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Maybe it is because I was a very young child in the fifties, that’s the time our fondest memories are being made, when our minds hold  like a story book, all the world seen through the eyes of a child.

One of my fondest memories was of my dads big red Buick. Oh how I loved to ride in that car. Then there was the candy, Sugar Daddies, Jaw Breakers, Moon pies with a R.C.Cola, what could be better.

No computers, Cell phones, or credit cards. No air pollution. A time when neighbors knew and helped each other. A time when child abuse was almost unheard of. A time when families and friends would sit on the porch at night  and  talk while the kids played outside.

The music of  the fifties was the best. Songs like Honey Comb, Kisses Sweater than Wine. Then came Elvis bringing in Rock n Roll. With songs like You Ain’t Nothing But a Hound Dog, the shaking, the greasy slick back hair.

The cloths of the fifties were,poodle skirts, knee high jeans for the girls, jeans and white T shirts for the boy.

There was the Ed Sullivan show, Walter Cronkite. one of the finest news anchors ever. The Donna Reed Show, Lassie, Mr.Ed, the talking horse, Sky King. Cartoons like Mighty Mouse and Woody Wood Pecker.

Yes, the good old fifties. A simple time. A time when Americas heart beat was strong.

Maybe it is because I was a very young child in the fifties, that’s the time our fondest memories are being made, when our minds hold  like a story book, all the world seen through the eyes of a child.

One of my fondest memories was of my dads big red Buick. Oh how I loved to ride in that car. Then there was the candy, Sugar Daddies, Jaw Breakers, Moon pies with a R.C.Cola, what could be better.

No computers, Cell phones, or credit cards. No air pollution. A time when neighbors knew and helped each other. A time when child abuse was almost unheard of. A time when families and friends would sit on the porch at night  and  talk while the kids played outside.

The music of  the fifties was the best. Songs like Honey Comb, Kisses Sweater than Wine. Then came Elvis bringing in Rock n Roll. With songs like You Ain’t Nothing But a Hound Dog, the shaking, the greasy slick back hair.

The cloths of the fifties were,poodle skirts, knee high jeans for the girls, jeans and white T shirts for the boy.

There was the Ed Sullivan show, Walter Cronkite. one of the finest news anchors ever. The Donna Reed Show, Lassie, Mr.Ed, the talking horse, Sky King. Cartoons like Mighty Mouse and Woody Wood Pecker.

Yes, the good old fifties. A simple time. A time when Americas heart beat was strong.

Recently I wrote a post about how Michael Jackson's death may have signaled the end of "megafame." Similarly Walter Cronkite's death is symbolic of the end of an era in journalism where one anchor could have so much power, credibility and influence... Read the rest of this post

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at the achievements of Walter Cronkite. See his previous OUPblogs here.

For most of the second half of the twentieth century, Walter Cronkite was always there whenever history moved. Before the word “embedded” came into fashion, he flew on the first bombing raids over Germany in a B-17 Flying Fortress. Before he covered the Kennedy Assassination, Vietnam and Watergate, he was also right there at the Battle of the Bulge. He covered the first nationally televised Democratic and Republican National Conventions - out of which the term “anchor” (and the Swedish term “Kronkiter”) was coined to describe his role. Walter Cronkite was always there; he was the anchor of all anchors.

But while Cronkite was always there, he understood that it was never about him, but about the facts. Today however, his model of reporting is praised by everyone, but emulated by no one. Not by Lou Dobbs, or Keith Olbermann, and not even by his replacement at CBS, Dan Rather, who tried to meddle in politics rather than to report it. CNN has a name for this narcissistic reporting style: “I-report.” I don’t think Walter Cronkite believed that there was an “I” in the news, however much an event lent itself to self-reflection.

So Cronkite’s legacy lives on only in advertising slogans. CNN may be “the most trusted name in news,” and Fox news may be “Fair and Balanced.” But “the most trusted man in America” would tell us that self-praise is no praise and that objectivity should be practiced, not trumpeted.

To be sure, it isn’t that today’s journalists are unrepentant gossips or opinion exhibitionists (though some are). It is that their bosses know that opinion and feisty debate sells. It is because experts in mass communications and social psychology have discovered that listeners and viewers like to hear what they want to hear, especially opinions that cohere with their own. That is why our journalistic umpires venture their opinions, and if they don’t, they pose incendiary questions to get their interviewers to say something about their political opponents that would start a war of words. While Walter Cronkite covered the news, the news establishment today wants to drive it.

Cronkite was a first-rate journalist who understood that it is always about the news, never about the reporter, transmitting the news faithfully while at the scene but never making a scene. He didn’t
engage in story making, he didn’t engage in frivolous banter about the role of the media in order to insinuate the self-congratulatory premise that he is a mover and shaker and master of the universe. Walter Cronkite knew that it was never about Walter Cronkite. It was his principled commitment to reticence that made his exceptional departure in declaring the war in Vietnam unwinnable so compelling. In his self-abnegation lay his considerable credibility.

Walter Cronkite was confident enough in the processes of American democracy, and humble enough to know the difference between newscaster and newsmaker, to desist from meddling from either the meaning or movement of politics. Without touch-screen monitors or a teleprompter, he brought us the news. Plain and simple. He wasn’t cool, he wasn’t a model, and he was even, by his own admission, “dull at times.” Though his career is a period piece in the age of facebook and twitter, we will do well to remain anchored in his journalistic values.

“And that’s the way it is.”

Donald Ritchie, author of Reporting from Washington: The History of the Washington Press Corps, Our Constitution, and The Congress of the United States: A Student Companion, reflects on Walter Cronkite’s death. Ritchie has been Associate Historian of the United States Senate for more than three decades.

The veteran news anchor Walter Cronkite died disappointed with the trends in network evening news programs since his retirement in 1981. Cronkite had aspired to make the CBS Evening News the New York Times of television, but after he left the air he thought the program went tabloid, reducing serious coverage of foreign and national events in favor of human interest stories, health and consumer reporting. He regarded this as “trivializing,” and lamented the general decline in standards of television news.

The root of problem was the limited time available for news in a half-hour format. Cronkite had begun anchoring when the network news had just fifteen minutes a night, following or preceding fifteen minutes of local news from the network’s affiliates. Over the Labor Day weekend in 1963, CBS inaugurated the half-hour format, featuring Cronkite interviewing President John F. Kennedy at Hyannisport. NBC used CBS’s initiative to overcome resistance from its own affiliates and expand its popular Huntley-Brinkley Report to a half hour. Soon afterwards, surveys showed that more Americans relied on TV than newspapers as their chief source of news. But even at a half hour, with seven minutes subtracted for commercials, there were only twenty-three minutes for news. Cronkite’s program devoted an average of eight minutes each night to its Washington bureau, whose stellar squad of correspondents–including Roger Mudd, Dan Rather, Marvin Kalb, Daniel Schorr, Nancy Dickerson, Bernard Shaw, and Leslie Stahl–jockeyed for air time. They boasted that their deadline of 6:30 PM EST became the deadline for the entire federal government.

Cronkite wanted to expand his news program to an hour, opening with hard news and then turning to lighter features. Even at the height of network domination in the 1960s and ‘70s, half of all television owners never bothered to watch the evening news and only one in fifty watched the network news every night. News drew its viewers from older, better-educated, middle- and upper-income professionals, who were disproportionately male. To expand their audience the networks needed to attract more women, racial and ethnic minorities, and younger people–consumers that advertisers were anxious to reach. The networks’ affiliates pioneered with local news programs heavy on crime, disaster, scandal, celebrities, and sports, which Cronkite dismissed as more show business than news reporting. No matter, local news grew so profitable that the affiliates resisted his efforts to expand network news to an hour.

The passing of the old era became evident as early as August 16, 1977, when Elvis Presley died. ABC News–being managed by the sports producer Roone Arledge–led off with Presley, while on CBS Cronkite opened with a report on the pending Panama Canal treaty. (Compare that to the way all of the networks covered Michael Jackson.) With Cronkite’s retirement, the local news approach finally penetrated the CBS Evening News. Cable networks challenged the three original networks–whose share of the news audience shrank from 98 percent in the 1960s to less than half today–and Cronkite lamented that too often the newcomers replaced sober news analysis with “polarizing diatribes.” He regretted that networks’ business managers replaced serious news documentaries with “trashy syndicated ‘news’ shows” on prime time. The Federal Communications Commission dropped the public service requirements for broadcast licensing, and the networks’ new corporate owners saw news budgets as ripe for trimming. CBS’s Washington bureau, which employed 21 correspondents at its peak under Cronkite, shrank to nine by the end of the twentieth century. Meanwhile, a new generation of news consumers was turning to the Internet as its major source, abandoning the evenings news along with the newspaper. The number of patent medicines sponsoring the evening news clearly demonstrate its aging demographics. “And that’s the way it is,” Cronkite had famously signed off his program, but what he saw of television news was not the way he wanted it to be.