In all the coverage of Cronkite's death, I haven't seen any mention of Lizard Music, a young adult book by Daniel Manus Pinkwater. It's one of my favorite books, and the protagonist is a school kid who is Walter Cronkite's biggest fan.
There are a lot possibilities to the Walter Cronkite show. I used to try to get some of the other kids interest in it, maybe set up a Walter Cronkite fan club, but they didn't even take it seriously, and I got a reputation as a crazy.
The book uses that as a starting point to introduce the character and get him watching TV. The kid starts watching late-night movies after the news, and then seeing lizards come on even later after the last show. The lizards play music and have game shows, and then a highly intelligent chicken enters the story, and there's a theme around the idea of being a pod person or an individual, and the kid ends up on a invisible island floating in the middle of Lake Michigan. One of the characters has a theory that you lose your individuality if you eat too much packages food, and, to this day, I still check my diet occasionally to make sure I'm not at risk of becoming a pod person.
Anyways, the book is fast, quick, random, and entertaining, a "children of all ages" kind of young adult book, and it's something to think about as you read and see David Kurtz at Talking Points Memo and various other journalists and media figures talking about their early admiration for Walter Cronkite and what a cultural icon he was. Anyone else remember this book and still want to have a lizard named Reyno.ld or chicken named Claudia?