As we mourn the loss of Walter Cronkite, perhaps the world's most celebrated television journalist, we're also mourning the death of a common culture. After a long and successful career as a print journalist, most notably as a correspondent covering the final phase of the Second World War in Europe and North Africa, he emerged as one of the first of the television news stars, covering everything from national political conventions to celebrity fluff. And as anchor of the CBS Evening News, he set a pattern that would last for decades: the news anchor as father-figure, sober and objective and reassuring.

Cronkite played a role in mid-century America not unlike that played elsewhere by a constitutional monarch: Though technically powerless, he was a vessel of national identity and pride, and his voice stood above politics to speak to our deeper ideals. One gets the impression that Cronkite was aware of his power, and of the fact that he had to use it carefully. He hardly ever expressed political opinions, and when he did, as in an electrifying 1968 special report in Vietnam in which he essentially declared the war effort a failure, his utterances had an earth-shattering effect. For those raised in the Age of Cronkite, it's hard not to feel an overwhelming sense nostalgia: It was a time of intact families and economic abundance and, most notably, the possibility of consensus.

Now, of course, we live in a polarized and atomized culture, in which thousands of niche communities have their own constellations of celebrities. Who would be the Cronkite of America in 2009? Does anyone command so vast an audience as a share of the population? Ashton Kutcher has over 2,800,000 followers on Twitter, where he shares passing fancies. But one has to assume that most of his followers wouldn't care all that much about his thoughts regarding the struggle for Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province.

It's easy to lament this absence of a modern-day Cronkite. By all indication, Cronkite was dazzlingly intelligent, thoughtful, and kind, and he did his difficult job very well. But his extraordinary influence was the mark of a brittle, narrow and startlingly ingenuous moment in America's public life. The Age of Kutcher is, in many important respects, healthier, more vibrant and more open to genuine critical intelligence than the Age of Cronkite that preceded it.

Consider what might happen today had a Cronkite passed premature judgment on the war efforts in Iraq or Afghanistan: He'd be met with blistering and often obscene criticism, yes, but he'd also contend with a fusillade of detailed, carefully reasoned counter-arguments from an army of part-time pundits with the leisure and insight to spare. As newspapers face wrenching change, we've also seen the rise of highly specialized blogs that offer vivid exposes alongside clever framing devices. Again, the landscape is more fragmented, but the results are, on balance, far smarter than in the age of news-as-commodity. This isn't to dismiss very real concerns about the fate of investigative reporting--who will fund it? Who will hold crooked politicians and crooked financiers to account?

Let's not forget, however, that small, out-of-the-way, working-class towns have suffered from a lack of serious investigative resources for decades: The problem isn't new. Rather, it's now spreading to the more privileged, who've long taken high-quality journalism for granted. The solution here isn't more centralization and more consensus. If anything, it might be less of both, and more of the self-starting spirit that has driven the media industry during its most successful moments.

Television news hasn't fared as well. Having briefly worked as a television news producer, I can attest to the dedication of the women and men who've followed--or who've tried to follow--Cronkite in educating and entertaining the mass public on the central issues of the day, in politics and in the pop culture that still (tenuously) binds us. It's very common to lament the trivialization of the news, as though the major networks aren't commercial enterprises that have an obligation to reach a broad audience. The dry news programs that prevailed in the 1960s and 1970s were the product of a regulatory climate and technological limitations that all but guaranteed a bland product. It was only when public access and cable began to lower the barriers to entry that we saw real innovation in programming.

As Steven Berlin Johnson argued in his book Everything Bad is Good for You, the subsequent decades saw a revolution in television where primitive plot lines were discarded in favor of dense, elaborate, postmodern fictions that stretched and challenged the imagination, in the process raising the expectations of viewers--and, arguably, our ability to comprehend a bafflingly complex world. Indeed, I'd argue that the television series Lost, with its unending series of bizarre plot twists, has done more to increase America's collective intelligence than a million nightly news broadcasts.

Our new entertainments, ranging from highbrow television dramas to lowbrow videogames, demand a high level of commitment. To understand anything at all, one has to pay careful attention. It's thus no surprise that we demand more from our news. Spoon-feeding a commodified product is terribly attractive for vast commercial enterprises; but Americans are rightly demanding more. The cable news channels are far from flawless, and they've tended to focus more on the details of Michael Jackson's untimely demise than the picayune details of health care reform. But we've also seen a tremendous ideological sorting that has allowed provocative voices to flourish. I assume that Bill O'Reilly and Rachel Maddow can't stand each other, yet they are very similar animals: Both are highly aggressive, both ask incisive questions and both are strikingly smart, populist displays aside.

In truth, the Age of Cronkite--of a big, all-enveloping media led by grandfatherly wise men--was a fleeting moment, one that cut sharply against America's fractious, disputatious, questioning nature. The new media environment, for all its tawdriness, is more in tune with the American id. And given time, it will do far more to uplift our sensibilities and indeed our raw brainpower than any one man, even an extraordinary and charming man, ever could on his own.