Lee? Excuse me?
Uh, Lee, from what I remember of your bio, you're way too young to have seen Cronkite in action. There's no way you could know that for many years Cronkite was the most trusted person in America, a trust he'd earned as the result of a long career as an actual journalist (as opposed to a talking-head anchor meat puppet). He was in London during the Blitz, and his live radio reporting as the bombs fell is still occasionally played as a part of the history of WWII.
Cronkite wasn't the first of the talking heads, he was one of the last of the real journalists to sit in an anchor chair. Your opinion of his successors is justified, but you're way off the mark about Cronkite.