My father called him “Mister Disease”. He wasn't slagging on America's most trusted news man, he was just cracking a pun. In his mother tongue, German, the word “krankheit”, pronounced the same way as Walter Cronkite's surname, meant ill health or disease.

The world of news reporting in the 1960s and 70s when Walter Cronkite held forth on the CBS Evening News was a lot less sick than it is today. The award-wining program emphasized hard news and news analysis. Even though there has always been a spin factor in news, you always got the impression, especially with Mr. Cronkite's articulate delivery and grandfatherly tone, that what you were about to see and hear had a pretty good semblance of the truth.

Broadcasters in those days gave viewers, at least those who watched the news, much more credit for intelligence. Cronkite's competitors, NBC's Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, also had an excellent daily news program which ran for a full 90 minutes. It too featured hard news and news analysis. Its theme music was Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, which gives you a very good idea of what network executives thought of their viewers.

Today, television news, once an oasis of hard if sometimes biased information in the vast wasteland that was and is commercial TV, is now just more “entertainment” programming. The emphasis is on gossip, emotional but superficial coverage of hot-button political issues and spectacular, cinematic treatment of high-profile disasters (recent coverage of Hurricane Irene is a textbook case in point). The only extended-length daily news programs left in America are on so-called “public” radio and TV, which have been made so dependent on corporate underwriting that they may as well be commercial.

Talk radio is chockablock with loudmouths who appeal to the basest emotions of a justifiably frustrated working class. Holding opinions, even unpopular ones, is one thing. Regularly polluting the airwaves with the most outrageous, inflammatory collection of falsehoods, half-truths and just plain fairy tales imaginable is another. In Cronkite's time, any news anchor who openly called for the assassination of doctors or politicians would have not only been put out of a job, he would have been hauled into court faster than you can say “Fairness Doctrine”, which by the way is the name of a broadcast regulation which basically said that if you have someone on the air expressing one political viewpoint, then you must allow equal time for the opposition to present its case. The broadcast industry successfully lobbied to have the Fairness Doctrine repealed in the mid-1980s. This paved the way for the transmogrification of a once-venerable motion-picture studio into the greatest propaganda outlet since Radio Moscow.

Walter Cronkite lived to see and report on the assassination of a U.S. President, the resignation-in-disgrace of another, man's first landing on the moon and the worst commercial nuclear accident in our history. And he lived to see the virtual meltdown of the profession he devoted his life to, the one which America's founders considered vital to the functioning of a free society.

And that, as the man used to say at the end of each nightly newscast, is the way it is.

This story Creative Commons 2011 by The Fuddler. Non-comm., attrib., no derivs.