You can’t explain the influence of Walter Cronkite to a high school kid today. They don’t have any experience that begins to corroborate what you’d say.
Walter Cronkite in the last decade - Texas Parks and Wildlife photo by Richard Roberts
Along with Chet Huntley and David Brinkley on NBC, Mr. Cronkite was among the first celebrity anchormen. In 1995, 14 years after he retired from the “CBS Evening News,” a TV Guide poll ranked him No. 1 in seven of eight categories for measuring television journalists. (He professed incomprehension that Maria Shriver beat him out in the eighth category, attractiveness.) He was so widely known that in Sweden anchormen were once called Cronkiters. (from the New York Times)
I’m saddened at the death of Cronkite. One of the things that saddens me is that he probably could have anchored for at least a decade past when he last signed off. Nothing against Dan Rather, at least not from me — just that Cronkite was one of a kind. He won’t be missed by too many people alive today who never had a chance to see him work.
So, go see him work. Media Decoder has a series of YouTube pieces showing what Cronkite could do, what Cronkite did. It’s history go see.
Other posts on Cronkite at Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub:
- “Happy Birthday, Walter Cronkite (a bit late)”
- “Old Iron Pants Cronkite”
- “Cronkite narrates Texas water supply programs”
- You did know that Cronkite was a Texan, right? “100 Tall Texans” at the George W. Bush Library in College Station (now on-line only)
More, probably better stuff
- CBS newsman Bob Schieffer on Cronkite, “News trumped all”
- CBS story on Cronkite’s death
- Tribute at the Museum of Broadcast Communications
- Walter Cronkite writing in the New York Times in 1990, on the perils of being a network anchorman
- NY Times slide show, “The Most Trusted Man in America”
- CBS to retire Cronkite’s introduction to “The CBS Evening News” (CBS shouldn’t do this, not yet; this is premature.)
Posted by Ed Darrell 
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 