Walter Cronkite has just died at 92
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Re: Walter Cronkite has just died at 92
#2I'm young and not originally from the US so he's a man I know of solely due to reputation. Various people always speaking of him with great esteem. I always (and continue to) wonder(ed) what about him made him so notable.
Re: Walter Cronkite has just died at 92
#3I'm young and not originally from the US so he's a man I know of solely due to reputation. Various people always speaking of him with great esteem. I always (and continue to) wonder(ed) what about him made him so notable.
He was called the most trusted man in America. For a long time he was the most famous anchor on television, back when TV was how most people got their news. He had a stalwart reputation, which is rare among anchors (especially compared to the current batch).
Re: Walter Cronkite has just died at 92
#4I'm young and not originally from the US so he's a man I know of solely due to reputation. Various people always speaking of him with great esteem. I always (and continue to) wonder(ed) what about him made him so notable.
He was called the most trusted man in America. For a long time he was the most famous anchor on television, back when TV was how most people got their news. He had a stalwart reputation, which is rare among anchors (especially compared to the current batch).
I'm just trying to figure out why. What did he do to earn such trust? Watching the news reports coming in I'm learning. Sad that it has to come to this but am I correct in saying that the way he reported about the war in Vietnam had a lot to do with it?
Re: Walter Cronkite has just died at 92
#5Earlier quoted context omitted.
He was called the most trusted man in America. For a long time he was the most famous anchor on television, back when TV was how most people got their news. He had a stalwart reputation, which is rare among anchors (especially compared to the current batch).
I'm just trying to figure out why. What did he do to earn such trust? Watching the news reports coming in I'm learning. Sad that it has to come to this but am I correct in saying that the way he reported about the war in Vietnam had a lot to do with it?
I don't know. I was born way after he retired. But this is what I know of him from reputation alone.
Re: Walter Cronkite has just died at 92
#6Earlier quoted context omitted.
He was called the most trusted man in America. For a long time he was the most famous anchor on television, back when TV was how most people got their news. He had a stalwart reputation, which is rare among anchors (especially compared to the current batch).
I'm just trying to figure out why. What did he do to earn such trust? Watching the news reports coming in I'm learning. Sad that it has to come to this but am I correct in saying that the way he reported about the war in Vietnam had a lot to do with it?
He was the CBS news anchor when the transition from 15 min to 30 min nightly news occurred in the US (back when there were only three channels to watch), and he held his anchor chair for around two decades. Some of his reputation is due to being the product of the times (e.g. being the face of the most-watched news show during the growth of TV news to become the dominant news source in the country) and some of it was through conscious decisions he made to "tell it like it is." He was the first major news figure to tell the American population that the vietnam war was unwinnable. His distinctive, sonorous voice was also a big help.
Re: Walter Cronkite has just died at 92
#7Before anyone asks why this is on Hacker News, he was a news reporter hacker.
Re: Walter Cronkite has just died at 92
#8Before anyone asks why this is on Hacker News, he was a news reporter hacker.
...and hacked policy too: http://www.google.com/search?q=cronkite+drug+policy
Re: Walter Cronkite has just died at 92
#9Before anyone asks why this is on Hacker News, he was a news reporter hacker.
I did some research to back your claim, searching for articles that would point out how he changed news. I failed to find the analysis I sought-after* but I did find a bunch of articles indicating that this was coming, sadly (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/26/arts/television/26arts-CRO...).
*Interesting that Google is flooded with reports about his death. I'm about to try Bing, but what I would expect is that such reports would be limited to news.google.com but rather, 25 pages in, reports about his death still come up. His wikipedia article is one of the few exceptions. EDIT: Bing does a bit better but still, I never realized how poorly search engines manage live content. On the one hand, they update their cache quickly and rank them correctly, but news articles should be news, not content results(?).
Re: Walter Cronkite has just died at 92
#10Before anyone asks why this is on Hacker News, he was a news reporter hacker.
So is everyone who becomes famous in their respective field a "hacker"? What were his innovations? Did he come up with some clever new way of doing the news?
Just because you're good at something doesn't make you a "hacker".