Friday, July 17, 2009

Walter Cronkite Dies Today

This may be the last serious broadcast journalist. It was at the end of his on air career that networks started demanding that the news had to make money. No longer would we get the news we needed to know, now we would get the news we wanted to know.

8 comments:

giggles said...

oh no... I hadn't heard.........

Unknown said...

Truly, the end of an era...
Sad, very sad!
~AM

themom said...

I find it so sad. I loved listening to his voice along with so many others who have left the microphone.

Commander Zaius said...

Your comments Utah are right on the spot. Dan Rather did his best following after him but it was just too hard. None of the big three on the regular networks now can hold a candle to him. And the junior reporters under them are even more light weight.

Doc said...

It is a pity that the evening news doesn't have a patron Saint. A Saint that would guide them to dig a little deeper and find the truth, or at least, the best truth they could find.

Not to sound like an old grumpy bastard, but at least then the news tried very hard to be news rather than the mouthpiece for whatever the PR man was spouting this week. These guys told it as they saw it, not as the press release printed it.

Fuck American news. The BBC are the only ones I can even remotely trust anymore and that says something very, very sad.

Doc

Utah Savage said...

Doc, Beach I agree with the two of you. I still listen to NPR, PBS, but the rest of it is enfotainment, for the most part. To some degree I think Bill Moyers is carrying on in the tradition of Huntly/Brinkley. They were a great team. But all the rest is schlock. BBC World News is a good source, and some of our newspapers and blogs are good. But you really have to dig to find it.

Cronkite was my families meat and potatoes. We were always engaged with the events of the day, our time in history. There are actually adult people who have never followed the news. Couldn't tell you a single important event other than some fucking reality show. Low culture is what we care about now.

susan said...

Yes, before there was 24 hour infotainment you could actually learn something in 30 minutes of nightly network news. I remember the night Walter cried as he reported the beatings outside the 1968 Democratic Convention. He went through the changes so many of us experienced and it's sad to say good-bye.

Ed Darrell said...

Jim Lehrer is top notch, and for that matter, so is the whole team at News Hour. You're right about Moyers.

But don't shortchange Bob Schieffer. And there is a lot of good work at NBC still.

But wouldn't you kill for a "Politics Tonight" done as splashily for politics as "Entertainment Tonight" or one of the ESPN sports shows?

Who holds forth on Salt Lake City television these days? Just the good ones . . .