I don't normally watch the local CBS affiliate KPSP-2 here in Palm Springs for news, but last night at 5:00 when the ABC station KESQ-3 didn't have any details on a "major breaking story" I began surfing and found that KPSP was actually already on the scene (that may have been how KESQ learned there was a "breaker"). It wasn't that story that made last night's newscast on Channel 2 such a memorable broadcast. Instead, about 10 minutes later, right in the middle of the live program, with no warning from the anchors, a CBS News Special Report graphic and sounder interrupted the local newscast. A moment later, Katie Couric informed us that CBS News legend Walter Cronkite died.

I could not help but reflect back 46 years earlier when there was another bulletin on TV. This time, it was Cronkite who, in a hurried voice, broke into "As the World Turns" to announce that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. At that moment, television news came of age. It was largely because of Cronkite and the professional approach that CBS exhibited at that time that television news evolved into the powerful information source it has become. Purists would argue that unfortunately, somewhere along the way, the TV news gathering and delivery process became derailed, and now in 2009, TV news is really little more than another entertainment source where the latest car chase or celebrity death edges out more meaningful or pertinent coverage of budget crisis or world conflicts.

Cronkite had become critical of the state of TV news in recent years, and for very good reason. Young broadcasters today who never even saw a Cronkite newscast really have little understanding of the great institution TV news once was. Perhaps it is best put by Robert Lloyd, Television critic for the Los Angeles Time.

"For many who grew up in the 1960s and '70s, Walter Cronkite was the voice of unfolding history. On the "CBS Evening News" and on the spot, his eloquent mediation of the great events of an age almost pathologically overflowing with them was essential to the way those events were understood. Even when he was temporarily at a loss for words -- his tears at the death of John F. Kennedy, his inarticulate glee at the moon landing ("Whew, boy!") -- he somehow spoke for the nation he spoke to.

Cronkite was not just a newsman; he was -- like Edward R. Murrow, who brought him to CBS and television -- as close a thing to the idea of a newsman as his age imagined. Except perhaps for Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, his high-powered NBC competition, all TV news anchors, news readers and news reporters, even the most august of them, seemed like variations on his theme, shadows of his Platonic ideal. A decade after his retirement from the anchor's chair, he was still being named the most trusted man in network news."

Thank you Mr. Cronkite.