Walter Cronkite in 1968 ... by gimleteye

Daily Kos' Markos Markopoulis made a comment that stuck during a segment on HBO's Bill Maher last week. He hadn't been alive during a time when one person in the media could have such an impact as Walter Cronkite. Markopoulis is right. The kids proliferating the web can't even imagine a narrow-band world defined by three TV channels.

I grew up with ABC, CBS, and NBC. Period. Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley were in my space. As a teenager then, I watched Vietnam War reports obsessively. Boys only a few years older than me were dying in war a draft card length away-- that is a big difference from today's foreign adventures and our all-volunteer army.

Today there are a million blogs, a thousand magazines and TV stations: there is news for every single point of view. With a few exceptions, Big News has dumbed itself to fit miniscule segments around advertising. But there was a time, and Walter Cronkite was of that time, when television newscasters believed they owed viewers the best visual representation of print journalism. When you are young, no one over the age of forty impresses you. Cronkite was just another member of the generation that was sending the United States to a wrong war until that moment in February 1968 when Walter Cronkite dissented in an on-air editorial.

Walter Cronkite reported to the nation on his recent trip to Vietnam to view the aftermath of the Tet Offensive in a television special, 'Who, What, When, Where, Why?' Cronkite advised negotiation "...not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could." Now that Cronkite has passed, I remember that moment quite clearly.

But so much happened in 1968. Scarcely a month later, Bobby Kennedy announced his intent to run for the Presidency. On the same date, the My Lai massacres occurred. A few weeks later, Martin Luther King was assassinated. In June, Bobby Kennedy would be dead. The presidency of Lyndon Johnson was over.

We have already been in Iraq longer than Vietnam. Because the cost of the war is being borne disproportionately by the children of the poor, the country at large is not so riveted by the loss. Our younger generations are ambivalent and disengaged from the sacrifices of their peers. All of us are also insulated by the same technologies that propel us forward in the all-information age. Anyone can hurl their spears in the ethernet, like passengers shouting in an air-conditioned car.

1968 was different. But I believe, forty years from now, we will look back on these years and realize that what we are passing through is equally momentous. We will not, however, have a television newscaster whose career marked the way.