Walter Cronkite

Walter Cronkite is seriously ill, network sources told Media Bistro's TV Newser blog yesterday. Last week, the network reportedly began updating the obituary for the 92-year-old newsman, who anchored the CBS Evening News for 19 years, earning him the moniker "Most Trusted Man in America." When reached by EW, a spokesman for CBS News declined to comment on CroThey're strange bedfellows: the old guard of broadcast journalism, the new guard of Media 2.0. But Twitter was atwitter with links and posts to YouTube videos of Walter Cronkite's most famous broadcasts yesterday nkite's health.

Cronkite was the first to break news of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination in the spring of 1968. Cronkite interviewed the president at Hyannisport on Labor Day weekend in 1963. Perhaps his most famous broadcast, Cronkite breaks the news of President Kennedy's assassination. Perhaps many in this generation may not be familiar with this giant of the news media. For them suffice it to say that Walter Cronkite was, without hyperbole, "the most trusted man in America".

Back in the days when television was relatively new and technology was in its early years Americans relied on the reporters such as Cronkite to be unbiased, to be truly "fair and balanced". They relied on them to report the news and not to make it up. Back then, unlike today, if you heard it on television news, you could believe it without question. Back then the news media had not yet sold their soul to the devil of advertising revenue. In those days there were legends in the news media, and towering above all of them was Walter Cronkite. For those not familiar with this giant they should Google him and learn what true reporting was.