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Thank you, Uncle WalterI am a practicing journalist. It is my chosen profession to convey information about events I have witnessed or impressions I have gained from experiences of life. Every day, whether the media is radio or print, I try to do my job well. I try to be accurate, insightful and entertaining. I usually come up short of my goals, but I have standards for myself and my work. I also have heroes and last weekend I learned that one of them, Walter Cronkite, had died at age 92. He was a legendary newsman, even during his active career, which started before World War II and ended in the early 1980s. I saw him on our small black and white television in the late 1950s and admired his presence and abilities as I became an adult and took up the same craft. In this age of glitz and glamour, I have wondered why he was revered and never fell out of favor with the public even though we have changed so much since he retired. Walter Cronkite gave the news in a stark and straightforward manner. "That's the way it is!" was his sign-off and that's the way it was every day when you sat down at 5:30 in the afternoon to see what CBS had determined to be the events of the day. He had a delightful personality that had shown in other programs he'd hosted--even when talking to a big lion puppet named Charlemagne. But when it came to selecting the news stories, as managing editor, and doing the news on camera, he was straight at you. I liked that because I felt I could believe him when he told us what was happening in Washington, D.C. or Vietnam. He had a heart and a lilting spirit. We saw his emotion when President John Kennedy was shot and when we landed on the moon. He was a real person who put his work first and his own fame far down the list. He believed that it really isn't who he was that mattered, it's who we were. In the 1960s, we were just emerging as a consumer society with great hope that we could make the world a better place. The "hippies" rejected society as we had known it and pushed the boundaries far past tolerated limits. The scientists used their skills and government's encouragement to launch a space program that showed how far we could go when we put our minds to it. Cronkite covered all of that and the inevitable clash between the old and new of our culture. We got to see ourselves every night on TV and we often didn't like what we saw. There is a line credited to President Lyndon Johnson when CBS ran stories that were critical of the war in Vietnam. "If we've lost Cronkite, we've lost the middle of America," he said, as he angrily turned off the television in the White House. Today, a news person doesn't have that kind of impact. We have been invaded by activists, opportunists and imposters to the point that the national audience has been broken into small segments and no media outlet is dominant. Our technology has expanded to allow giant screens to feature miniscule stories and the most popular shows are those where we watch amateurs play out adventures in a staged reality. We are more aware of our surroundings than we were in Walter's time. We know what's going on around the world and have many sources to verify events. The news cycle is now six minutes from the time something newsworthy happens, until it is reported, as opposed to twelve hours or more in the 1970s network news era. We are suspect of the agenda of everyone who speaks to us. In short, we have lost our innocence. Still, that's the way it is! Uncle Walter led us out into the sunshine and a trusted voice told us what was going on in the world around us. He encouraged us to go forth to seek knowledge and solve our problems. He expected us to be honest and truthful and to put forth our best characteristics rather than our worst. He was a role model for more than other journalists; he was a black and white image who turned the world into a colorful landscape of infinite possibilities. It will honor him to practice the basic principles of civilized behavior while exploring the far reaches of our universe. Editor's Note: This is Ken Root's 35th year as an agricultural reporter. He grew up on a small farm in central Oklahoma and started his career as a vocational agriculture teacher. He worked in Oklahoma, Kansas and Missouri as a broadcaster and was the original host of AgriTalk. He has also been the executive director of the National AgriChemical Retailers Association in Washington, D.C. and the National Association of Farm Broadcasters in Kansas City. Ken is now the lead farm broadcaster at WHO and WMT Radio based in Des Moines, Iowa. He has been a columnist for HPJ and Midwest Ag Journal for eight years.
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