by Pete Langenfeld

Created on: July 24, 2009

With the recent passing of Walter Cronkite the question that I heard most often was whether we would ever see a network anchor as powerful and influential as Cronkite. The consensus seems to be "no."

It got me to wondering about the fate of the national network news. I don't believe that we'll ever see the national news as powerful as it used to be. I think that there are a lot of things that caused the decline in netwok news. The two biggest factors are cable/Internet and the extreme polarization of todays politics.

When Cronkite was at his peak in influence the options for getting your news were very limited. There were newspapers and network news. And if you wanted up to the minute news, that eliminated newspapers. That left you with the three networks.

While cable/internet has hopefully made us a more well-informed society, it has helped to diminish the network news because people can now be more selective about where they get their news. There are so many more options in T.V. watching that people can choose not to watch the news at all. In Cronkite's day if you were going to watch T.V at, say, 6 p.m. you were going to watch the news, that's all that was on to watch. And if you were going to watch the news you watched Cronkite.

The explosion of cable and satellite has also provided an avenue for more voices to be heard. People are now free to pick and choose to find a voice that agrees with them. This is not always a good thing. When you only listen to those with whom you agree, you don't always get the whole story. There are times in our lives when we need to here the facts no matter how much it may hurt.

I think we could count on Cronkite for that. He would give the facts and let the viewer take it from there. He wouldn't tell the viewer how they should feel about the story. He would trust that the people were smart enough to handle the facts.

The added diversity and volume of new voices is a good thing. But I'm not sure people are discerning enough in the voices they choose to hear. Just because someone is given airtime to speak their mind does not mean that they are worth the time to listen. And we haven gotten away from the idea of integrity. All to often viewers will hear someone on cable/internet giving their opinion and take it as fact

The internet in particular has been a boon to those who never had a voice before. It has also been a boon to those who just throw out whatever pops into their heads, without a care or the facts back it up.

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