Walter Cronkite's Impartial Journalism and How it Might Survive in Web Writing

After the passing of legendary Walter Cronkite on July 17 this year, the accusations of biased news came to the fore again via the mouths of media pundits, even though that's never a dormant issue. Cronkite was once again lauded as defining journalism from the Edward R. Murrow model, back when political bias wasn't allowed to show through on CBS News, whether that be through the script, a smirk, or even a raised eyebrow. And, despite giving commentary on bitter truths a few times, Cronkite managed to stay impartial through every single year of his 19 years anchoring the CBS Evening News as well as his years before working as a reporter in the field. It was said that nobody really knew what his true political views were until he came out after his retirement as a liberal (in the most general terms, as Cronkite contended) right around the same time that much of the news media turned openly liberal.

For those of us who grew up with Walter Cronkite on TV and had an early inkling of understanding about the concept of impartiality in the news, it was fascinating to see a slight glimmer of hope on news networks this month when myriad reporters lamented openly about the extinction of Cronkite's type of journalism. It came as close as Katie Couric and several other prominent reporters on cable news getting on top of their desks to proclaim to the world that they were going to change journalism back to the form of a true fair and balanced system.

Of course, as much as most to every news reporter wants to become the next Walter Cronkite, they ultimately have to go with the agenda set a long time ago at the news networks. Now, if a reporter or anchor has differing beliefs from that network agenda, you can expect a lot of musical chairs to take place so they end up working for either the Yin or the Yang of the news divisions to fit into their political niche. In between all of that moving around are network news meetings every morning to create newscasts that attempt to bring down the political beliefs of the other side, no matter how blatant or subtle it may be.

It probably puts the career of a field reporter or anchor for network (or even local) news in a bit of a tortuous spot for those who desperately want to bring back impartial journalism. I have no doubt in my mind that Katie Couric and many at CBS News want to bring back the Cronkite model of journalism, with that feeling now intensified with Cronkite's passing. With the admittedly liberal agenda of the current CBS News, that isn't going to happen, no matter how defiant any of those anchors/reporters may attempt to be in the near future.

You'd think all is lost with that scenario in the world of disseminating news or opinion on current events. But with the incredible growth in the fields of web writing, bloggers and general freelance writers, there's an opportunity here for those of us in this writing field to be more aware of our lack of constraints. While I have good friends in this industry who aren't afraid to take advantage of that freedom by proudly showing their liberal, conservative or Libertarian sides in their articles, many more have an opportunity to do real impartial journalism again if they're so inclined to be adamant about it.
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More than a year ago, I wrote about web writing as a growing alternative career for people who'd lost their job in another field while perhaps possessing an untapped talent assembling words in a compelling way. There was also a noting that with all those writers comes a variable mixture in quality within those citizen practitioners of the written word. With places such as the site you're reading this from (Associated Content), there became an opportunity for virtually everyone to participate as a citizen journalist, opinionated philosophizer, how-to writer extraordinaire, or all three at once. Yet while I've attempted to balance all three here and other places, there's still that little problem of taking a titular title of journalist so you can truly bask in accepted excellence.

We all know that Walter Cronkite was first and foremost a journalistic reporter before becoming CBS's head news anchor. Nevertheless, I was reminded by his longtime colleagues after his death that he was also an excellent writer alongside his affable, on-camera presentation and journalistic credentials. You can't always teach that type of talent, no matter how much journalism school teaches you how to write effectively and tightly for the world of news media. It's not that difficult to learn the mechanics of writing. Learning how to make all those jumbles of words say something compelling that can make things move and shake is an innate and perhaps mysterious process.

In the world of citizen journalism, the ones who want to succeed at it without having a journalism degree need to have that innate ability to write well. That also means upholding standard journalistic code by obsessively checking your sources and facts before submitting an article into the queue for payment and later being read by thousands through search engines. These are the tenets of my own freelance writing career that I started without a degree in journalism, but based on what I hope is a moving and compelling ability to write while expounding on the world around us without any outlying political agenda.

You may have read that Walter Cronkite was a big fan of the internet and its potential in disseminating information. It wasn't known by me, however, what he thought of the emergence of citizen journalism and the people succeeding in this business online without journalism degrees. There isn't any denying, though, that it's a force to be reckoned with and has mainstream media worried when we hit the nail on the head more often than not. We also have to contend that mainstream media can have just as much variable talent in writing ability as citizen journalism has. For those who do write well and want to uphold impartial journalism on the web, an open highway is now before them.

I'd like to think that Walter Cronkite would have appreciated the talented, hard-working citizen journalists out there who became the only hope to uphold Cronkite's form of journalism after it was taken away the day he retired from the anchor chair over 28 years ago. For your consideration, may I state my own adamancy to keep doing that from here on out in my own writing career. Feel free to write me and complain if you ever see a bias or lack of truth creeping into anything you read from me on the net.

For those comfortable with it without destroying their assimilated writing style, I hope other fellow citizen journalists will join in doing the same thing. When in larger force, using this process to find the true answers to our most important topics today will only enhance the meaning of a journalist, no matter how you care to currently define it.