He Was No Edward R Murrow

I don't want to run down Walter Cronkite. He was good at what he did. He wrote his own copy. He was good at taking all of the news of the day and sewing it up into a seamless half hour summary every night, reading it off with his mellifluous voice, in a stately cadence, never missing a beat or mispronouncing a tongue twister. He had a gravitas that made him able to both interview the major players on the World scene and gain the trust of his viewers. He wasn't liberal or conservative. He didn't rock the boat. He never lost his cool. He had a good run. He came up on his own. He was at the top of his game for thirty years and knew when to get out. He spent nearly thirty years in a comfortable retirement on Martha's Vineyard. I'm sure his grand children and great grand children will remember him fondly.

We had a local guy in LA, Clete Roberts, who came out of a similar background as a war correspondent in WWII and was every bit as good on camera. I think Clete was more daring in the field and insightful on feature stuff than Cronkite. They got rid of Clete in the late Sixties, when they brought in the young pretty boys and girls. Mostly vacuous assholes that would dominate TV news from then on. LA was the jumping off point for Tom Brokaw and Connie Chung. Connie was smart, pretty, vivacious and a total flake. Brokaw was and is a clueless retard. The fact that he became a respected television institution tells you all you need to know about the evolution of TV news in America. Some old guys still got big time local news work in LA. They were all Right Wingers. George Putnam. Jerry Dunphy. Hal Fishman. Assholes, all of them. The good guys ended up doing radio traffic reports and local color.

Compared to what came after them, all those old National network news guys were good. Cronkite, Huntley and Brinkley, Harry Reasoner and the host of correspondents that backed them up, getting the stories. We won't see their like again. Now we have Glen Beck.

And that's the way it is, Saturday, July 18, 2009.