"And that's the way it is ...."

Will anyone say it with such assurance again? Goodbye, Walter.

Image: O'Halloran/Library of Congress [VIA PINGNEWS].

Update: Television critic Robert Lloyd of the Los Angeles Times has this to say:

Network news anchors still aim for that mix of eloquence and authority that Cronkite embodied, but they compete, at a disadvantage, with the noise of an ascendant punditocracy and the mountain-from-molehill nattering of cable news organizations that live on crises -- it's not the old voice of reassuring honesty that they cultivate, but one of perpetual anxiety. There are many more rooms in the mansion that is television news nowadays, but they have grown proportionately smaller; they are no longer fit for giants.

Thanks to Ben Whitford in Slate for the link.

Second update: Here's an appreciation of Cronkite by Verlyn Klinkenborg in yesterday's New York Times.