He also brought us joy and cheer:<\/p>\n

\u201cMan on the moon \u2026.Whew boy (laughs)<\/a> \u2026 There he is, there\u2019s a foot coming down the steps. … So there\u2019s a foot on the moon, stepping down on the moon. If he\u2019s testing that first step, he must be stepping down on the moon at this point. … Well, look at those pictures.\u201d<\/p>\n

Was he all gravitas?\u00a0 Almost, and always in front of the camera.\u00a0 In his autobiography, he acknowledges that he was wowed by mingling with at least one member of the rich and famous, Frank Sinatra.\u00a0 But Sinatra\u2019s crooning was not to be confused with serious journalism, and Walter Cronkite knew it.\u00a0 He never cheapened the news; even having the fortitude and persuasiveness to prevent CBS from forcing him to pander to the audience as it had made Edward R. Murrow do.<\/p>\n

And what about our news anchors now?\u00a0\u00a0 NBC News\u2019\u00a0 Brian Williams can be serious one moment and then play the role of \u201cBig Head\u201d on Jon Stewart.\u00a0 When he\u2019s a guest on The Daily Show, Williams and Stewart talk about their home state of New Jersey as if they were in Tony Soprano\u2019s Bada Bing Club.\u00a0 On CBS, Katie Couric has turned the evening news into a mastery of bad puns.\u00a0 On ABC, Diane Sawyer\u2019s efforts to be earnest lack credibility both because of all the light-weight gotcha interviews she has done as well as the fact that before going into broadcasting she carried a broom behind Richard Nixon to try to clean up the messes.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

I asked a physician who has been to Haiti three times since the January 12 earthquake how Anderson Cooper could report for two weeks from the scene of the devastation and then return to the CNN studio and revert into his special kind of flirtatiousness with newsreaders hired to trivialize the news.\u00a0 The physician found it incredible that anyone could experience the horror of reporting from a land where nearly a quarter of a million people had died and then \u201cgo frivolous on us.\u201d\u00a0 Perhaps it\u2019s testimony to Anderson Cooper\u2019s fortitude; he\u2019s a good company man and does what CNN asks of him.\u00a0 Or perhaps he, like so many others, has cheapened his reputation and diminished his accomplishments by \u201cjust saying yes.\u201d Cooper and others might learn a lesson from Bob Costas, who refused to be a substitute anchor for Larry King one evening, because the topic was going to be an over-sensationalized California murder.<\/p>\n

The landscape is not without hope.\u00a0 PBS continues to provide us with the experience of Jim Lehrer or Judy Woodruff and bring in fresh talent committed to enlightening audiences.\u00a0 There are no cute little teasers on the NewsHour, only the sixty-second annoyance of the roll of sponsors.<\/p>\n

As always, the American public plays a decisive role in what it receives.\u00a0 Fox \u201cNews\u201d has higher ratings than any other cable \u201cnews\u201d outlet, while CNN, which has tried to be reasonably objective, has seen its rating plummet over the past six months.\u00a0 CNN has serious journalists such as Fareed Zakaria, Christine Amanpour and John King, but serious interpretation of complicated issues is apparently not what enough Americans want.<\/p>\n

An article previously\u00a0 posted in the Occasional Planet<\/a> asked citizens in public places where \u201cFox News\u201d is on the television, to ask management to change the channel to CNN or MSNBC.\u00a0 It has been done; it can be done.\u00a0 As citizens, we play a role in what news is presented, how it is presented, and who presents it.\u00a0 It\u2019s another form of voting, and just as important.\u00a0 WWWD (What Would Walter Do?)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Recently, it\u2019s become a sport to poke fun at Larry King.\u00a0 A talk show host who has interviewed more than 40,000 people on radio<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2133,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[77],"tags":[390,388,389],"yoast_head":"\n