And thats the way it is, travel well my friend.

He was an Icon in my young world.

And if not a Saint, I sure miss him. His decency.

Now these shrill Fox monstrosities spewing tripe.

The contrast is indescribable, and points to why this country is in ruins. TV, mind control, propoganda now refined for decades.

Goodbye, Old Soul, Sweet Dreams....hope to be with you very soon.

Bye bye Uncle Walter! Whether it was the civil rights unrest, the Kennedy assassination (where he almost broke down when reading the official announcement of death on the air), the Vietnam War, the space program, or NIxon--you helped us make sense of what was happening and were anything but "coldly objective". Thanks for being there for all of us.

May the blogoshere be for a future generation of similarly connected journalists what the wire services and newspapers were for you--a good training ground for becoming an eyewitness to more than just the official politically-correct version of history that unfolds every day and the means of reporting it to all the people.

Poet

the last drop of the good stuff is gone.

bring on the cheap swill, bill.

He was a more than a damn sight better that the current crew of tv legacies who mostly won't even come close to the class of this man, Walter Cronkite.

But there are a new batch of motivated and real investigative journalist out there, mostly not connected to the msm(thankfully), digging around in the garage dump of this world to bring the filthy truth out for those want to know and for those that should want to know, it just boils down to just 'do you want to know?'.

The current crop of news models are not fit enough to clean his toilets.

He outlived journalism by quite a bit at least.

Back in the day when the government feared the people...

Adios News Integrity,

What a sweet and assuring thing it was indeed, to have Walter waiting for you at six o'clock. Here's a fitting cartoon with Walter in it:

http://sendables.jibjab.com/originals/what_we_call_the_news

"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." - Thomas Jefferson

'"It is impossible to imagine CBS News, journalism or indeed America without Walter Cronkite," Sean McManus, the president of CBS News, said in a statement.'

CBS News, journalism, and America are but mere shadows of what they once were.

Mr. McManus, you are the president of CBS News. Can you not dignify Walter Cronkite's memory by cleaning house of the bubble-headed shills and preening primadonnas? Can you honestly do no better than what you have done? Cronkite is watching you.

Walter Cronkite, we miss you already.

Mister Cronkite: We Americans abandoned integrity, fact and quality in reporting for flash, scandal, swill and controversy and I for one am truly sorry.

Good Night.

A lot of todays teleprompter readers will chokingly tell us how WC inspired them to become journalists. Yet what they became is stenographers to government propaganda spin.

One has to wonder how news has become so corporatized, with fluff winning the day to distract, and a conservative slant acting as an agent of misinformation. What would Cronkite have had to say about Fox News, CNN, and the mainstream media? May Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow carry his torch high. Truth is the anti-venom, and Walter bled it. R.I.P.

He kept up with current events during the Bush years and wrote vociferously about the power grab. I think he died of a broken heart over what we have become.

As a rather nerdy science-kid (something you could be and not be ostracized too much back then) I'll always remember his NASA coverage, and his weekly program (on Sundays, it think) called "The Twenty-first Century". It presented all the wonderful ongoing scientific and technological advances and how they would shape society, eliminate poverty, and allow all to enjoy comfort and leisure in the 21st century. I was shooed away once by my catholic parents when the program featured developments in birth control pills.

Like all futurism, it was wildly inaccurate. But it was optimistic in that way the 1960s were - a sense that any present troubles were temporary and anyone suggesting that that the future wasn't going to be much better than the present would be regarded as a kook.

It was largely because of a tiny handful of people including Mr. Cronkite that I still believed for a while that the USA might be salvageable. Now I'm not at all so sure. One thing is for certain: an era has ended.

Cronkite, a good guy, out of well-meaning became co-responsible for the fake facade of US society, which has since escalated. Mr. Middle America Cronkite, like the society he served and influenced, was hardly radical enough on crucial issued - pollution, commercialization, war on marijuana or Vietnam - to be realistic.

R.I.P.

How are we to evaluate well-meaning people who co-cause distress and destruction?

What is it about us that when someone famous dies (Cronkite, Jacko), we tend to elevate him/her to sainthood? Yes, we can say good things about him/her, but please lets not lose our sense of balance.

Media stars are paid millions, but frankly I don't know any reporter who is worth that kind of money... marketing is what elevates their worth.

Depending on your yardstick, Cronkite was a decent newsman, but not in the league of a John Pilger or a Robert Fisk. During the heyday of Cronkite, I preferred Severeid.

Walter Cronkite had been out of the news business for years and years now.

The news business has transformed since his departure into infotainment and public relations for presidential administrations and the establishment. Just remember the lack of journalistic ethics from both print and TV Media during the leadup to the Iraq War when so-called journalists acted as lapdogs rather than watchdogs of the criminals in the Bush administration and the fanciful lies told by Colin Powell to the United Nations regarding "WMD." Yeah, those cartoon-like figures and illustrations had been "real proof" alright. More like real lies! By the time the Bush administration illegally invaded Iraq, the Media/Press Establishment in the USA had completely failed and has yet to regain any of its ethical standards back as it continues to distort the truth and afraid to actually confront the power structure, because of the fear....blah...blah...blah....blah of retaining access to those with high postitions of power. Media consolidation of radio, TV, and newspapers have also totally corrupted the "journalism" profession as well. In short, the news business is awful today and really seems to be more about propaganda shilling for the monied and propertied classes than about the "truth."

Mr. Cronkite was part of that elite establishment as well. In spite of being connected to power, Cronkite admirambly questioned the unjust war in Vietnam. Yet, it should also be noted that Cronkite was not always opposed to that war, either.

I do not think people are "elevating" Cronkite to any sort of "sainthood status" as some poster erroneously suggested either. What has occurred is proper reflection on his way of presenting the news, in contrast to the obscene and vulgar ways that the political discourse has taken in America with the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glen Beck, Mike Savage, Bill O'Reilly, Lou Dobbs, Chris Matthews, Joe Scarborough, Pat Buchanan, as well as FOX "News" and its corrupt/criminal owner Rupert Murdoch.

And that's the way it is today, not yesterday, but now!

Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."

His memoir, while not as complex or interesting as Howard K. Smith's, is worth reading. Especially towards the end where Mr. Cronkite details his outrageous treatment by CBS when they forced him far too early out to pasture. He was one of the first casualties of the buyouts of the once smaller, often family dominated networks by increasingly massive, corporatist/fascist parent companies with hundreds if not thousands of corporate bottom lines to protect. For them Cronkite was too honest, too direct and too likely to use moral reasoning. His stance against the Vietnam War had already made him enemies in the military-industrial complex.

In Cronkite's day the Big Three TV networks kept the news and entertainment divisions separate. TV news in the early to mid Cold War was considered too societally important to be measured in terms of advertising ratings profitability. About the time Cronkite was put out to pasture in the early 1980s, the nightly TV news began to be measured for ratings profitability and the news divisions were invaded by "image consultants". The networks started hiring and promoting TV anchors not based on their journalistic acumen but on their demographic ratings appeal to large subsets of the viewing audience. Thus we went from seasoned, veteran authentic journalists like Howard K. Smith and Walter Cronkite--who paid hard-earned dues as local wire service, newspaper, radio and war correspondents for decades before TV came along--to pretty boy weathermen-turned anchor dolls like Peter Jennings who was a Canadian weatherman who didn't have a degree in journalism, had never been a hard news correspondent or covered a war, but appealed to white women ages 18-to-35 who found him suave and and his delivery very "sophisticated." Rush Limbaugh similarly lacks any journalistic credentials but broadly appealed to white males ages 18-to-35 who found him "truthful" and "authoritative."

Because of his being forced out too early, Cronkite was one of the most wasted journalistic and, in a broader sense, cultural talents in the last 30 years. He did many of the things he wanted to but he might have done so much more had he been allowed the proper media platform. He was a great narrator in any case. I still have audio of him hosting a children's program about dinosaurs and the scientists who study their remains that is wonderful listening.

He was one of the tiny handful of Americans allowed inside the Soviet Union in the early years of the Cold War and saw, on one of his excursions, German POW survivors of battles like Stalingrad doing menial work still in their tattered old WWII uniforms. I think out of well over 200,000 Germans who fought at Stalingrad only 5,000 or so made it out alive to be repatriated to East Germany under Kruschev.

With Cronkite narrating the moon landings and Star Trek and Lost In Space on the tube, many in my generation including myself grew up expecting that man would have colonized Mars by now--and we could have had we gotten our priorities straight. Instead we got moon landings that led nowhere. No further better vision. Now the entire nation and the planet are on the path that leads nowhere.

If souls can be re-born, I hope his finds an alternate parallel U.S. where RFK became president in 1968; we got out of Vietnam by 1970; we got universal single payer health care by 1972; we improved and maintained public education and laid the groundwork for an environmentally sustainable future; we included money to develop space habitats and space colonies, and we early and fully funded NASA's Mission To Planet Earth to preclude Newt Gingrich from deliberately slashing funding to that mission to prevent the early, timely and comprehensive acquisition of multiple data sets confirming global warming.

Walter Cronkite was a 20th century American in the best sense of the word and he stood for hope and against militarism. He had been a war correspondent unlike many present day "TV journalists." He saw firsthand what war does to combatants and civilians alike. He represented hope for the future based on the best aspects of what it meant to be an American. He stood against apathy and emotional defeatism.

There will never be another one like him because there will never be another 1960s. At least not in this verse of the polyverse.

I can remember actually looking forward to the evening news.

We won't be seeing his like again.

What metal said at 8:52 AM. Excellent post.