The passing of Walter Cronkite is a milestone in the lives of today’s middle-aged men and women.  He was the voice of news in a more naive age, when we believed what we were told.  If Walter Cronkite said so, then it was true.

There are many excellent obits for this icon of news, and I have nothing to add worthy of another.  Instead, I mourn the death of innocence in the news in a time when Cronkite would be the target of attack and ridicule.  Whether denigratingly called the MSM or State Owned Media, as has lately come into fashion, Cronkite would have been as easy a target as any network anchor.

But things were different back then, when the news divisions weren’t underneath the entertainment divisions of networks.  Newsmen didn’t banter or do promos and teasers.  They held themselves above the wrestling, believing it to be a badge of honor to tell it straight. 

No one challenged Walter Cronkite’s integrity.  No one dared.  No one would have even considered trying, even if Cronkite’s broadcast was contrary to whatever political perspective they held.  We have people serving us news who similarly want to maintain the level of integrity and neutrality that characterized Walter Cronkite, but they are faced with different hurdles.

The broadcast networks are forced to present us with newscasts as an duty for the benefit of holding a slice of the public airwaves.  There was a time when they never questioned this duty, and embraced it as a responsibility of being a network.  But networks are businesses, and eventually the business minds realized that this was airtime to be used to create synergies with their more profitable endeavors. 

They mixed and matched, and forever changed the way news was delivered.  They dumbed it down and entertained it up.  It’s not that journalists necessary agree with this as the transition happened, but they quickly learned to serve the boss of find a new job at the local station in Duluth.  And so they learned to present news in a fashion consistent with entertainment, concerned with their demographics and public recognition.  All the time wanting to be more like Walter Cronkite as they became Buffalo Bob, trying desperately to cling to their ideals.

Then came the new wave of partisan punditry, to fill the confirmation bias gap generated by the release of news from fact.  Once people accepted the premise that sensibility need no longer be directly connected to reality, they were free to reinvent facts to suit their politics, and to attack those whose facts didn’t comport with their values.  The new genre attacked Walter Cronkite’s progeny, themselves weakened by their succumbing to the practicalities of commercial enterprise.  After all, how does one wear clown shoes or a red squishy nose, yet fend off challenges to their integrity?  Walter Cronkite never wore a red nose, but then no one ever asked him to or told him that he either wore it or found a new place to work.

We were better for believing in Walter Cronkite and allowing him the opportunity to tell us the news without challenge.  If he was to assume the anchor chair today, he might not be treated any differently than any other anchor on a broadcast network.  It’s impossible to say whether Walter Cronkite would have allowed himself to do commercials to promote his network or his newscast, to demean himself in the name of audience share.  I can’t imagine him engaging in mindless banter after telling the story of a tragic death or national crisis.  But then, that wasn’t the way it was done back then.

Today, both ends of the political spectrum attack Cronkite’s network media legacy, calling it names and proclaiming that it’s part of a conspiracy to delude the masses by feeding it biased news or hiding those parts of the story that don’t comport with the position of their bosses.  It’s all spin, or alleged spin.  Would Walter Cronkite have been treated any differently if he was working the anchor desk today?  Not likely. 

Walter Cronkite remains an untouchable icon, as he should.  We need heroes.  We need heroes in the news media, people who are above reproach by the extremist infotainment pundits who manipulate lesser minds.  We need to have a baseline of information that everyone will believe in and accept to be accurate.  We can still debate right and wrong, good and bad, but at least we can agree on the facts underlying our debate.  We haven’t had that agreement in a long time.

Walter Cronkite was the standard for discussion, argument, debate during a time of enormous upheaval in America.  Disagreement between young and old, war and peace, honesty and corruption, was rampant.  But unlike today, there was a factual baseline by which all disagreement could be weighed.  We have lost that standard for what constitutes fact, and are now left to create our own set of facts.  We denigrate the news media’s representations, and pick and chose what reality we wish to adopt.  We don’t really debate anymore, since we’re arguing alternate sets of facts rather than different value judgments based on an agreed-upon set of facts.

Without the standard, we have no common ground.  To improve the human condition, we require a standard.  It doesn’t seem possible that we will ever have another standard like Walter Cronkite to inform us nightly of the facts upon which we agree to rely.