The main thing to remember about Walter Cronkite is not why he was beloved, but why he was hated.
The media, by which people only started to mean "television" in the 1960s, did not do much to revivify its Yellow Press pre-WWI mandate to "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable" until it started reporting on the civil rights movement.
The betrayal that the white power structure in the south felt over "them dirty Yankees" televising pictures from the Little Rock desegregation crisis of 1957 and on up through the Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1964 still echoes through Republican orthodoxy today.