Twitter
Facebook
Email Lists
Donate
The
projected image of Walter Cronkite smiled out at a crowd of hundreds of
journalists, family, and friends at a memorial in
“This
democracy, Walter said, cannot function without a reasonably informed
electorate,” Obama told the audience at
That commitment to informing the electorate was deeply held by Cronkite. His belief that a free press is integral to a free society led him to become honorary chairman of CPJ—not that it was effortless to bring the legendary anchor onto our board in the nascent months of the organization in 1981. “It was a long shot,” CPJ founder Michael Massing told me before the memorial. But once he was on board, as Executive Director Joel Simon wrote on our blog, “there was nothing honorary about Cronkite's involvement with CPJ.”
He
was hands-on, working to gain the freedom of journalists in places such as
Cronkite’s son, Chip, told the audience today that his father felt “it is neither too much to ask for a free press nor too much for the government to give”—a position embedded in CPJ’s principles. Former President Bill Clinton, astronaut Buzz Aldrin, and numerous journalists also spoke of Cronkite’s deep well of curiosity and his ability to lead, with “60 Minutes” correspondent Andy Rooney calling him “a force for good.”
“He thought that if we were vigilant and courageous enough, it would all work out,” said journalist Nick Clooney, a longtime friend of Cronkite’s. “I never saw him pessimistic. Even at his great age, he still believed in it all.”
Cronkite’s name remains at the top of our masthead. Its presence reminds us, as his projected image did today, that a free press matters greatly in a dangerous world.
Print
Share
Delicious
Digg
Google
Reddit
StumbleUpon
Subscribe
After reading through the homepage headlines, the story about Walter Cronkite stood out to me most. This is not to say that the others were less important, but just that this story is the one which appealed to a belief that I would like to maintain as well. Even after gaining many years of experience and age, Walter Cronkite's concepts of journalism still seemed highly idealistic. This tells me that after failing,and knowing he would fail again, he never wanted to stop striving to get as close as possible to journalistic perfection. This aspect of character is one that everyone could learn from. We will never reach perfection, but there is a best possible state of being. The closer we get to that, the better off we will be.