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    Obit Cronkite
July 18, 2009

Cronkite was leading newsman of his day

Would Walter Cronkite have tweeted?

As the leading TV newsman of his day, would Cronkite have fired out 140-character dispatches to legions of online followers as many journalists routinely do today, had such a thing as Twitter existed a generation ago?

Maybe so. Cronkite, who died Friday at age 92, was a journalist who clearly embraced the possibilities of new media. He had plied his trade in newspapers, radio and at a wire service when, in the early 1950s, he answered the call of a cutting-edge but primitive emerging media platform called television.

Even for Americans who remember Cronkite declaring “and that’s the way it is” every evening in his heyday, it’s hard to fully recall the heights to which he took TV news. And vice versa. Simply put, at CBS News, he invented the role of anchorman and prevailed in that role until his retirement at 1981 from the “CBS Evening News” anchor desk.

Dan Rather replaced him. But in a larger sense, no one has ever taken Cronkite’s place.

Even as Cronkite stayed busy and visible with many projects in his lengthy “retirement,” his departure from the “Evening News” marked the start of the changing of a journalism era — an era whose differences from Cronkite’s prime are as striking as they are hard to grasp.

Would Cronkite have tweeted? More and more of his modern counterparts do. It’s a way to form some semblance of an intimate one-on-one relationship with members of a mass audience. It’s an invitation for personal response from those viewers who have something to say in return.

Today’s viral world of communications promotes interactivity between the people on camera and the people watching them. It is blurring the roles of once-sacrosanct boundaries that defined the newsgathering profession. Now bloggers and citizen journalists abound. Every cell phone customer is a television film crew just waiting to happen.

These are all mostly positive developments, or so we tell ourselves. Everyone who wants it has a platform and a voice. That’s good — right?

And, of course, we have an unprecedented number of choices. The broadcast network’s three evening newscasts carry on, even with their dwindling audiences, much as they have done since network television’s birth.

But supplementing, even overshadowing that durable trio, is a dizzying array of news and information that showers the viewer from scores of TV channels. (Not to mention text and video straight from the Internet, bypassing TV altogether.)

No wonder that, as the audience continues to fragment between increasing sources of information, communities form between like-minded members of the public. They gather for the shows that target them. They bond through Facebook pages. They tweet. They look for and create togetherness in pockets of the media cacophony.

It’s a startling contrast to the world of a generation ago in which Cronkite presided widely. As anchor of the “CBS Evening News” and the network’s special coverage of breaking events, his was one of few faces and voices available to news-hungry viewers. He served in a role he largely invented and at which he excelled like nobody else. His was a vast community.

Viewers by the tens of millions gathered before him. They believed what he said, and he never let them down (yielding poll results that declared him “the most trusted man in America”).

With his passing, it’s easy to conclude there will never be another Walter Cronkite. But more to the point (and concise enough to tweet): There won’t be another era like the one that let him be.

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