploration, an enthusiasm that was contagious, and the trust of his audience. He will be missed," astronaut Neil Armstrong said.

"Walter Cronkite was and always will be the gold standard," said ABC News anchor Charles Gibson. "His objectivity, his evenhandedness, his news judgment are all great examples."

On April 16, 1962, Cronkite replaced Douglas Edwards on CBS' "Evening News."

"I never asked them why," Cronkite recalled in 2006. "I was so pleased to get the job, I didn't want to endanger it by suggesting that I didn't know why I had it."

A former wire service reporter and war correspondent, Cronkite valued accuracy, objectivity and understated compassion. He expressed liberal views in more recent writings but said he had always aimed to be fair and professional in his judgments on the air.

But when Cronkite took sides, he helped shape the times. After the 1968 Tet offensive, he visited Vietnam and wrote and narrated a "speculative, personal" report advocating negotiations leading to the withdrawal of American troops. He concluded, "We are mired in stalemate."

After the broadcast, President Lyndon B. Johnson reportedly said, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America."

Polls in 1972 and 1974 pronounced Cronkite the "most trusted man in America." Cronkite was the top newsman during the peak era for the networks, when the nightly broadcasts grew to a half-hour and 24-hour cable and the Internet were nonexistent. In the fall of 1972, responding to reports in The Washington Post, Cronkite aired a two-part series on Watergate that helped ensure national attention to the then-emerging scandal.

As many as 18 million households tuned in to Cronkite's top-rated program each evening. Twice that number watched his final show, on March 6, 1981, compared with fewer than 10 million in 2005 for the departure of Dan Rather .

Rather, who replaced Cronkite at the anchor desk, called Cronkite "a giant of the journalistic craft."

Cronkite had stepped down at 64 years old with the assurance that other duties awaited him at CBS News, but he found little demand there for his services. He hosted the short-lived science magazine series "Walter Cronkite's Universe" and was retained by the network as a consultant, although he was never consulted.

He hosted or narrated specials on public and cable TV and issued his columns and the best-selling "A Reporter's Life."

For 24 years he served as onsite host for New Year's Day telecasts by the Vienna Philharmonic, ending that cherished tradition only in 2009.

Cronkite's final resting place will be next to his late wife in Missouri, where the two first met, a spokeswoman said Saturday. A private funeral service was scheduled for Thursday in New York, and a memorial service is to be held within a month at the Lincoln Center.

____________________________________________________________________________________

Was Cronkite Really the First "Anchorman"?How we came to use the term.
By Ben ZimmerPosted Saturday, July 18, 2009, at 9:46 AM ET

In the news reports on Walter Cronkite's death, you often hear that he was the original "anchorman." The Baltimore Sun's obituary states, "The Missouri native was so fundamental to the concept of TV news that the word 'anchorman' was coined to describe his role at the 1952 national political conventions." Did the term anchorman really originate with Cronkite?

Not exactly. Anchorman (also written anchor man or anchor-man) has been anchored in the English language for about a millennium, though its meaning has varied considerably over the years. In an Anglo-Saxon glossary dated to the 10th or 11th century, the word ancor-man is given as a translation of Latin proreta, meaning the person on a ship who is literally in charge of the anchor. Anchorman also accrued a number of figurative uses in the pre-television era. It could refer to the person at the end of a tug-of-war team or to the last team member to play in a sequential sport like relay racing or bowling. More generally, the most important member of any sporting team could be called the anchor or anchorman. Not all senses of the word have been so positive, however: In the U.S. Naval Academy, the midshipman graduating at the very bottom of the class is known as the anchorman and gets recognition for this dubious honor during the graduation ceremony.

In the early days of broadcast television, the anchorman usage common in relay racing and other team sports came into circulation in discussions of various panel shows. John Cameron Swayze, a popular news commentator, was a regular on NBC's Who Said That?, a show in which panelists had to identify the authors of famous quotations. An article in the Washington Post on April 3, 1949, explained that Swayze was "anchor man in an otherwise changing team of experts." News panel shows had their own anchormen, and here the usage meant something more like "host." Correspondent Griffin Bancroft was identified as the "anchor man" of the CBS news show Capitol Cloakroom by the April 2, 1950, Post, while Lawrence Spivak served that function on NBC's Meet the Press, according to the New York Times of March 2, 1952.
Quantcast

But in the CBS telecast of the July 1952 presidential nominating conventions (both held at Chicago's International Amphitheater), Cronkite's pivotal role differed substantially from that of the more pedestrian panel-show anchormen. On March 13, the Chicago Tribune gave an early report of CBS's state-of-the-art plans for the conventions, already identifying Cronkite, the network's new Washington bureau chief, as "anchor man of the CBS crew." A day before the Republican Convention kicked off, on July 6, the Hartford Courant further explained that as "anchor man" Cronkite would be "coordinating switches from one news point or reporter to another."

In his memoir Tell Me a Story, CBS News producer and director Don Hewitt dimly recalls how Cronkite was dubbed "anchorman" at the '52 conventions: "Sig Mickelson, our boss, later claimed paternity for the term and may well have been right that he coined the phrase 'anchorman,' even though I thought I had." Convention producer Paul Levitan has also been credited. Whoever first gave the appellation to Cronkite was likely inspired by the earlier panel-show uses. Regardless of the term's provenance, however, Cronkite quickly became recognized as "not just 'an anchorman,' but 'the anchorman,' " in Hewitt's words. And, of course, when he began hosting the CBS Evening News a decade later, Cronkite cemented his place as the iconic anchorman of his generation.