Meanwhile, like many other observers, Gene Lyons mourns the end of professionalism which Cronkite's death marks:
Two big things about Cronkite and his times made him different from today's multimillionaire news celebrities. First, he came up as a print journalist, covering ball games, school fires, city council meetings and the Texas state Legislature. He knew a fact from an opinion, how to distinguish a reliable source from the other kind and how to construct an airtight story. He was a news professional, devoted to craft. I suspect he'd have walked off the set rather than devote an entire newscast to a pop singer's death, never mind entire weeks.
Second, Cronkite grasped the purely arbitrary aspects of TV celebrity. Fame never went to his head. In retirement, he conducted a long-running feud with CBS executives he thought sacrificed journalistic values to the star system and bottom-line greed.
"Something is seriously out of balance," he wrote in his 1996 autobiography, "when the top people receive such huge wages while the networks drastically cut their staffs to meet grossly reduced budgets."
The exacting standards that Cronkite and his colleagues established have all but vanished. One of the right-wing noise machine's signal achievements has been to devalue even the possibility of his kind of professionalism. It's all propaganda to them.
We'll not soon see Walter Cronkite's like again.
How true, unfortunately.
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