Over the past four days, tens of thousands of words have been issued online, in print, and on the air about Walter Cronkite and his 19-year run helming the CBS Evening News.

Folks my age are just about the youngest to remember Cronkite’s run on the broadcast, or at least most of it. Yes, there were only three networks then, with ABC a far third in news viewership and news budgets. There was no NPR; PBS’s way-underfunded precursor, National Educational Television, stayed away from the live-news genre. Broadcast news basically meant the NBC and CBS evening newscasts, plus their Sunday interview shows, news segments on the early-morning shows, and hourly radio headlines.

Star journalists in old-time radio had peppered their broadcasts with personality, and with personal opinions. The networks quickly considered that approach wrong for TV.

Instead, network news telecasts held to a strictly objective stance and a hierarchy of priorities. The stories picked, and the way they were told, were pretty much the same as the wire-service items in local papers (thus speeding the demise of afternoon papers).

Cronkite was almost tailor made for this formula. He’d been a wire-service reporter during WWII, so he knew that form’s specific demands. His official yet personable demeanor made him a welcome regular presence at the dinner hour—even as he introduced film footage of wars, revolutions, race riots, and plane crashes.

Night after night, Cronkite and his NBC/ABC rivals (including UW grad Chet Huntley) relayed what the government and corporate officials had said that day about the economy, diplomacy, and all those newfangled “lib” movements. Each telecast held to a predictable rhythm of introductions, filmed field reports, in-studio analysis bits, and a light human-interest piece at the end. Even as the world seemed to be crumbling in those 11 years between JFK’s death and Nixon’s resignation, Cronkite’s tone and that of the program surrounding him held constant.

If commentators now remember Cronkite’s anti-Vietnam War commentary from 1968, it’s because that was the only time he overruled his no-stance stance. (He did daily essay pieces for CBS Radio, but those were even-handed analyses of topics in the news.)

CNN launched toward the end of Cronkite’s anchoring years, and originally held to the classic TV-news formula of importance, credibility, and objectivity. But over the decades, cable news has swung back toward the old radio news formula of personality punditry, with the added ingredients of celebrity nonsense and nonstop live ambulance chasing.

It’s possible to re-create a solid square newscast like the one Cronkite ran. You’d need a small core team of writers and producers, surrounded by a crew of analysts and correspondents. And you’d need at least a few field camera crews to shoot the footage you couldn’t get from pool coverage or off of C-SPAN. The whole thing would cost little more to make than The Daily Show.

But who’d need it? We’ve got Jim Lehrer for the official statements and the mealy-mouthed analysis. We’ve got the current incarnations of the network newscasts to list what some corporate team thinks are the day’s biggest events.

No, Cronkite was a figure of his time. He contributed greatly to his time; especially in his long retirement, when he spoke his mind much more openly.

What we need, and what many of us in the online sphere are groping to invent, is the new news.