Cultureshark remembers Walter Cronkite

Walter Cronkite was a little bit before my time, but studying journalism and media back in my not-so-distant youth, I was well aware of his impact. He had a presence that loomed over the world of TV news even after his retirement from full-time anchoring duty (just ask Dan Rather, whose life Cronkite apparently tried to make miserable ever since he took "his" spot).

I don't have a lot of firsthand memories of seeing the man in action, but we've all seen the clips, and thinking about those and Cronkite's career makes me reflect on how there is this Golden Rule of Objectivity in journalism--that's supposedly the standard its practitioners are supposed to strive for--yet we remember Cronkite most for the moments when he was not objective.

Remember him getting emotional when JFK died or getting giddy during the moon landing? And what is the conventional wisdom about his success? He was "America's most trusted man." Legend has it that the powers that be knew they had "lost" the public on Vietnam when Cronkite started making it clear he wasn't on board. Just because his opinions were considered mainstream doesn't mean he didn't have them and get them across.

Kind of makes you wonder, do we really want objective newscasters and reporters? Journalism schools do, but I don't know if actual consumers of news do. We just want someone who is biased, but biased the same way we are. People have written a lot of words in recent years about this and whether it is actually a bad thing that people seek partisan news sources like Fox News. After all, that's how journalism got its start: good old-fashioned biased reporting and opinion.

Tonight CBS airs an hourlong tribute at 7:00 P.M. I'll wager most of the clips will show Cronkite getting those feelings across. Granted, "objective" is not a synonym for "emotionless," but I don't know if there'll be too many classic moments introduced as, "Check out how brilliantly impassive and objective Cronkite was as he introduced a report on the Suez," or "Watch the master in action as he registers no emotion when talking about school busing."