The Last of the Newsmen Walter Cronkite and the Way It Was.
By Megan Garber
July 2009
http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/the_last_of_the_newsmen.phpTV news anchors, and any other journalists who aspire to be trusted in the way that Walter Cronkite was trusted, would do well to remember one of the moments that solidified Cronkite’s status in journalism’s echelons: the moment, forty years ago today, when we put a man on the moon. As footage of Apollo 11 making its lunar touchdown flashed onscreen, and as Neil Armstrong confirmed that, indeed, “the eagle had landed,” the news anchor charged with guiding the nation through the history it was making let out a long guffaw—half amused, half amazed. “Oooooh…oh, boy,” Cronkite whooped, shaking his head and rubbing his hands in giddiness and, really, glee. “Wally, say something,” he said to his co-host, the astronaut Wally Schirra. “I’m speechless.”
This was Cronkite’s brand of news: at once epic and intimate, at once grandfatherly and childlike—not only familiar, but familial. It was sincere. It leveled with you, and treated you not as a Nielsen stat, or as a consumer, or as a user, but as a person—one whose life was as bound to the day’s events, just as epically and just as intimately, as Cronkite’s was. It respected the news, and the viewer along with it. No holograms necessary.
The New York Times, in an appreciation of Cronkite this weekend, considered the roots of the authority that the anchor once named “the most trusted man in America” embodied. “His job was to appear unfazed, unchanged by the events he described,” the editorial goes. “But from time to time—reporting President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, reporting from Vietnam, reporting that first step on the moon—he made it clear that the news of the day had changed not only us but him.” It was in those moments that “he seemed his most authoritative.”
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Stewart is an honest broker if not a real newsman. The credibility of
network news has been declining for 20 years (see Pew trend data on
this). People distrust that cocktail party insider, rubbing elbows with
the powerful entitled status, they distrust television's news judgment,
and they dislike that arrogant, privileged gatekeeper mentality