I just saw. I watched him as a kid in the 1960’s. RIP Walter.

RIP, uncle walter.

Yes, my second thought on hearing it from David Shuster was, “well, that’s the last of the real reporters.”

With the anniversary of the moon landing coming up, I remember welll how thrilled and emotional Cronkite was on the original occasion.

Walter was a main reason for getting into journalism a million years ago. He’s better off no longer having to watch mainstream news operations destroy what people like he and Murrow built.

Now that you’re in a better position sir, we can use your guidance more than ever.

Rest in peace, Mr. Cronkite.

Growing up in the American MidWest in late 1950’s,the 1960’s and 70’s this man,Walter Cronkite,shaped my perceptions of what mattered as news via television for all those years.

He also hosted/narrated CBS programs like ‘The Twentieth Century’ which I recall aired on Sunday afternoons.

Watched him on black and white televsion up through 1969 when my parents then purchased the first color television for our home.

A great man,a great American,a great journalist and television news icon.

He deserves to be laid in honor in the American Capitol in WashingtonDC.

Incredible American. The likes of which will not likely be seen again.

RIP Walter Cronkite.

RIP Walter Cronkite… he’s a man whose sense of integrity and fair play have been sadly missing from American Journalism.

In a world of 24/7 “Gotcha Journalismism” he’s sorely missed, and has been since 1981.

If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America

LBJ

RIP Mr Cronkite

Used to watch “The Twentieth Century” too. My folks watched Huntley/Brinkley most of the time but I saw alot of Cronkite too.

I hope that today’s crop of “reporters” realize they aren’t exactly matching up. I suspect there will be a movie about him sometime soon.

I can’t say that I approve of round-the-clock, day-after-day for a week or more coverage of anyone’s death – but given what the tv networks did to memorialize Tim Russert, they “owe” Cronkite a month’s worth, at least.

jack… u mean jack black? omg i love ’school of rock’.

who is my lai? is she that rapper?

RIP Mr. Cronkite.

And don’t worry, we’ve got Marcy and Glennzilla and Dahr Jamail and Amy Goodman and multitudes more.

‘bye, Uncle Walter. You are missed.

Boy was I naive. At the age of 60 something, I used to think that all journalists were like Walter Cronkite. R.I.P.

OT: Moyers on global warming….guests saying Pres O not tough enough, ex. regulation,etc

Thomas Jefferson once said that if he had to choose between a nation with government and no newspapers, or one with newspapers and no government, he’d always choose the latter. Jefferson, historically one of the harshest critics of newspapers, also said: “Where the press is free, and every man can read, all is safe.”.

Journalism reached its peak, perhaps, during and just after Watergate. It’s safe to say that Nixon was brought down by the diligence of Woodward and Bernstein initially, and, then, a slew of other reporters from magazines and TV. They all competed to get the next scoop on the tragicomedy.

Journalism, at that time, came closest to a full-fledged “profession,” as medicine and the law have always been regarded. I took journalism classes at the University of Minnesota and a main point of discussion was whether journalism had become a profession with a “code” to follow and with an association to reward and censor its participants.

Somehow, that question of professionalism for gathering news is now nowhere on the radar. It has been shot out of the sky.

The incipient code, which was stillborn sometime in the Reagan era, contained elements that included: objectivity; never failing to at least try to get both sides’ comments (even if it meant writing “Mr. Smith did not return several calls made to his office; quotes from a “common” person on the street on the subject matter. The press (newspapers, TV and radio) came oh-so-close to becoming a true Fourth Estate, contributing to knowledgable discussions among everyone from street vendors to CEOs about all local and national issues. Above all, it came close to giving a voice to the average person, which would have mean real power for the working stiff, which is just not the case in the United States these days.

Jefferson’s philosophy in the United States was accompanied by legislation ensuring various degrees of freedom of publishing and the press. The depth to which these laws are entrenched go to the heart of our Constitution. The concept of freedom of speech is often covered by the same laws as freedom of the press, thereby giving equal treatment to media and individuals.

The term Fourth Estate refers both to the press as representatives of the common person and to the common people may. The term with respect to the common man seems to go back at least Henry Fielding in 1752 who is quoted as saying: “None of our political writers … take[s] notice of any more than three estates, namely, Kings, Lords, and Commons … passing by in silence that very large and powerful body which form the fourth estate in this community … The Mob.”

Jefferson knew that the Fourth Estate was a check on tyranny. He knew it was a hedge against secrecy. And he knew that no democracy could thrive — or survive, even — without a bright, shining light on government action.

The Society of Professional Journalists (SPR) states that it is dedicated to the perpetuation of a free press as the cornerstone of our nation and our liberty. To ensure that the concept of self-government outlined by the U.S. Constitution remains a reality into future centuries

Questions about journalism’s status as a profession were valid in the mid-1970s and into the early 80s. But even having to raise those questions in the first place blithely ignores the constitutionally defined role of the press in this nation, and how vital that role is to the strength of democracy.

The SPR does not have the elaborate list of commandments that the lawyer’s New York Lawyer’s Code of Professional Responsibility has. It hasn’t items that cover everything from: DR 2-106: Fees for Legal Services to DR 5-110: Sexual Relations with Clients to DR 8-102: Statements Concerning Judges and Other Adjudicatory Officers to Disciplinary Rule 9 – Client Funds and Property.

It’s not that journalists, especially professional journalists and the so-called mainstream journalists (not the new-breed citizen journalist on the Internet’s Web blogs) don’t deserve such vigilance or recognition. Afterall, it is unequivocally true that covering government issues and lack of openness by the government occupies as pivotal a space among press duties as anything else. It’s what we, in the news business, do and, indeed, why we exist.

But the Society of Professional Journalists has no disciplinary rules. The SPR has no elaborate code. Anyone can become a mainstream journalist, if they can write. They could have a grade school education or a Ph.D.

As a reporter in the late 1970s and early 80s, I and my buddies loved “beating” the competition to a story and getting the truth behind Minneapolis or Bridgeport, Conn.-area politics. Our motto was “you’re not doing your job (as a reporter) unless someone is mad at you” (for exposing the truth behind his faux program for the common person or for telling the people about his secret, backroom meeting with so and so after the “open” meeting for the public. One time, I walked into a prison block at a Minnesota prison to talk to the inmates. Turns out I didn’t have proper clearance. The warden was mad!! But I got the inmates’ comments on prison conditions.

Former CBS broadcaster Dan Rather, whom I idolized during the Vietnam years and during Watergate— a result of his reputation for asking very tough questions and not being afraid to ask follow-up questions, of powerful people like President Richard Nixon and many others—left CBS in 2006 in the wake of a scandal surrounding questionable documentation for a story accusing President George W. Bush of being absent without leave during his military service. Today, Rather works as a journalist for entrepreneur Mark Cuban’s HDNet network.. Rather now says journalism in recent years “has in some ways lost its guts.” Rather reportedly said journalists have become lapdogs to power, rather than watchdogs.

He says journalists are giving in to the intimidation by government officials that access will be denied unless given on the officials’ terms only. “By and large, so many journalists have adopted the go-along-to-get-along (attitude),” Rather said. Because of this “access game,” journalism has degenerated into a “very perilous state,” “In many ways, what we in journalism need is a spine transplant.” Says Rather “My role as a member of the press is to be sometimes a check and balance on power.”

That’s how we saw it in the late 70s on into the mid and late 80s in Minneapolis and in Milford, a suburb of Bridgeport, Conn. If someone didn’t return phone calls, we’d call someone else to get a reliable source on the record about all issues.

Contrary to today’s apparently ubiquitous practice, we controlled what was “off the record.” For public figures who were used to answering reporters’ questions, we published everything they said before they remembered to say “This is off the record!” We never asked them or reminded them that something even could be off the record.

Back then, public figures whom I covered, like Minneapolis Police Chief Anthony Bouza or Milford, Conn., Mayor Alberta Jagoe came to expect and respect our hounding. They answered every phone call. Ms. Jagoe tried to use us at the Bridgeport Post by having a daily 8 a.m. news conference (so she could get the p. 1 headline in that day’s afternoon paper). But we’d dial our phones until our fingers were red trying to get her opponents’ viewpoint into every story. If we couldn’t, we always included a sentence: “Republican alderman so-and-so could not be reached for comment.” Then that Republican alderman would get the headline the next day.

Tony Bouza prospered, first as head of three precincts in Harlem, then as NYPD’s Bronx Borough Commander from 1973 through 1976, then as head of the New York City Transit Police, and finally as Chief of Police of Minneapolis, Minn., from 1980 until February 1989. He was a regular source for me from 1980-1983 .

In Minnesota and Connecticut, we taped every conversation (with the public figures’ knowledge) or took copious notes, to serve as our defense against scatter-gun libel suits or verbal intimidation or denial of access. Often times, public officials were so mad at us they wouldn’t speak to us for weeks or months. We, like your typical doctor or lawyer, worked through lunch and/or dinner if the story, competition, and deadline demanded it. That’s very much professional dedication.

In Milford, Conn., the Post, New Haven Register and the Milford Citizen competed in a city of only 50,000. But that type of competition among media outlets—especially newspapers—is long gone. The end came with the Telecommunications Act of 1996, because of which large entertainment companies such as Time Warner, Viacom and Disney have been able to take over many of the country’s news outlets, inserting their own code of ethics and bias into the national news.

Jeff Cohen, who in 1986 founded Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), has said the “news” pushed by the major radio/TV networks and newspapers slants unerringly toward the interests of the five major corporations that own the bulk of them. They bury stories of vital importance while spewing hours and column inches at the mind-deadening likes of Paris Hilton and Brittany Spears.

Their excuse is that they “give the public what it wants” and are “in business to make a profit.” But the real profit centers of the corporations that own the CM are not in providing news and information. General Electric, Westinghouse, Disney and the other media-financial-industrial behemoths have too much to lose from an accurate reporting of the true news of the world. To protect their core interests, they are bread-and-circus PR/diversion machines, not real news organizations. And they profit from war-time contracts.

The April 20 New York Times story about how the Pentagon used more than 75 retired military officers with ties to lucrative defense industry contracts, as a way “to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance,” shouldn’t be too surprising.

The article, written by Times reporter David Barstow, reveals the manipulations of the Bush PR machine, with Rumsfeld playing the puppet master; propaganda talking points found their way to military “analysts” hired by news networks and then sold to the American public as “independent” observers. Their ties to military contractors were never revealed.

Barstow did the kind of investigative reporting Woodward and Bernstein would have been proud of in the early 1970s. He unveiled the Pentagon military analyst program which has been said to be not just unethical but illegal. It violates, for starters, specific restrictions that Congress has been placing in its annual appropriation bills every year since 1951. According to those restrictions, “No part of any appropriation contained in this or any other Act shall be used for publicity or propaganda purposes within the United States not heretofore authorized by the Congress.”

If the U.S. Congress had the will to take action, it could create real mechanisms for enforcing the law and ensuring compliance. This is important for reasons that go beyond the issue of whether anyone supports or opposes the current war in Iraq. So long as government agencies are allowed to continue getting away with covert domestic propaganda, the public is left unable to know whether the opinions of “independent” analysts are truly independent. During the Vietnam War, official Pentagon statements became so mistrusted that the term “credibility gap” was coined to describe the distance between official statements and public perceptions. The government’s use of “surrogates” posing as independent experts extends the credibility gap not just to public officials but also to seemingly independent, private citizens and the news media.

The “Mainstream Media,” or MSM, can’t even be called that any more. Today’s mass media is Corporate, not Mainstream, and the distinction is critical. Calling the Corporate Media (CM) “mainstream” implies that it speaks for mid-road opinion, and it absolutely does not.

The mainstream of American opinion wants national health care. The CM does not.

In Minneapolis and in Milford, we tried to beat the competition. In Minneapolis in 1981-83 there were three TV stations, three major daily papers, several radio stations and several weekly papers.

But, we didn’t try to kill someone’s career. We’d sit with our paper’s lawyers and our managing editor to cut out parts we weren’t sure of or that might be libelous.

And we never took a nickel from a public or private source: no free meals or rides, no free pens, no free candy. We had pride in our incipient profession. We already considered it a profession. We were idealistic and out to defend the little guy against the powerful. We were not necessarily conservatives, but we were mostly college graduates who liked a good fight. We came from middle-class families before the middle class lost the ability (in recent decades) to own a home, pay for college, own a car, and plan for retirement. We felt like underdogs however, and rooted for the underdogs in the World Series or the NBA finals. We mostly were utopians, looking to reform the world and make things better for everyone. It was a kick to help the little guy, uncover a “big shot’s” scheme or simply “beat” our competition to a story.

Thankfully, just as the CM solidifies its power over our mass media outlets, the internet has burst forth as an open, wildly diverse medium for mainstream opinion and actual truth. Its preservation will require what Thomas Jefferson called “eternal vigilance.”

That includes restoring the Fairness Doctrine, enacted by a Republican Congress in the 1920s to guarantee balanced opinion on the emerging electronic medium of radio. It means a ban on unified corporate ownership of large fleets of radio, TV and print outlets. It means busting up the monopolies that warp public access to information and opinion.

Independent journalists are on the rise, attempting to counteract the corporate media’s bias.
“The good news is that the independent media in our country is booming thanks to the Internet — it’s the failures of corporate media that has led millions of independent journalists to start asking questions. It’s an exciting time, but we have to keep the Internet safe from media conglomerates.”

Some worry about anonymity on a lot of Web sites and blogs. It’s very easy to attack someone when you don’t have to put your name to your complaints.

Modern media, including the creation of Internet-based news sources and the possibility that citizen journalism will greatly expand the field, has made it all but impossible to identify which journalists are notable, in the sense that they could be identified in the past.

But independent collectives or individuals citizen journalists likely will never have the funding to do the research the NYT or (Wpost ) did on the Pentagon’s internal propaganda crime.

The real value of the NYT piece is what it teaches us about investigative journalism. What made the Times piece strong is that it relied on primary source documents — 8,000 pages of Defense Department documents, to be exact. It began as a federal Freedom of Information Act request submitted over two years ago! It wasn’t until the Times sued in federal court, and after several blown court-ordered deadlines, did the documents see the light of day.

And therein lies the crisis of modern journalism: with severe cutbacks in newspaper staffs because of a failing business model, investigative journalism, is becoming an endangered species.

Sure, bloggers and freelance writers can file Freedom of Information Act requests but you need serious time and resources to get beyond the bureaucratic foot-dragging and stonewalling. How much time and money, including all the legal bills, do you think it cost the NYT to get that story and how many bloggers and free-lancers can afford to take on such labor-intensive work?

Unless this growing void is filled, the American public is heading straight into a pitiful paradox: more breadth and access to news and information (via the internet) but, little, or no depth; a mile wide but an inch deep.

Give me Minneapolis and the Bridgeport suburb of Milford just after Watergate. Those were the days.http://crush.typepad.com (emasculation-blues); http://apocalypse-blues.typepad.com/

Saw him in person once – he was much shorter than you might think. A giant of a human being.

You need to write your comment into a diary. To respond to just one point, I am not a fan of Jefferson, slave raper and someone who never freed his slaves, but despite his feeling of superiority of his farmer class over all the other dirty economic classes, understood some democratic principles. Too bad there is no longer any pol, tainted as Jefferson, yet who understand the fundamentals of democracy.

It is not the size of the man, but the size of his mind and impact. Cronkite was a giant.

Thank you Cynthia and all posting their reflections.

Just surfing looking for Walter stories and I came upon CNN where John King is hosting a tribute. When John king is chosen to celebrate the greatness of Cronkite, there can be no greater indication of the continuing disintegration of the mainstream news industry.

He set the gold standard. A man of many facets. A man of integrity.
The Real Deal was Walter. We were blessed to have had him when and for as long as we did.
Sail the skies with Betsy now, Uncle Walter!

who ever asked, it was My Lai which was a battle in Vietnam:

My Lai lay in the South Vietnamese district of Son My, a heavily mined area where the Vietcong were deeply entrenched. Numerous members of Charlie Company had been maimed or killed in the area during the preceding weeks.

As the “search and destroy” mission unfolded, it soon degenerated into the massacre of over 300 apparently unarmed civilians including women, children, and the elderly. Calley ordered his men to enter the village firing, though there had been no report of opposing fire. According to eyewitness reports offered after the event, several old men were bayoneted, praying women and children were shot in the back of the head, and at least one girl was raped and then killed. For his part, Calley was said to have rounded up a group of the villagers, ordered them into a ditch, and mowed them down in a fury of machine gun fire.

Word of the atrocities did not reach the American public until November 1969, when journalist Seymour Hersh published a story detailing his conversations with a Vietnam veteran, Ron Ridenhour. Ridenhour learned of the events at My Lai from members of Charlie Company who had been there.

It was Vietnam’s Falusia

garlanddex???-
When ecohnomics said you need to write your comments in a diary, it wasn’t because she admired the content.

The amount of space you took is multiples of a reasonable length for a comment. If you must talk at length, write a diary. That’s why the form exists.

I suspect you’ve just been looking for a thread to drop your rant into: I didn’t see a word about Walter Cronkite in your post. Such intrusions aren’t appreciated, and will not be read by most here.

Hi, katymine – guess you’re feeling all right? Hope so, always good to see your name pop up.

I took the comment asking who and what Jack and My Lai were as jokes – but maybe I was wrong. In any case, you’re right, it doesn’t hurt to remind folks that Fallujah and Haditha and Lord knows how many others were not the first time U.S. troops let down their people’s trust.

Oh, pluese. Space on the net isn’t that scarce. My comment was related to the depth of grandexxes’s comment. Deserves it’s own responses, in depth.

When was the last time that U.S. troops did anything that was really pro-U.S.? Certainly not since 1900.

Oops, sorry ecahn, I shouldn’t have put words in your mouth. My bad.

My eyes can’t handle posts of that length. I feel guilty if I go on more than 3 or 4 paragraphs.

wow one big damn monsoon is blowing through.

Well, actually, in some of the recent books I’ve read on Iraq, there have been some accomplishments by troops with commanders that understood that offering assistance made friends better than kicking down doors. Currently reading The Gamble.

But my comment to katymine was mainly while thinking of those who refuse to believe that American troops ever do anything wrong, let alone commit war crimes. I was raised to believe that, and a surprising amount of people still do. Perhaps not among FDL’s readers, though.
Of course, it would have been better if they hadn’t had to be there in the first place, picking up the pieces shattered by the decision to invade in the first place.

Was that before Cronkite was anchoring the news?

My going in hypothesis is that any U.S. action that influences any indigent population negatively is a bad thing. Especially when the bad thing amounts to millions of human beings. What in the name of whoever could the U.S. be thinking. Oh, suddendly I get it. Oil. Millions of local populations lost, small price to pay for U.S.ians to be able to drive SUVs at low gasoline costs.

Could be my fantasy of what I imagined life to have been.

Send it to the Colorado Plateau, it was about 100 degrees here today.

Cronkite anchored for 20 years, from 1962-1981.

OT: More very depressing commentary by Moyers on insurance CEO wealth; truth, that is. With website information on their contributions to our Gov servants.

Not entirely fantasy. Once upon a time, CBS was very proud of how they reported news, and very proud of how much money that they lost in doing so.

A Statement from the President -

For decades, Walter Cronkite was the most trusted voice in America. His rich baritone reached millions of living rooms every night, and in an industry of icons, Walter set the standard by which all others have been judged.

He was there through wars and riots, marches and milestones, calmly telling us what we needed to know. And through it all, he never lost the integrity he gained growing up in the heartland.

But Walter was always more than just an anchor. He was someone we could trust to guide us through the most important issues of the day; a voice of certainty in an uncertain world. He was family. He invited us to believe in him, and he never let us down. This country has lost an icon and a dear friend, and he will be truly missed.

Cronkite started reporting WWII which is before TV. In the late 40’s and early 50’s he did radio. And the early broadcasts were only 15 minute’s long.

Wondering if this reporting will bring “reporting” from the brink of sensational sexualualized stupid baloney.

We may never see his like again. We certainly don’t see it in the current crop of TV journalists.

In retrospect, I doubt that the news was ever as stand up and independent as we would have liked it to have been or perhaps thought it was. But even so, there still was a news business and Walter Cronkite was one of its towering figures. Nowadays we only have a caricature of the news delivered by caricatures of news reporters.

Go and listen or read Glenn Greenwald’s interview with Chuck Todd and compare that to any of a thousand moments in Walter Cronkite’s career. The difference could not be more stark.

For my part, I trace much of this back to 30 years of media consolidation. So many individual editorial voices and news philosophies were lost. In their place, we have seen the corporatization of the media, a homogenization of it. Rather than enterprises geared to serve and inform their readers, listeners, and watchers, we have institutions that identify their interests with government and the powers that be.

The change in philosophy governing the ethics and goals of a strong and free press can be personified in the career of a single newsman: Bob Woodward. Where he once spearheaded the drive of this country’s youth for the truth, ugly or otherwise, by his dogged pursuit of the smallest clues in the search for the largest crimes of corruption by the most esteemed office in the land; Woodward in a quarter century devolved into a cowering, but willing witness to the atrocities that unbridled power thrives on to steamroll any truly democratic obstacle in it’s path.

The hungry young idealist has become the corporate fat cat.

i liked the post and don’t care for your tone to this person.

CSPN is now airing an excellent interview of Cronkite.

So many grand offerings on Mr. Cronkite’s legacy.

As a journo and radio/tv person in the 70’s and 80’s, I gotta honor Uncle Walt too.

What he meant to us all, as we were growin up in junior and high school, is impossible to describe.

He brought us the truth, when were were 12, and when we were 20.

He brought us the truth.

Bless him. They don’t make them like him no mo.

He was a hoss.

I miss him, Molly, Hunter, and others so much . . .

And I stand for them, still. Dammit.

NIce pics SB . . . nice pics. Well done.

Hell of a long comment, and true to it’s core. Thanks.

As a former journo, TV, and Radio guy, I’m with ya thru your entire piece.

Damn if we haven’t lost it all along the way.

And only a concerted effort to regain it all, will redeem the loss of Walter.

Damn I miss him and Molly and Hunter.

I completely disagree with you and Echan . . . the comment was mighty, lengthy, and rightous.

Harumph.

The comment was interesting, lengthy, mostly off-topic, and wasn’t as well-rounded as it might have been. It was a somewhat of a rosy personal recollection of journalism rather than a fully-rounded analysis.
I enjoyed it and absolutely agreed it would have been better introduced on it’s own, instead of grafted onto this Cronkite consideration.

There is a part of me that is still haunted by the sound of Cronkite’s voice up-dating the number of Americans dead in Vietnam, day after day after day. He helped turn the country around with that alone.

What a sad day. RIP Walter.

I remember as a little girl Walter Cronkite always on the tv and was confused to learn later on that there were two other news channels besides CBS Channel 13! I was born in 1968 and still have a few memories of my mother pulling me out of the livingroom after my father told her to do so, because of the images of the Vietnam war being played out on the tv. I still remember Cronkite’s voice as I left the room.

I’ll always have a fond memory of Cronkite that most FDL pups will appreciate.

I was part of a group of college freshman that a would gather every day to watch the nightly news down in the room of one of the other students. At the end of the broadcast, after Walter assured us “And that’s the way it is” we would all shout “No, goddamit, that isn’t that the way it is.”

We were all 18 and, of course, we knew everything.