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.”Advertisement
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.
This article proceeds of a lot of!
Ed: Well, I can’t argue with that!
I think it is a mistake to credit Cronkite with setting the pattern the TV anchor – his predecessor Ed Murrow did that in both radio and TV but as I recall Cronkite was a worthy successor to Murrow. We all wondered if he could fill Murrow’s shoes and I think most of his audience accepted that he did. On Tet I would have to say that it was the moment that TV realized it could control the narrative regardless of the actual events on the ground and began to believe its duty was to do so -particularly after Watergate. TH US military made the mistake of thinking that they controlled the narrative in Vietnam. The trouble with Tet at the time was that the US military was portraying the state of the war as such that the enemy just could not launch such an attack and so they looked like idiots. In retrospect I believe this situation was caused by the military giving up censorship which they had used in WW2 in conjunction with much franker off the record backgroundrs. It fooled me at the time – the military lost credibility in my eyes. Now the same thing has happened to the press in the Iraq war. Peter Arnet’s reporting from Baghdad in the 91 war was TV’s high water mark reporting as it did live from the enemy capital. In 2003 Arnet and CNN were discredited for being in Saddam’s pocket. Still, I believe TV will continue to rule the roost so long as people half consciously mistake highly edited and manipulated footage for actual experience.