The TV Zone

Walter Cronkite's funeral is tomorrow afternoon, and so I'd like to take a look back at this career in a handful of posts today that I hope might convey to a reader exactly why this passing is so important.

(And don't worry: I'll be posting plenty of other TV stuff too...)

Been a lot written and posted over the last few days, though what I will do here is dig just a little bit deeper and (if and where possible) go back to the United Press days too. But mostly, let's just stick to TV here, and go to some of the landmark events that Cronkite covered.

If you are too young to remember the guy, and he hasn't been on TV as an employed anchorman for nearly 30 years, than I'm hoping you might find some of this of interest. Not to be trite, my friends, but it was a profoundly different time and place. TV news was still nascent, while the major news force in the U.S. remained print, though the eclipse had begun in earnest on Nov. 22, 1963.

You'll look at Cronkite and maybe wonder, "eh, what's the big deal? He was doing his job." Yup, he was, but he did it with a rock-solid professional absent any emotional or political baggage. This was - you should also realize - the man most people were looking to for their news.

So let's step back. The first is the well-thumbed look at the JFK coverage. I post this extended version because it negates that old saw that Walter wiped away tears when he reported the news of the death. In fact, he notes the death via unofficial sources at least two or three times in this report. No emotion. Just the facts as he knew them.

On the jump: The first clip is interesting because this is the first instance CBS broke in at 1:40 with news of the shots fired, at about 1:40 p.m. Cronkite's reporting from a radio booth somewhere in the Graybar building because the TV camera needed to warm up. I've also got Eddie Barker's first reports. Eddie was a CBS stringer, and Cronkite cites his reporting...