Cronkite & Today's Leaders

I'm likely not going to make many friends with this post, but what the hell.

Someone ought to point out that President Obama's platitude delivered over the weekend after the death of Walter Cronkite, that for generations Cronkite "was the news", was a nice catch phrase and easy to roll off the tongue. After all, it's the kind of thing people want to hear to make us feel better about ourselves and salve the loss we may be feeling.

I think it's the kind of political babble Cronkite may have found distasteful.

Article after article, post after post from my colleagues and far deeper thinkers than myself, comes the message over and over and over again that Walter Cronkite was the "most trusted" because of his energy, wit and desire to make sure what he was reporting was the truth he could stand behind. Not a case of Walter being the news, as some news anchors have become in our day, but Walter reporting the news. Because "the way it is" continues to mean what is says in simplest terms; not the way I see it, but the way it is. Not an anchor's view, but a reporter's delivery of the story.

Cronkite had credibility because he approached the job of television anchor with a reporter's sensibility. There was no consultant peering over his shoulder, advising him on how to part his hair or look thoughtfully over his glasses. That kind of stuff he figured out on his own because it was just him. The important part of the job was telling the story.

Not to say the show business aspect of broadcasting didn't matter; it just didn't matter as much as the content of what he wanted us to know about. As much a managing editor and reporter as an anchor, Cronkite's legacy many of us hold in reverence today was in telling the story. Not being the story.

I was struck by this thought while watching CBS-TV's excellent (for the most part) special on Cronkite that aired Sunday. But I wondered: where was the reaction and thoughts of the last living U.S. President in office during the Cronkite era? Instead of Jimmy Carter or George H.W. Bush, both from the same generation who served as President or Vice-President in the years prior to Cronkite's retirement, we are treated to Bill Clinton, who took office a decade after Cronkite had stepped down from the anchor desk.

Apparently instead of telling the story with the contemporaries in history it was better television to "relate" to a younger audience who likely had no idea who Cronkite was. But hey, wasn't it cool to see Clinton and Mickey Hart!

Part of me wants to think this is because it was easier to get a video clip from the White House or Bill Clinton to do a short-notice sit-down for a quick special, or even pull out the Grateful Dead and Jimmy Buffett clips to showcase how cool Walter could be. It added to the entertainment side, the glitz and show-biz of television. Make the story something we can emotionally relate to. One could almost hear the consultants sighing with pleasure.

For me, the real power -- the real emotion -- wasn't in the words of today's political leaders. It was in the power of seeing Cronkite's work as history. My wife wanted to know why I couldn't talk after watching Cronkite in Vietnam, or his coverage of the Kennedy and King assassinations, or the reporting on the Civil Rights movement. It's because 55 years after those Chicago conventions, 46 years after those shots rang out in Dallas, and 41 years after he came home from Vietnam the weight of those times is sometimes too heavy to lift without emotion.

It wasn't Walter being the news; it was Walter telling our history.

We've become so deadened to what's real; the reality television-style politics played out in today's media. Is the race for the White House really that much different than "Survivor"...maybe Jeff Probst should moderate the next debate in 2012, with the losers kicked off by a show of hands? It made me sad to think our version of reality is now the reality TV of the cable news talk shows, and empty words designed to stir emotion -- but not too much emotion, mind you -- from our political leaders interested more in manipulation and posturing than leading. Perception becomes progress, because we feel so good about it.

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There has been lots of talk about how nobody will ever be another Cronkite, much in the way we would never see another David Brinkley, nor even another Peter Jennings. I'm not sure I buy into that argument. The conventional wisdom is the business has changed, but I think the real truth is we don't want to seriously examine our own credibility in telling the story in a way our viewers, listeners and readers still hope for.

Cronkite, Murrow and their peers came up from the reporting ranks to secure their place in journalism. Somewhere along the way the model broke, as network and local broadcast executives looked to short-cut the process and find someone with the gravity of Cronkite or Huntley without the costly grooming to earn those stripes. It became easier to find someone who would act authoritative without being authoritative; never mind they couldn't Q&A their way out of a paper bag with a newsmaker.

As an industry, we somehow need to get back to the idea that reporting big stories, surviving campaigns of war and politics and walking in the shoes of the people we are reporting on matters.

I still remember the sheer force of will of Brian Williams, Anderson Cooper, Robin Roberts, Sheppard Smith and Ohio's own Martin Savidge and others showed during Hurricane Katrina coverage. They felt it was their job, their mission, their duty to make us see what was happening.

In typical American fashion, it is something we've forgotten because it was more than 90 seconds ago, but it doesn't have to be that way.

We know the way it was. We know the way it can be again.