One wonders whether Wolf Blitzer, the CNN news anchor, cringes every time he has to say on air that his network has “the best political team in the business”. He should. Certainly, I cringe whenever I hear some marketing type insist on calling South Africa “world-class”. If you have to keep reminding people that you are world-class or the best, you are almost by definition saying the opposite of what you intend.
Walter Cronkite, the legendary American newscaster who died at 92 on Friday, never had to brag or utter silly slogans for his network, CBS. Anchoring the evening news through two tumultuous decades, the 60s and the 70s, “Uncle Walter”, as America affectionately call him, was quite simply the best. In 1972, he was voted the most trusted man in the country.
Back then, there were only three US television networks, CBS, NBC and ABC, and watching the evening news, often round the dinner table, was still a national habit. Cronkite and his competitors had a lot of unsettling news to deliver. The assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and the Rev Martin Luther King, Vietnam, race riots, the shooting of anti-war protesters at Kent State University, Watergate and the resignation of Richard Nixon, the Three Mile Island nuclear scare and Iranian hostage crisis all happened on Cronkite’s watch. Continue reading “The Way It Was”
