... and that's the way it was

The death of former CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite marks the end of an era in journalism. At a time when the main , if not only, news sources were morning papers and evening news on three television stations, Cronkite became one of the most trusted men in America, the gatekeeper of all the public needed to know on each particular day. Each newscast ended with the iconic words: "And that's the way it is."

It was a simpler time in journalism, an era that might be difficult to explain to a wired generation accustomed to a 24 hour news cycle, available from thousands of outlets at any given time, and with no definitive voice of authority.

Shortly after Cronkite's death was announced, The NYTimes Brian Stetler interviewed CBS News President Sean McManus:

“It’s really hard,” [Mcmanus] acknowledged, “to remember just how influential and important he was.” He cited Mr. Cronkite’s famous declaration that the Vietnam war would end in a stalemate.

Viewers and Web readers now, he said, “are so used to being assaulted by so many streams of media that it’s hard for them to imagine that there were only three or four ways to get news and information on TV.”

On an evening when Mr. Cronkite was on the minds of the television industry, Mr. McManus sounded a sad note about the splintered media environment. TV executives are always looking for the next Cronkite, he said, “but I don’t think anybody will be in that position of prominence again.”

Cronkite took his responsibility seriously, breaking from his role as dispassionate anchor only a handful of times: when he announced that President Kennedy had died; when, after a trip to Vietnam, he pronounced the war there unwinnable, which turned the tide of public opinion; and when American astronauts first walked on the moon.

Former Merc television writer Charlie McCollum called the legendary Cronkite "television's wise man":

In a sense, he was a Mr. Rogers for adults, a man who could make sense out of things when things didn't seem to make sense.

"A good journalist doesn't just know the public, he is the public. He feels the same things they do," he once said. But no TV journalist ever empathized with America quite like Cronkite.

Read Cronkite's New York Times obit here.

photo credit: New York Times, Bettman/Corbis

good tweet, bad tweet

Changing the news one tweet at a time? I guess. But whether that's for good or ill remains to be seen.

A piece in the New York Times by Alan Cowell about the ubiquity of twitter chatter notes that most reporting out of Iran during the post-election protests came in the form of 140 characters or fewer. And much of that, in fact, made it into the mainstream press.

But then the piece quotes slate.com's tech-friendly Jack Shafer thus: “My zeal for Twitter knows a limit,” wrote Jack Shafer, editor at large of the online publication Slate, saying the welter of messages from the streets of Tehran was “more noise than signal in understanding the Iranian upheaval.”

On the other hand, but on the same subject, the New York Times' Brian Stetler sees tweets (and youtube videos) as filling the void when foreign correspondents have been called home and the powers that be may be imposing a news blackout. The cascade of citizen news that came out of Iran during those first days was a starting point for news organizations with no feet on the ground. The task then became to watch the news as it developed, sift and analyze it, and -- you hope -- vet it. Stetler writes:

“Check the source” may be the first rule of journalism. But in the coverage of the protests in Iran this month, some news organizations have adopted a different stance: publish first, ask questions later. If you still don’t know the answer, ask your readers.

In yet another story on the subject -- this one also cites twitter as the real-time source of news of Michael Jackson's death -- the AP's Jake Coyle looks at the inaccuracies or flat out lies that sometimes crop up on the twittersphere, such as the grossly exaggerated report of Jeff Goldblum's untimely demise. The problem with DIY journalism is the lack of accountability. Twits can tweet anything. He writes:

While involvement in the protests in Iran might be Twitter's most meaningful achievement thus far, some have noted that many inaccuracies were circulated.

That has raised the concern that some people or governments may use Twitter to spread disinformation even more dangerous than suggesting Jeff Goldblum is dead.

Andrew Keen, author of "The Cult of the Amateur," believes Twitter — and whatever real-time Web services follow in its wake — represents the future of both the Internet and media.

But Keen says the Iran coverage on Twitter "exposes all the weakness of the service, the fact that it's so chaotic and unreliable. Who knows who's tweeting what?"

Back to Cowell, who concedes that new forms of info-sharing does indeed make for new ways to gather news, but still suggests it adds a layer of complexity to the process. He writes:

News gathering takes time, energy, courage, people, humility, creativity and layers of editorial oversight to guarantee the authenticity of the final product. For all the human flaws of those who gather, edit, check and analyze it, news allows people to judge for themselves whether the people they voted into office merit their trust and their tax dollars.

As the Twitter revolution has shown, the ascendancy of new methods of spreading the news — a kind of digital, high-speed word-of-mouth — reinforces the need for assembling it, sifting it and trying to make sense of it.

Honest news is essential to ensuring that people know what their soldiers are doing in Iraq or Afghanistan as much as what their politicians are doing in their boudoirs or how they are composing their expense accounts. At its best, news bypasses spin to let readers know who is really winning on the far-flung killing fields of Pakistan or Gaza, just as it did in Vietnam.

We lose all that at our peril.