Walter Cronkite is dead at age 92. This started off as a comment over on big Salon, but I saw it was starting to get a bit long and besides, I'm not sure that's the right audience. So I came over here.

I'm like many Americans of a certain age; Walter Cronkite was the man who told me what was going on in the world during my childhood, adolescence and early adulthood. I remember from very early on, we had the TV going in the other room while we ate dinner so that my father could listen to his newscast. It was Conkite's voice that told me about space launches, the assasination of JFK, the deposing of Nikita Khruschev, the Viernam war, the first men on the moon, Nixon's resignation. You name it and it was his gravelly voice that told me about it.

Walter Cronkite wasn't always an anchor at a desk. He wasn't afraid to put his butt on the line when reporting. He did more than just "cover" WWII for UPI. He took part in Operation Market Garden and went in with glider-borne infantry. Not a safe thing to do, even when you're not getting shot at.

When his glider crash-landed (that was the only way they ever landed) he lost his helmet and had to scrounge around on the ground to look for it. He found it and put it on his head. After awhile he noticed that a growing group of people was following him. It turns out that the helmet he found wasn't his. It had a big white stripe on the back, which signified that the wearer was a leader, an NCO or an officer, and everybody was looking to him for direction.

Even as an anchor, he got close enough to the shooting in Vietnam to need a helmet and flak jacket. There's quite a few peole still taking those risks, and sometimes loosing the bet, but I'm not sure that I could see one of today's court stenographers doing that, certainly none of the anchors. He never spoke much about the current crop of TV faces - I thinkit was out of kindness.

Walter Cronkite stayed a working reporter. I wish more people in the trade took his eaxample. Maybe then we'd still trust the network news instead of wondering what their angle was, what did their corporate masters have to gain by what they were reporting and how.

 I know it's corny, but there's nothing else to say but:

And that's the way it is Friday, July 17th, 2009.