I am a little ‘sick in the head’ about Walter Cronkite’s passing. The literal translation of Cronkite in Yiddish, the most literal of languages, is ‘sickhead’. As a student of language, Walter had to know.
I became a sickhead for news thanks to Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, and from my mom, who insisted on watching CBS and NBC news back-to-back every weeknight. Huntley was a Montana boy made good. All I can remember about David Brinkley is that he seemed to speak through clenched teeth and that he had excellent posture.
Cronkite was a curiously gutsy guy swallowed by a fleshy mustached sound box. He established the CBS tradition of the caring town crier; glee or grief didn’t have to be in the script: we felt privileged to witness the big fella fighting to maintain composure.
JFK had just visited Montana two months before his assassination; I might have only been seven years old, but I’ll never forget when Walter Cronkite took off his dark framed glasses just after telling us John F. Kennedy had died. I knew the world had changed forever: I saw it on Walter Cronkite’s face.
From Cronkite to Dan Rather to Katie Couric, CBS Evening News is still married to a simple, folksy style, for better or for worse. Network news audiences have gone from better to worse, losing an average of *one million viewers every year.
Cronkite’s competitor Chet Huntley died a few months after his return to Montana in 1974, David Brinkley died in 2003. With Cronkite’s passing Friday, network news, once a proud packed three-chimney steam liner, cast off its last anchor and is a dinghy adrift in international shipping lanes–perhaps with Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart at the helm.
The Anchor & Ship
Instead of 23 minutes of news that’s pre-digested, organized and delivered at dinnertime by middle aged white males, there’s an avalanche of fact and opinion, theory and perspective at our fingertips. The wonderful, awful thing is that news and opinion aren’t filtered, boxed and labeled any more. The wrapping changes the contents to suit the specific sickhead who opens the box.
Sometimes I long just to sit down with a Swanson TV Dinner and wait for Walter Cronkite to make sense of the world for me…but that’s just not the way it is today, Saturday June 18th, Two Thousand and Nine.
* http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2009/narrative_networktv_audience.php?media=6&cat=2
July 19th, 2009 at 7:50 am
Well said, Claire. Cronkite served America fairly well, during his time - but his passing now, at this very interesting transitional time in media, is a marker. He built a respectable ship, but there’s no “big ship” anymore.
July 21st, 2009 at 3:43 am
Great piece Claire, I always knew him as Uncle Walter, not for the fact that we may be related, no the reason was that he was always invited into the home and was the one to show us…the moon landing, even today I look at an image of a blank black and white tv screen (cameras not able to capture an image) and I hear Uncle Water telling us the exciting news…so in closing- we’ll miss you Walter