Coastal Voices Guest Opinion: Walter Cronkite: The way it was

I recall another great newsman, Edward R. Murrow, who shined and then faded in much the same way. He had the tenacity and spleen to hold up the mirror, eventually defeating an American monster named Joseph McCarthy, but he couldn’t halt the invasion of the newsroom by ad/ratings-driven entertainment and sensationalism that, quarterbacked by CBS President William Paley, steamrolled him like Sherman’s march through Atlanta.

So too, Walter Cronkite. Pushed into retirement by Paley at 65, ironically at the height of his popularity, “the most trusted man in America” was forced to give way to a CBS youth movement in the form of Dan Rather.  From my teen years to adulthood, I watched as Mr. Cronkite pulled off both the tough and joyful chronicling of our national experiment and experience — from presidential assassinations to the civil rights movement, convention and campus unrest to a walk on the moon. Only once in memory did he ever allow his emotions to drift into editorialization — briefly describing the insanity of war and a failed military action 10,000 miles around the world, which, given not his popularity, but his ultimate veracity and our belief in it, caused Lyndon Johnson’s decision not to eye a second term, with the fateful words, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.” 

I recall some years ago encountering Stuart Pfeiffer, an investigative reporter for the Los Angeles Times, in the hallway of the Superior Court building in Santa Ana. To a group of high school journalism students he was giving a guided tour of the building and the beat that he and Dana Parsons covered daily with integrity and a diligence approaching ferocity. He asked if I minded saying a few words to them. I recall telling them of the beauty of the checks and balances system the Founding Fathers gave us, but how when those three branches failed for various reasons that the flawed nature of our humanity dictated, how the profession they ascribed to, journalism and their Fourth Estate, was the real last bastion of democracy, and as long as men and women like Mr. Pfeiffer and Mr. Parsons were covering the pulse and beat of my county and country, those other three branches would be exposed to the disinfectant of their sunlight and stand a far better chance of survival.

 I take minor solace in the fact that Mr. Pfeiffer is still on his Orange County beat because, given the hydrophobic demand for ad revenue, entertainment titillation and the trading of honest, in-depth reporting for access to those in power and feel-good lint — a disease which exists from small town Main Street up to the Beltway and Wall Street — his is an endangered species.

I have always looked at the concept of truth to be one of ontological proportion, as the ancient Greeks viewed it. Simply, if something existed, it held, and was, the truth. Mr. Cronkite knew that and delivered it on a nightly basis, taking it down whatever path it led, despite the affectation of popularity.

Which is why when he departed each evening with “And that’s the way it is,” I believed him, and, whether the news was good or bad, I and my country were better off for the knowing.

Rest in peace, Mr. Cronkite. And thank you for a job and life well done.

Jon M. Alexander is a Crescent City attorney.