Academic

AND THAT?S THE WAY IT WASN?T: Ed Driscoll on Walter Cronkite nostalgia. The nostalgia isn?t for lo?

By Glenn Reynolds

AND THAT’S THE WAY IT WASN’T: Ed Driscoll on Walter Cronkite nostalgia. The nostalgia isn’t for lost integrity. It’s for lost power.

UPDATE: Roger Kimball calls Cronkite the world’s most overrated reader of the news. “Like Michael Jackson, he was so successful because he perfectly incarnated certain popular clichés. His success was not a matter of substance. . . . He didn?t research or write the news. He read it. He emitted the same platitudes every other news reader mouthed. He did so, however, with a sort of cardigan authenticity that used car salesmen would climb naked over broken bottles to emulate. . . . Michael Jackson was famous for inventing a dance step called the moonwalk in which the dancer seems to float backwards while walking in place. Walter Cronkite did something similar. He seemed to float above the yapping clamor of common opinion. At bottom, though, he merely reflected it.”

Full post as published by Instapundit.com on July 19, 2009 (boomark / email).