Much Ado About Publishing

And That's the Way We Wish It Still Was: A Tribute to Walter Cronkite

by Nina L. Diamond

I was raised by Walter Cronkite.

Okay, that might come as a surprise to the Cronkite and Diamond families, but it really shouldn’t since every Baby Boomer journalist, print and broadcast, will tell you the same thing.

In an era before cable and 24-hour news stations, when the news was broadcast by just the three networks -- CBS, NBC, and ABC -- the country knew him as Uncle Walter, The Father of Television News, the man for whom the term “anchor” was coined back in 1952, and, according to a 1972 poll whose pronouncement we’d already believed for decades and would believe for decades more… The Most Trusted Man in America.

Walter Cronkite died in New York City, at 92, on July 17, 2009, three days before the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 first-man-on-the moon landing that had thrilled him so.

I was 13 when I watched Uncle Walter anchor CBS’s coverage of that historic mission. Like millions of other people, I sat on the living room floor in front of our television and watched the fuzzy, grainy black and white images of the lunar module and, first, Neil Armstrong, and then, Buzz Aldrin, take their leisurely strolls on that big, white ball in the sky.

By the time I was born in 1956, Walter Cronkite had been through print and radio, had been one of the first reporters on the battlefield as he covered World War II for UPI, and he’d been a CBS television correspondent for six years and the network’s political conventions anchor for four years.

I started talking when I was nine months old, and I think I started reading at two or three years old. I can’t be sure. There’s a photo of me reading a magazine at around that age, and I know that when I started nursery school I already knew how to read and was well into my love affair with words and sentences, newspapers, magazines, and books.

And television, of course, because that big box brought the world into our house, and the trusted Walter Cronkite with it to show me that world and explain all that history in the making.

Uncle Walter trained me very well. So much so that from childhood to this very day I’ve been very particular about who I hear my good news and bad news from. And how, as a journalist, I gather, report, and write that news myself.



In 1962, when I was six, he began anchoring the CBS Evening News, for which he was also the Managing Editor. In 1963, when I was seven, we were sent home from school early one November afternoon with the news that President John F. Kennedy had been shot. Cronkite, removing his glasses and tearing up, broke the news to everyone that the president had died. Sitting in front of the TV, I was shocked.

Almost 46 years later, the shock still hasn’t worn off.

Uncle Walter brought me The Cold War, The Civil Rights Movement, and The Vietnam War. A society changing so quickly you could hardly catch your breath: The counterculture, women’s rights, hippies, the political power of music (and art, theater, film, and television), war protests, rights marches, longer hair, shorter skirts, sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll.

By the time I was 12, in 1968, the world bore absolutely no resemblance whatsoever to the one we’d been living in just five years earlier.

In April of that year, Uncle Walter told me that Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated. And, in June, it was Bobby Kennedy who fell to an assassin’s bullet. It was as if someone had turned the world upside down and shook it, like some demented snowglobe.

Able to trust his reporting and anchoring, I was glued to the TV just like everyone else, hungry for every bit of information Uncle Walter could provide.

That summer we saw the Democratic National Convention and its riots play out on TV from Chicago. Somebody shook the world again like a snowglobe.

The next summer, 1969, when I was 13, the world shook in a much happier, though still weird, way when we watched men walk on the moon and a gazillion kids gather in Woodstock for a concert that defined a generation. Then the shaking snowglobe got demented again when Charles Manson and his “family” of crazy runaways went on their California murder spree.

Watergate followed in 1972 when I was 16, and culminated in President Richard Nixon’s resignation in the summer of 1974 when I was 18 and had just graduated from high school.

At Florida State University, in Tallahassee, I majored in communications, interned in a press office at the state Capitol there, and in 1981, when I was about to turn 25, I was working at the ABC affiliate writing and producing when, on March 6th, we all gathered in the station’s control room to watch Walter Cronkite’s last CBS Evening News broadcast from the anchor desk. His very last “…And that’s the way it is” sign-off.

It was never that way again.

The following year, I moved back to Miami and began writing full time for magazines and newspapers.

When Cronkite left, it was the end of an era, not just in general, but in journalism as well as all forms of media and publishing. The era had actually been fading out since 1968 when the financial success of a new CBS News program called 60 Minutes ironically dealt a fatal blow to journalistic, media, and publishing standards.

You see, prior to 60 Minutes, broadcast news departments weren’t expected to turn a profit, and newspapers, magazines, and book publishing were quite content with very modest profits. But, when 60 Minutes became the first broadcast news program to turn a profit, the corporate powers throughout the media decided that big profits were now the goal. And if that meant that journalistic standards suffered as business considerations, ratings, and pleasing advertisers (what the hell happened to the sacred separation of editorial and advertising?) took precedence over ferreting out the truth and reporting it, well, that was just too bad.

From then on, corporate profits came first – and still do – and everything else took a back seat.

And that’s why we have the significantly lowered standards we have today throughout broadcast, print, Internet, and book publishing.

As he watched this happen to journalism and publishing, Walter Cronkite spoke out.

In a 2001 interview, he told Larry King that young journalists today are performers and not all of them have good journalistic qualifications. “I see too many young journalists forgetting the principles of the craft to be on-air, to be stars,” he added.

The dumbing down of journalism and publishing went hand in hand with the general dumbing down of the culture.

“To elevate journalism requires elevating the education of the American people,” Cronkite told King.

With the media focus on speculation, sensationalism, and fluff, “there are so many important stories that don’t get on the news at all,” he noted, even though cable news stations are on 24 hours a day.



Ironically, Don Hewitt, who had been Cronkite’s CBS Evening News executive producer, created and produced the now legendary 60 Minutes, whose profits inadvertently led to business concerns edging out journalistic duty. And doubly ironically, Hewitt died at 86 on August 19, 2009, almost exactly one month after Cronkite.

After Walter Cronkite’s death, during special news coverage and tribute programs, his funeral, and a public memorial, everyone who spoke about him stressed his reverence for the role of journalism.

President Barack Obama spoke at the September 9th memorial, held at Lincoln Center in New York City, noting that like everyone else, “I have benefited as a citizen from his dogged pursuit of the truth.”

Walter Cronkite believed that “journalism is more than just a profession, it’s a public good vital to a democracy,” President Obama continued, noting that Cronkite’s journalism is a standard that’s harder to find today as journalists offer instant commentary “rather than the hard news and investigative journalism he championed.”

Those journalistic standards won’t rekindle themselves, we have to demand a return to them, the president said, adding that if Cronkite was on the air today, he’d still “shine the bright light on substance.”

When Walter Cronkite reported, that’s the way it was.

And that’s the way it still should be.

* * * * *

Nina L. Diamond is a journalist, essayist, and the author of Voices of Truth: Conversations with Scientists, Thinkers & Healers. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including Omni, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, and The Miami Herald.

Ms. Diamond was a writer and performer on Pandemonium, the National Public Radio (NPR) satirical humor program, for its entire run in Miami and select markets nationwide from 1984-1998. As an editor, she works frequently with other authors and journalists on both fiction and non-fiction.

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