Much Ado About Not Much
“Errol Flynn died on a seventy-foot yacht with a seventeen-year-old girl. Walter’s always wanted to go that way, but he’s going to settle for a seventeen-footer and a seventy-year-old.”
—Mrs. Walter Cronkite
“I was eight, watching him on black and white television every night in Elmira, NY. In our home, my mother refused to serve dinner until the CBS Evening News was over. And I announced my intention to my family, apparently at the age of eight to my family, that he was the man I wanted to be and this was the profession I wanted and I’ve lived such a charmed life that I got the chance to explain that to Walter and tell him that and make it clear and just—was able to breathe the air he exhaled.”
—Brian Williams, recipient of The 2009 Walter Cronkite Award, presented each fall.
CBS News to Air Tribute to Walter Cronkite on Sunday Evening
In one respect, this makes sense: Sunday evenings have a higher viewership than Friday or Saturday evenings. But, still. Something, ANYTHING tonight would have been the right thing to do.
Fact: Regardless of your stance on Katie Couric, she’s just now been illustrating, while speaking to CNN’s John King, exactly how much we’ve lost since Cronkite and Murrow had the care of the public’s airwaves. Emphases all hers.
“Apparently, before the era of teleprompters, John, he would write a few notes on file cards, just glance at them, know what the story was, and speak extemporaneously to the audience. You can’t find many anchors who are really capable of pulling that off in this day and age.”
Sigh.
“I was talking to Douglas Brinkley, John, earlier today, and he’s writing a biography about Walter—the University of Texas is a repository of all his papers—and apparently he was a packrat. [Brinkley] has boxes and boxes, and he has the reporter’s notebooks from when [Cronkite] was in Vietnam.”
Well Christ, Katie, whatever do you do with your reporter’s notebooks? Oh. Dear me. Sorry, I can see why such a habit might bewilder.
Forgive my mislaid bitterness—it’s really all meant for Don Hewitt, Katie. [Via inothernews]
Indiana State Police SpokesFolks Will Not Lie To You, No Matter How Much You Beg
“(CNN)—The search for two of three inmates who escaped from an Indiana prison has been called off, authorities said Tuesday. One of the inmates…was captured Monday. The other two—a convicted murderer and a convicted rapist—remain at large after Sunday’s escape from the Indiana State Prison in Michigan City, Indiana.”
How come, you ask?
‘We don’t know where to look,’ [Indiana Department of Correction spokesman John Schrader told CNN Tuesday.]
Oh. Huh.
Well, can you at least tell us how these dudes managed to pull a Shawshank through the prison’s underground tunnel system? (Sidenote: Must prisons always have these? Really?)
‘At this stage, we don’t know exactly how that happened,’ said Douglas Garrison, the chief of communications for the IDC.’”
Yay!
Number 461 in ‘Phrases That Should Never Ever Leave The PR Crisis Management Sit Room’?
“We don’t know exactly how,” followed by anything else. Preceded by anything else either, come to think of it. NO WHERES AT ALL should this appear. Please and thank you.
I kept telling Senator Jon Kyl through my special television set where I can speak directly to and/or yell at the folks inside that if he didn’t cut to the chase and just straight up ask his goddammed question in plain English already, the little patience I had resolved to pre-allot to Sonia Sotomayor’s next questioner, Senator Chuck Schumer, was going to be exhausted before he even began. But did he listen to me?
So Senator Schumer’s eyebrows are super fun to watch when you don’t have to listen to the rest of his face at the same time.