Last time around, we looked at the wide-open demassified future of TV in the age of the Internet, with Liz Stephans and Scott Baker of Breitbart.tv’s daily B-Cast show. In the latest episode of Silicon Graffiti, we explore the legacy of the man who personified TV news in the much more limited era of three over-the-air national channels.
Noel Sheppard of Newsbusters.org and Austin Bay of Austin Bay.net join me to discuss the legacy of Walter Cronkite, including:
- The first CBS Evening News with Cronkite.
- Why Cronkite’s legacy was mourned by Old Media.
- Cronkite announces JFK’s assassination, and man landing on the moon.
- Austin Bay on Cronkite and Tet.
- Cronkite in retirement: advocate of World Government; less than champion advocate of the American Everyman.
- Searching for the next “Cronkite Moment” in Iraq.
- And more!
To watch our nearly 40 previous editions of Silicon Graffiti, click here and just keep scrolling, or visit our YouTube page. You’re more than welcome to embed the above video on your own blog — in fact, we encourage it. For a YouTube-sized version, click on the sideways-Y-shaped icon on the above video. To embed the bigger 16X9 widescreen version, click here, then click “Embed” and choose (naturally enough) “Big Widescreen Player” from the options below.
(Bumped to top.)
Update: At one point in the video, Noel and I discuss this Cronkite quote from 2005, as Uncle Walter expressed his indignation with the results of the previous year’s presidential election:
“We’re an ignorant nation right now. We’re not really capable I do not think the majority of our people of making the decisions that have to be made at election time and particularly in the selection of their legislatures and their Congress and the presidency of course.”
Four years later, even after a very different election result, and one of Cronkite’s would-be successors still holds his countrymen in similarly low esteem.
I blame the pernicious effects of high-fructose corn syrup, myself.
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