Here's My Point: Another Icon Lost

By Ron Fitzwater

I sometimes think that I am awful lucky to belong to that in-between generation that I do. I'm one of those folks who are too young to be Baby-Boomers (our Dads fought in Korea and Vietnam, not WWII) and too old to be Generation X or Y or whatever they are called now (those are our kids).

We witnessed many things in our lives, including the assassinations of King and the Kennedys. We watched reports of the Vietnam War and searched for the faces of our fathers when the Bob Hope Special was on and we wondered about what all that Watergate stuff was about. That is, until we got a little older. And we watched a man walk on the moon for the first time, an American.

One of the people, and probably the one most folks think about when they think of reports of those events, is Walter Cronkite. Cronkite came into our homes every night at 6:30 p.m., described all of those things to us, and more and did it with a level of integrity that was and is unimpeachable.

Cronkite has been called the "most trusted man in America" and he truly earned the title through decades of the honest, straightforward journalism that informed and educated the viewer. He swelled with pride at his county's accomplishments and choked up at her shortcomings and was not afraid to do so.

Probably his most memorable accomplishment was to give his opinion on the Vietnam War, something unheard of for a major media personality of the time, but he felt so strongly that he put his considerable reputation on the line for something he saw as wrong.

To me as a kid, he was just some old guy telling the news. It wasn't until I got a little older that I began to truly appreciate what it was he did and, by then he was leaving the anchor desk to make way for the younger Dan Rather.

Many years later, when I began my quest for this second career I am now in, I began to study well-respected newsmen in hopes of learning some of the tricks of the trade. What I learned about Cronkite is that there were no tricks. What you saw and heard was what the news was, and it was news.

News was not some titillating tid-bit out of Hollywood but what was happening in the world, and it wasn't a 10-second sound bite, it was a news story.

In comparison to today's news, I heard the other day that every network news anchor from the old big three networks went to California to do live newscast around King of Pop Michael Jackson's funeral. In 1977, when King of Rock and Roll Elvis Presley died, it didn't even make the opening tease for the CBS Evening News with Cronkite and was reported somewhere in the bottom part of the newscast.

There are no longer true national newscasts. The game changed when profits became more important than content and sensationalism became more important than substance, something Cronkite thought of as an unfortunate but normal progression of the business.

It is too bad that guys like Cronkite, Howard K. Smith, David Brinkley and Chet Huntley aren't around anymore to tell us what the news is. Without them we are left to root through the trash broadcast reporting out there in search of the information it needs.

Cronkite would say "that's the way it is" and, sadly, that is the way it is.