I watched Huntley-Brinkley.
Except for his Vietnam body counts, I watched very little of Walter Cronkite and have not had the experience of perceiving him to be anything more than an icon of a distant time and place where men were men and the truth was lassooed like a bulldogged calf, wrestled to the ground and branded with the CBS eye. He was just another old white man who spoke good English to me.
My inspiration came from the likes of Fred Friendly whose aim was ". . . not to make up anybody's mind, but to open minds and to make the agony of decision making so intense that you can escape only by thinking."
Quite frankly I can't imagine at all, that Cronkite made anybody think. Which is I think entirely the point of his celebrity. You opened your craw and swallowed down whatever fish that the grave and erudite Mr Cronkite tossed you. So now he's dead and people are wondering why when we swallow today's fish it stinks and gives us bellyaches. Well what the hell was he doing in 1968? Forming a news hegemony? I think it didn't work.
The presumption that we can trust news organizations to present expositorily through one talking head, a narrative that will leave us intellectually satisfied, and satisfactorily intelligent is one that is appropriate to the peasantry of any society. So another Cronkite can and will be manufactured and the peasants will settle down. In the meantime, enjoy the New Media while we still have liberty.
