Before anyone asks why this is on Hacker News, he was a news reporter hacker.
*Interesting that Google is flooded with reports about his death. I'm about to try Bing, but what I would expect is that such reports would be limited to news.google.com but rather, 25 pages in, reports about his death still come up. His wikipedia article is one of the few exceptions. EDIT: Bing does a bit better but still, I never realized how poorly search engines manage live content. On the one hand, they update their cache quickly and rank them correctly, but news articles should be news, not content results(?).
The second is his (behind the scenes) role in taking on McCarthy as part of Edward R. Murrow's See it Now broadcast. It might still be a bit of a stretch to call it hacking the news, but it's not much of a stretch.
NPR has a piece about the See it Now episode, as told by Cronkite, on their site: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1753982
Just because you're good at something doesn't make you a "hacker".
No, but you see, the death of (US based) celebrities is of great interest to hackers worldwide under the
"On Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. "
guideline, because such deaths are, of course, gratifying to intellectual curiosity.
Strangely enough this bit of the guidelines doesn't seem to be having an effect
"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. "