Cronkite

For the oldest of us, the Evening News died yesterday, the "most trusted man in America" who came into our living rooms every weekday night and told us about what was happening beyond our own senses, "And that's the way it is."

For two tumultuous decades, before 24/7 cable and the Internet, Walter Cronkite was the face of the news, mediating between millions of Americans and the raw chaos of events, ordering the flood of words and pictures into a hierarchy of importance and sending viewers off to live the other 23 and a half hours feeling well-informed.

It was an illusion, of course, but Cronkite was the ideal embodiment of reassurance that the turbulence of the 1960s and 1970s was not upending the world as they knew it.

In the days before O'Reilly, Olbermann et al, he presented violent scenes at home and abroad with a McLuhanesque cool that drained most of the threat from them, giving only rare glimpses of human emotion in his welling eyes and shaking voice as he reported JFK's death, the disorder of the 1968 Democratic Convention and the sight of a man walking on the moon.

But beyond that calm façade were good journalistic instincts about the failed war in Vietnam ("If I've lost Cronkite," LBJ said. "I've lost middle America") and the meaning of Watergate (along with Woodward and Bernstein, CBS News was following the break-in while the rest of the media slept).

In the flood of tributes that inevitably follow the death of such a figure, the one that undoubtedly would have meant the most to Walter Cronkite was that he was always a good reporter. That he certainly was.

"And That's the Way It Is..."

After the Tet offensive in early 1968, the Most Trusted Man in America announced the war in Vietnam could not be won. "If I've lost Cronkite," the President of the United States said, "I've lost America" and conceded by announcing he wouldn't run for reelection.

Walter Cronkite is 91 now, and George W. Bush is no Lyndon Johnson, but America's news nanny, who tucked us in every evening for two decades by ending the CBS Evening News with "And that's the way it is," has declared "Our Troops Must Leave Iraq."

In a piece co-written and appearing in print, Cronkite's voice is still being heard. In the Japan Times, on the eve of Pearl Harbor day, he concludes:

"Congress must act. Although Congress never declared war, as required by the Constitution, they did give the president the authority to invade Iraq. Congress must now withdraw that authority and cease its funding of the war.

"It is not likely, however, that Congress will act unless the American people make their voices heard with unmistakable clarity. That is the way the Vietnam War was brought to an end. It is the way that the Iraq War will also be brought to an end. The only question is whether it will be now, or whether the war will drag on, with all the suffering that implies, to an even more tragic, costly and degrading defeat. We will be a better, stronger and more decent country to bring the troops home now."

Trust is not what it used to be, and age has diminished the reach of Cronkite's voice, but he is still trying to tell America how it is.

Media Mistrust: The Tipping Point

According to the latest Gallup Poll, Americans passed a milestone four years ago and have never looked back: More than half of us now have little or no confidence that mass media--newspapers, TV and radio--report the news fully, fairly and accurately.

Thirty years ago, only 26 percent felt that way. The gap then between Republicans and Democrats was only 10 percent. Today it is a chasm, with twice as many Republicans mistrustful of the news they are getting.

In the wake of Watergate, the public didn’t blame the messengers for delivering political bad news. In the post-9/11 world, they do and accuse them of distorting it.

Behind this change is the difference in the amount of news we get and how we get it. Before 24/7 cable and the Web, newspaper front pages and the evening news on ABC, CBS and NBC packaged our perception of the world and, for better or worse, there were few other sources of information to challenge what they gave us.

Walter Cronkite signed off every night, saying “That’s the way it is,” and most Americans had no way to doubt it.

Today, there are millions of Walter Cronkites on cable and the Web to decide for themselves the way it is and, although they still depend on MSM for most of the hard news, they decide for themselves what it means.

Mistrust and rancor are part of the price we pay for this privilege, but after the Bush-Cheney era gives way to a likely Democratic Administration, will partisan dissatisfaction with the news shift as well? Or do Republicans have the patent on media-bashing?