About Walter Cronkite

I wasn’t alive for any of Cronkite’s evening broadcasts, but I did study him a lot in school. I think that makes me unqualified to say much about him. I love Cronkite’s work, and I’ll leave more meaningful remembrances to more competent writers. They’re going on now about how there will never be another Cronkite. That no one will trust a single newsman anymore, not after the politicization of networks and the fragmentation of media (TV, radio, newspapers, the web). I suppose it is true that there won’t be another Cronkite because Cronkite was the result of a fairly new medium and a cultural landscape that probably won’t come around again. That’s not necessarily bad. Things change. It’s sad that Cronkite is gone, but maybe instead of using his passing as a metaphor for the death of the news we should look back at all of the network frustrations he faced in the 80s and how quickly he became a name to drop instead of a legacy for subsequent broadcasters.