R.I.P. Walter Cronkite

Inevitable as it is, it's a shame when a great one passes, and in many ways the death of Walter Cronkite at age 92 today is the passing of an era. I doubt there'll ever be a TV news person with the influence Cronkite had — or at least the trust that he wielded with the audience.

Not many news readers nowadays qualify as bona fide journalists — not meant as an insult, it's just not part of the skill set. Cronkite was a journalist.

Appropriate perhaps that this comes as people are marking the 40th anniversary of the moon landing, a moment when Cronkite's boyish enthusiasm got the best of him and he crossed over from the serious reporting of the news to just enjoying the marvel.

Phony journalism

In the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan writes about the latest incident of a phony story making it onto the pages of a reputable journal. This time it's the New Republic, which already was badly burned a decade ago by the Stephen Glass debacle.

This time it was a writer/private named Scott Thomas Beauchamp, who apparently made up a bunch of stuff about horrific misbehavior by his fellow U.S. troops in Iraq. This kind of editorial sloppiness does no favors to the anti-war cause or the credibility of journalism; the New Republic has proved to be a friend of neither. ("Fool me once, shame on you ...") Noonan makes some good points.