When There Were Three..

Last night I watched CBS' tribute to Walter Cronkite. Not only did it remind me of how fast time and technology has moved but it also brought back many emotions from when I was a boy and my Father would gather my brother and me around the TV each night to watch the news together. My Father was in radio and television and we not only got the lessons of what was happening in current affairs but also we were instructed on how to ensure that our southern Indiana twang was eliminated so that we had the same accent as Mr. Cronkite. He represented the middle of the country without having to say that he was from there. With no accent at all he made everyone feel comfortable. It became ritual in our house to be at the TV when he broadcasted. Long before he retired we would handicap who would take his place; which seemed at that time nearly impossible to imagine. Would it be Eric Severeid (too old), Roger Mudd (too stiff), Dan Rather (too much of a field reporter, not an anchor). These were our conversations as we as listened for the nightly body count coming back from Vietnam and wrestled with the messages coming from the anti-war movement and later the Watergate trials. It seemed that we could not trust government so we trusted the media. There were only three people to trust after all and one of them garnered the most trust of all. This was when journalism had a code and you had to report, discern, write and justify to be able to say something. And so, Walter Cronkite became the one person we all could trust. It will never be that way again. There are too many talking heads and anyone can write anything they want and countermand enough to cast doubt on what anyone says. I am sure that there are those now who trust the government more than they trust the media. Scary. Walter Cronkite set a standard to gain his trust. He did this on the shoulders of Edgar R. Murrow and others before him. Today, few have a reason to stand on the shoulders of Walter. The nightly news is not watched by many and the soundbites that we receive are so far from the whole truth that we believe little of what we hear anyway. When there were three I know we didn't get the whole story and I know we didn't see the whole picture. But when there were three we sat at our televisions together and watched and discussed the news as a family and those memories will always make me have positive memories of Walter Cronkite.