Katie Couric: The End of An Era (LA Times)

Katie Couric (and by default Brian Williams and Charlie Gibson) are the end of a era for evening newscasts on TV. Howard Rosenberg contributes a rather lengthy look at Couric, the CBS Evening News and evening news personalities in general. Read more here.

Here are two of the interesting paragraphs.

News media hero worship was mild prior to 1950 BC (Before Cronkite), when Walter surfaced on TV en route to getting picked to famously anchor the "CBS Evening News" a dozen years later. Though he'd worked on CBS, relatively few knew of his earlier record as a combat correspondent during World War II. So the Katie questions apply here too, in reverse: What gave Cronkite his transcendent cred? What made CBS viewers and others believe in him so totally, made them mentally sit in his lap and coo when he read the headlines?

Whatever the answer, it's foolish to invest such trust in one person -- news anchor or presidential candidate -- because of something intangible that one can't define. Yes, CBS News was blessed with a handful of talented holdovers from Edward R. Murrow's radio days, but Cronkite was The Man, at one point punctuating Vietnam War doomsday reports with such moral authority, for instance, that embattled LBJ was said to have remarked: "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America."

***GET MORE***
-MORE MEDIA: See the home page of WATCHING THE MEDIA FOR YOU for newest posts
-CAMPAIGN ALERT: Get Barack Obama and John McCain Soundbites at CAMPAIGN BITES