Legendary anchorman Walter Cronkite is gravely ill, according to TVNewser columnist Gail Shister, citing “multiple CBS News sources.”
Cronkite, 92, wasn’t the first anchorman, but in many ways he invented the role. You can see the images just by thinking about them: Cronkite overcome with emotion after announcing the death of John Kennedy; the space flights; coming out against the Vietnam War; paving the way for the Israeli-Egyptian rapprochement by interviewing Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin even before President Jimmy Carter could get involved.
Cronkite, with his famous nightly sign-off (“And that’s the way it is”), was the embodiment of something close to a national cultural consensus, which doesn’t remotely exist today. Of course, there was much that was phony about that. But there was nothing phony about Cronkite. He was the real thing.
Photo of Cronkite in 1973 by Vin Crosbie and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.
