Impartiality the way it was for trusted anchor Cronkite

Respected journalist ruled the long-gone golden decades of TV news by Rupert Cornwell in WashingtonWalter Cronkite There will never be another like him, for a simple reason. There cannot be.

Walter Cronkite, the legendary American television journalist, who died on Saturday, was a titan from a vanished era, when the three broadcast networks ruled the American airwaves unchallenged.

It is inconceivable that another TV news anchor could ever be to Americans what Cronkite was during the 1960s and 1970s: a sort of national family uncle, wise, reassuring, understanding, a man they could trust to tell them the news - to borrow his own sign-off line from the CBS Evening News - the way it was.

The clout of network TV news back then is hard to grasp for anyone reared exclusively in the modern universe of the internet, blogs, and 24/7 cable news channels.

CBS Evening News, which under Cronkite overshadowed the rival programmes at NBC and ABC, had a viewership of some 20 million, almost as much as the combined audience of the three shows today, when the national population is half as large again.

At the height of his career, Cronkite was arguably the most famous and influential individual in the US. The moment when he told his countrymen of the death of John F. Kennedy, his composure for once crumbling, his eyes misting with emotion as he slowly took off and replaced his glasses, is seared into America's collective memory with the dreadful images from the motorcade itself.

On screen impartiality was his trademark, amplified by his deliberately slow delivery and taste for understatement.

At one point he was voted the most trusted man in the country - a point brought home to President Lyndon Johnson in 1968 with the most momentous consequences. After the Vietcong's Tet offensive that January, Cronkite went to South Vietnam for a first-hand look at what was happening. His TV editorial concluding the war was a stalemate, and that a negotiated settlement was the only way out, shocked Johnson, as it laid bare the infamous "credibility gap" between the Administration's rosy depiction of the war, and the ever more obvious reality.

"If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America," LBJ is said to have remarked. Within weeks, the President announced that he would not seek a second elected term, and vowed to search for a negotiated peace - just as Cronkite had urged.

Americans adored him, too, for a boyish excitement, never more visible than when he covered the Apollo 11 moon mission in 1969.

At Cronkite's last national convention in 1980, when the Democrats renominated Jimmy Carter, the delegates chanted "Walt-er, Walt-er" with a passion that eclipsed their feelings for the incumbent President. His last evening in the anchor's chair, on March 6, 1981, was a major news event in itself.

His career amounted to a history of the American news business in the middle and late decades of the 20th century. From his high-school days in Texas, he wanted only to be a journalist. After working for a year at the Houston Post, and then as a news and sports announcer for radio stations in Kansas City and Oklahoma, Cronkite joined the United Press, then the pre-eminent US news agency. Soon he was a hardened war reporter, covering the allied bombing campaigns against Germany, the 1944 Normandy landings and the Battle of the Bulge. After the Nazi defeat, he was UP's chief correspondent at the Nuremberg war trials, before spending two years in Moscow, as the Cold War began.

In 1950, back in the US, Cronkite's television career began. The medium was in its infancy, but Cronkite quickly realised it would overtake radio and print journalism to become the prime source of news for Americans, and a crucial factor in its politics.

- INDEPENDENT