With yet another Twentieth Century Icon passing on to the afterlife, one can’t help but notice many of these Icons have no replacement. No one is left behind that can fill their shoes in their absence. Whatever category they raised to the top in, no one is left to carry their water.

Walter Cronkite is just another example of this. His legacy could be narrowed down into one word, “objectivity.” The way that newsman would deliver the news, left no traces of personal bias. We never had to be enraged watching the evening news by seeing the personal bias of the anchor dripping all over our screen. Objective news reporting has become a thing of the past. Now we just pick our favorite and go with that. We have to bounce back and forth to get both sides, so we can find the truth, which always resides in the middle.

We have no more middlemen. Walter along with Tim Russet was the last of the Mohicans and for people like me they will both be sorely missed. It is quite a sad state of affairs when one realizes the propaganda talking heads we are left with on both sides. It is gravitas itself that I will miss with men like this. The men of stature and weight have moved on and have left the world with posers and people who have failed with the dream of truth and a free press.

Walter like no other newsman really did earn our trust and there is not a single news anchor left today who has earned anything but our disdain. David Gregory of Meet The Press would be the only exception I could identify. The rest are cartoons in a cartoon graveyard.

People always point to technology or all the different choice we have now to get the news. However, this is nonsense. If we had a single news network anchor that we could trust, it wouldn’t matter how many choices we had. We would follow that trust and stand with that person, but none of them held our loyalty. The dying network newscast has stopped being appointment TV not because of technology and choice. It is dieing because of the anchors, plain and simple. The blame lies with them, even if they want to hide behind these excuses.

If they were the best at what they did, America would gravitate towards excellence. That is who we are. May the Lord forgive Walter from all his sins and grant him peace in the afterlife. Walter if you could, just for me, say hello to David Brinkley and tell him we miss him too.

C. Rich

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