The Patriot Post® · What They Didn't Say

Just about everything they said about Walter Cronkite last week rang true – and just about everything was said. For his passing at 92 unleashed a flood of memories.

The word anchorman was coined for him; he would coordinate the coverage of one major crisis after another with a remarkable combination of initiative, endurance, calm and perspective. In these frenetic times of BREAKING NEWS and All Celebrities All the Time, his understated style would seem comatose. Back then it was magisterial, almost majestic.

Whatever the awful or ominous news, he left the viewer with the feeling that an adult was still around, namely Walter Cronkite. He was just who the polls said he was: Uncle Walter, the Most Trusted Man in America.

It was Walter Cronkite who interrupted “As the World Turns” with bulletin after unnerving bulletin from Parkland Hospital in Dallas that terrible November day in 1963 as hope faded for the country’s young president. He demonstrated television’s ability to keep the country together minute by minute, day after day, shock after shock. He stayed on camera as crisis gave way to resignation, mourning and then renewal. He was a splendid, to use the British term, newsreader.

He became more than a newsman when he endeared himself to the nation during that annus horribilis 1968, when it seemed not just the American effort in Vietnam was coming apart but America itself. First Martin Luther King was shot down, then Bobby Kennedy. And through it all, Walter Cronkite remained a nation’s center of gravity, and it very much needed one.

When, early that same dark and disturbing year, he pronounced the war in Vietnam lost, why, then it was. No need to go into detail. Namely, that it was being lost not on the battlefield, where the enemy’s long, long Tet offensive would stall and then fail, but on the home front. Which is the decisive front in any war. He didn’t just reflect the national consensus; he crystallized it, articulated it, was it.

The commander-in-chief in 1968, increasingly isolated in the White House, knew what Walter Cronkite’s weighing in on the war meant. “If I’ve lost Cronkite,” said Lyndon Johnson, “I’ve lost middle America.” Within weeks, the president would announce he wasn’t running for re-election. Vox Cronkite, Vox Deus.

All of that and much more was noted during this week’s unending obsequies, which were as extravagant as the deceased’s style had been understated. But it was what the commentators didn’t say that was most telling – not just about the life and times of Walter Cronkite but about our very different own.

For example, they didn’t say he’d also declared the war in Iraq lost at its low point a couple of years ago, but this time his pronouncement didn’t take. Defeatism just wasn’t what it used to be. And neither was Walter Cronkite. When he decided to start a syndicated column a few years ago, it never caught on. His time had passed long before he did.

Walter Cronkite could no longer dominate the media because it was a different media. He still had admirers, but now he had competitors, too – a whole, unlimited blogosphere of them. The tri-opoly (ABC, NBC and CBS) that had made his reign over broadcasting possible no longer ruled American opinion.

The Fairness Doctrine, which may have been the unfairest restraint on American opinion since the Alien and Sedition Acts, had gone by the boards. It’s now been supplanted by the kind of wide-ranging variety of opinion the First Amendment originally envisioned.

This has all been most unsettling to those who still think American opinion ought to be safely confined to some nice, respectable left-of-center reservation where the Dan Rathers and Walter Cronkites can roam like protected game, their authority unchallenged and unquestioned. Instead, the great unwashed are heard on all sides. See Fox News and MSNBC and YourFavoriteIdeology.com.

They say there couldn’t be a Walter Cronkite these days, and they’re right. Because in this age of 24/7 television news coverage, radio talk shows all over the dial, and the ubiquitous Internet with its multiplicity of bloggers, one for every taste and many with no taste at all, there is no shortage of different viewpoints to choose from. Walter Cronkite could be the most trusted man in America only when political commentary was limited.

Walter Cronkite was the most respectable of commentators, and when respectability is reinforced by decree, you can have a Walter Cronkite – a single arbiter of public opinion. In the finest tradition of newspeak, the unfair decree that backed up this artificial consensus was called the Fairness Doctrine. And there are those who miss it. Because when it was still in force, politically correct opinions didn’t have to fight to be accepted. Instead they could be gently imposed by a kindly, avuncular anchorman.

© 2008 TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.