This will be kind of short, but I just want/need to say this.
There was a time in my life where I wanted to be a journalist. In graduate school I got a grad assistance job for the Manship Chair at LSU. His name was Sig Mickelson. It was only much later in my life, when I grew up that I realized how cool that was and how much of a wasted opportunity it was for me.
Sig Mickelson was famous for two things while the head of CBS News. He hired Walter Cronkite and fired Edward R. Murrow. Let me say that again, he hired Walter Cronkite and fired Edward R. Murrow.
I went to graduate school not cause I wanted to learn anything, but cause I thought I would be able to make more money with another degree. I am not saying I didn't learn anything or work my ass off, but 20+ years later I still kick myself I wasn't more engaged.
My fellow students, who actually became journalist, were all jealous I got that gig. Working for a living "legend." The man that right after WWII built CBS TV/news from the ground up.
I'd often be asked, what do you talk about? Did you ask him about Murrow? What was Walter Cronkite like to work with? Did you ask him about this or that? Those questions would often be met with blank stares by me. I never asked him any of that stuff. I just did what he told me to do, which at the time was a lot of research on the FCC.
It highlights that at the time I thought I knew everything, when in reality I didn't know much. That I spent countless hours sitting across from the person as much responsible for TV news as any person in the entire world and didn't even engage him in conversation, well just sad on my part.
This was a time, the early 90s, when there wasn't MSNBC or Fox Noise. A time when I'd do research for him on this "strange" thing called the Internet using Gopher, cause at the time there were no browsers.
Such a wasted opportunity.
This is actually something I have not thought about for a long, long time. But the death of Walter Cronkite brought it all back to me. Lives intertwined.
Now I will just end with this quote from him, right before he passed away, about the current state of TV news (2000):
It simply hasn't happened, he said. We were hoping that we'd get more voters to the polls. We were hoping we'd have better candidates, better-informed candidates; that the charlatans were out of business completely; that the X-ray eye would expose all the charlatanism.
Certainly, we haven't more people going to the polls, he added. And surely there is no exposure of the charlatans anymore. The X-ray eye probably has astigmatism of some kind or other.
A pretty smart guy ......