Last we heard from Uncle Walter, he was blaming Karl Rove for defrosting Osama bin Laden out of cryogenic suspension in the London basement of the Ministry of Defense (where he was kept alongside Austin Powers, Evel Knievel and Vanilla Ice) just in time to influence election Tuesday. In a short AP piece this week, Cronkite thinks that Dan Rather should have stepped down “a long time ago”:
But Cronkite did not heavily fault Rather for his role in last September’s discredited story about President Bush’s military service. Rather anchored the “60 Minutes Wednesday” story.
“We all know he made a mistake by now,” Cronkite said. “But would we have done much the same? I would not be sure that I wouldn’t have followed my producers and accepted what they had to offer.”
And that’s the whole problem with the concept of the evening news anchorman, as Burt Prelutsky notes:
You can go back to Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, John Chancellor and Walter Cronkite. We treated them all with a deference that was totally out of proportion to the work they did. Essentially, the job description requires that they read the captions to the news footage we
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