I vaguely remember him when I was a kid as my parents would only watch Cronkite for the news.
There’s plenty of footage of him on YouTube. In my opinion, he’s very good. But, it’s so hard to transport myself back to a time where I didn’t have at least cable news as an option.
So, if you remember the 3 channel network news era, what did you think?
I was just a kid in those days, too, but I really liked him. There may be no better icon of the days of trusted real news than Cronkite. Despite the gravitas of his reporting, which earned him the moniker of “most trusted man in America”, he would sometimes get as excited as a little boy when covering the NASA manned space missions, which included his unforgettable coverage of the first moon landing. The sad part is how much has deteriorated since then, in politics and in the media. When Cronkite retired it was, in a real sense, the end of an era.
Having grown up in the three channel era (and we didn’t even get CBS clearly), I remember that there was much less selling of the person reading the news. Today the branding of the announcer, whom we don’t even call that anymore, just seems bizarre and dumb. So, about Cronkite, I think, yes, he was an announcer, if you’re into trivia.
I think there’s a big contrast with today. Brian Williams, in particular, gets under my skin. Yes he’s tall, yes he has Presidential hair, yes he has a deep voice and an avuncular presentation. But he kept lying! Why isn’t that more important than all the impression stuff? And yet today it’s not. So I wouldn’t say Cronkite was the hero here, I’d say the whole premise of having a personality instead of an announcer is just messed up. Pick somebody with a very clear voice who can read, and don’t even tell us their name.
Cronkite went to Vietnam in February, 1968 to report on the status of the war. Upon his return, he read an editorial on the air, saying that the war was deadlocked, and that it would be useless for the U. S. to commit additional men and resources to fighting it. Upon hearing this, President Lyndon Johnson was reputed to have said, “If I’ve lost Walter Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.” Johnson decided not to run for reelection due to criticism of how the U. S. was conducting the Vietnam War, and Cronkite’s editorial is considered to have played a part in his decision.
My memories of Cronkite have dimmed, but he was an OK news anchor, not a demigod of broadcasting. Edward R. Murrow deserves greater respect than Walter.
Cronkite’s style got him ranked a bit high on my Pompous-O-Meter.
Archie Bunker used to call him Pinko Cronkite, but he watched him anyway.
I have stronger memories of the Huntley-Brinkley Report than I do of Walter Cronkite. I was a kid at the time.
I’m drawing a blank on what the third network’s news show was / who anchored it. Let’s see, Cronkite was CBS and H/B was NBC so that would make the missing one ABC?
Harry Reasoner?
ABC News had a succession of anchors such as Peter Jennings, Bob Young, Frank Reynolds, Howard K. Smith, and Harry Reasoner. Barbara Walters became a co-anchor in 1976 and was the first woman to host a national nightly newscast. Peter Jennings became the permanent anchor in 1983 and was on the air until 2005.
Funny how I remember Harry Reasoner only from Mad Magazine spoofs of Harry Reasonable.
(70 year old here) We really liked Walter. You felt like you knew him. He had an avuncular appeal, was considered to be “the most trusted man in America.”
I remember him holding back tears during his coverage of the JFK assassination. A favorite high point was during the Moon Landing coverage- at one point his enthusiasm took over and he effused “Oh Boy!”
Uncle Walter. He was great.
I swear I posted before reading this.
In the days of 3 network TV there was much less overt editorializing the news. You had ABC, NBC, CBS and maybe a public broadcasting channel.
The news hour of the day was literally that, an hour. A half hour of local news, a half hour or maybe an hour, of national news around the dinner hour of 5 or 6pm, and that was about it. Editorializing was done mostly on other shows like 60 minutes. There just wasn’t time for it during the national news, maybe a short couple of minutes clearly labeled as an editorial. Also the late news at 10pm to follow up, again mostly local news.
That being said, I thought Walter Cronkite was kind of a pompous ass. I preferred Howard K. Smith, Frank Reynolds, and Harry Reasoner. I don’t know, maybe that was the channel that came in best. In those days there was no cable TV available, just the antenna on the roof that we tried to tune in for the best reception and left it alone.
And usually what came in best was PBS Channel 10 featuring Laurence Welk.
Likewise. Aside from his newsreading cameo in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, I have no memory of Cronkite or any of the others.
I do know Harry Reasoner was ABC in the Seventies, having verified by looking at Wikipedia.
I grew up in a CBS household, so Walt was my evening news reader, every night. I loved him. The others were fine, I’m sure, and given the down-the-middle structure of the evening news there was no substantial difference between any of the 3 networks anyway. But Walter was my guy.
In those days the news was the anchor reading a story, backed up by reporters in the field, usually but not always asking questions of the principals of the story. No in-studio talking heads. About once a week, Eric Sevareid would come on and give an essay that verged every-so-slightly towards opinion.
The nation would be well-served by returning to this model.
Cronkite was a first-class news anchor. He reported as even-handedly as possible and definitely was clear and trustworthy.
He also was instrumental in bringing the Beatles to the US, when he decided to run a two-month old news report about them that was pulled due to the Kennedy assassination.
I agree with all these posts.
I’m 71, and I remember when the CBS evening news was 15 minutes (“Douglas Edwards, with the news!”). I think the local news was another 15 minutes. I don’t remember exactly when it changed to 30 minutes each, probably some time in the mid-late 50’s.
Anyway, in the 60’s I preferred Huntley-Brinkley to Cronkite, I thought they had more personality (especially David Brinkley, he could be a sly little card sometimes) and they certainly had better theme music.
But I think it’s good to remember that all of these people cut their teeth as actual reporters. Cronkite was a top news service (print) reporter for UPI in WWII, and stayed with them until 1950 in spite of an offer of more money from Murrow and CBS News. I remember that as network anchor he had some editorial control over the stories he ran on the air. He wasn’t some tweezed and plucked “personality” reading the news, he was a bona fide journalist.
I’m from that era, as well. All of those men (and a handful of woman) had started out as serious print reporters, and it showed. Sure, Harry Reasoner might read a light-hearted piece at the end of his newscast, and David Brinkley was always described as “wry” (but Huntley had enough gravitas for both of them.) And Cronkite brought both sincerity and weight to every broadcast.
As a side note, ABC News first installed Peter Jennings as anchor when he was only 27. When he turned out to be too young an inexperienced, the network pulled him off the anchor desk and sent him out to do real reporting for ten years until he matured. Can you imagine a struggling organization these days telling their hotshot young star, “You’re good, but you need more time to develop.” And to Jennings’ credit, he agreed and built up a terrific resume as a foreign correspondent.
Living out in the boonies, we couldn’t get CBS, only NBC, so we were a Huntley/Brinkley family. (Oh, how I admired John Chancellor!)