[null, {"document_url": "http://literaryunderworld.blogspot.com/2016/11/happy-birthday-uncle-walter.html", "unformatted_src": "https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-wuZW6EJ0IUM/WB651CLpaPI/AAAAAAAABJU/6vM3WY01U88RtM7Vysi-EW9n2tym7LVNACLcB/s320/IMG_2101.jpg", "src": "https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-wuZW6EJ0IUM/WB651CLpaPI/AAAAAAAABJU/6vM3WY01U88RtM7Vysi-EW9n2tym7LVNACLcB/s320/IMG_2101.jpg", "formatted_filename": "IMG", "rendered_width": 320, "rendered_height": 240}, null, {"document_url": "http://literaryunderworld.blogspot.com/2016/11/happy-birthday-uncle-walter.html", "unformatted_src": "//lh4.googleusercontent.com/-dR8E9JXOhas/AAAAAAAAAAI/AAAAAAAAAP8/_P9dUOD69tc/s120-c-pf/photo.jpg", "src": "http://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-dR8E9JXOhas/AAAAAAAAAAI/AAAAAAAAAP8/_P9dUOD69tc/s120-c-pf/photo.jpg", "formatted_filename": "photo", "alt_text": "My photo", "rendered_width": 120, "rendered_height": 120}, null]

Happy birthday, Uncle Walter 

Act One focuses on Truman and Cronkite's lives in parallel from 1945 onward. It is a little gentler on Truman than history has been, but more true than some of the biopics have been. Act Two focuses on King and Cronkite through the civil rights movement, including the ethical and practical issues faced by the CBS news team as they tried to cover the movement with dispassion. I did not know, for example, that simply covering the movement was seen as "championing the blacks" and that southern affiliates threatened to cut their affiliation with CBS - which would have bankrupted the network.

Unfortunately I missed most of Act III. Damn news. I was reporting on a story back home by remote, and got some information during the intermission. I was still updating the story from my laptop when Act III began, and once I was done, the doors were locked and I couldn't get in until someone came along who had a key. Rats. Jim (who was verklempt throughout the performance) reports that it was a representative of Cronkite's question-and-answer on Larry King Live on the one-year anniversary of 9/11. I would have liked to have seen that.

I only caught some of the presentations at the conference, but those I caught were fascinating. Check out the Twitter account @BNDedonald if you want more specifics. I met a journalist named Deandre Williamson of the Bahamas, who won the award for having traveled the farthest (unless it's farther to Chile? Maybe.). Williamson discussed the evolution of the media in the Bahamas, which does not have freedom of speech, and its recent adoption of the SPJ Code of Ethics a few months ago. It faces an uphill battle there, and I enjoyed discussing those issues with Deandre.

I've often said that my participation in the ethics commission and the small part I played in rewriting the code are among my proudest accomplishments, and thus it was no small thing to be asked to talk about it - here at the conference, at local universities, at SPJ conventions, at high schools, on a milk crate at a street corner. Kevin called it "spreading the Gospel"; I've sometimes called it "evangelizing ethics." As I said in the speech, there are far too many people who don't even realize the code exists, and that's because we do a lousy job of transparency in our work. We must stop expecting that the average reader knows how a newsroom functions, how news corporations work on the inside, about the difference between news and opinion, and the presence and enforcement of ethics codes.

I learned a lot from my fellow journalists this weekend, and about Uncle Walt, whom I thought I already knew well. Cronkite retired before I was old enough to really comprehend the news, but when I was young and would hear my newsman father refer to "Uncle Walter," I thought at first we really had an uncle named Walter.

If you do, you get to wear The Glasses. Elizabeth Donald
