Walter Cronkite is berating television executives for scaling back their coverage of events overseas.
"The networks have almost deserted foreign news," Cronkite, 83, said Tuesday before more than 2,000 people at the Norfolk (Va.) Forum's speaker series.
After closing news bureaus throughout the world to save money, the networks "expect to parachute a correspondent and a cameraman into a crisis," said Cronkite, who served as anchor of "CBS Evening News" from 1962 until 1981.
Troubles in the Persian Gulf, Bosnia and Kosovo might have been resolved more quickly had they been covered more aggressively by American networks, Cronkite said.
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Instead, "we weren't paying attention until the shooting started," he said.