I was 3 years old when he retired from CBS Evening News, and the news didn’t exactly thrill me when I was a kid after that, it was just something my parents watched that I sat through while waiting for The Simpsons to come on.
I knew the name, I knew he was some kind of journalist, but he was really just another old white guy on TV talking about boring stuff.
Harry Reasoner was also on “60 Minutes” for many years.
When Walter Cronkite retired, it really was the end of an era. Maybe it was his distinct voice and down-to-earth demeanor, but there isn’t another one like him. Anderson Cooper is a distant second, IMHO.
We didn’t get a CBS station at first, so our eveneng news was John Cameron Swayze. When CBS came, I mostly remember Cronkite as the host of You Are There; a re-enactment of historical events. That was part of a wonderful lineup of Sunday daytime shows that had an intellectual orientation. Later on, my news preference was for Huntley- Brinkley
The take-home message is not that network news shows in the 60’s didn’t feature editorials all that often, but that they did them at all. No one has the guts now.
The Wiki entry on Cronkite notes that he ended his broadcasts with “…And that’s the way it is”, except when he ended the broadcast with an opinion. That’s integrity.
We watched them all the time. Along with Murrow, top of their game.
“Oh boy!”
My first exposure to Cronkite was when You are There was adapted for Saturday morning children’s TV in the early Seventies.
I agree with Snowboarder Bo Johnson
We switched to broadcast-only TV and at first were only getting two channels: the Ion group and the local Fox affiliate. It was not FoxNews, so the news broadcasts were local and not horribly distorted, but then the broadcasters switched their stuff around and suddenly we were able to get the local NBC channel.
I swear, the local NBC station does news like journalism. Their level of professionalism is far higher than the local Fox station. It is not quite like having Cronkite or Reasoner or Brinkley doing news, but it is almost close.
The thing with Cronkite and his peers is that they did the news. Straight. I never had any idea whether they supported Democrats or Republicans. There was no hint of bias in their deliver, no eye-rolling, sneering or even subtle vocal inflections suggesting how they felt about the people being reported on. It seems to be a lost art.
I grew up with Cronkite (CBS) and Huntley and Brinkley (NBC).
Both built on the foundation laid by Edgar R Murrow-who was before my time. I grew up being told by my parents (Dad was a reporter for a short while in the '30s) that Murrow’s accomplishments were amazing. News prior to him was very biased and poorly done. ½ fake news and ½ government propaganda with a generous dose of bias. Murrow by strength of his reporting set the foundation for what would eventually become an honest profession. Cronkite built on that. He really was the most trusted man in America. Today we would listen to him with considerable skepticism, but at the time he defined truth and honesty in America. I know we can never go back, but I really miss those news days.
Which would be a good thing at any time, for any news source, Cronkite then, or Fox and CNN now. Skepticism doesn’t mean you automatically disbelieve something, it just means you don’t automatically believe it either.
I’m not so sure it was so great to implicitly trust someone at that level of influence, even if he was trustworthy. Always, always keep your guard up.
I only watched TV news now and then as a kid, but Cronkite always struck me as a calm, trustworthy, authoritative anchorman. My parents respected him, as I recall.
Cronkite wasn’t in CE3K: https://spielbergfanclub.com/2011/06/walter-cronkite-was-pegged-to-anchor-for-close-encounters/
Liked him a lot better than I did Huntley & Brinkley.
You are absolutely correct. It was a failing of the times. We are the better for this change. But it wasn’t and isn’t easy.
People wanted to believe in and trust authority figures. FDR is perhaps the most famous example. People tended to believe what the Government said and what their newspapers printed. Of course the other newspaper was a rag full of communist or facist propaganda, but at least one paper was honest-whichever side you were on.
One of the more traumatic changes that happened in the US in the late 60s was the loss of this trust, due primarily to Vietnam. The famous creditability gap. It wasn’t about some falsehoods reported on the battlefield. It was the fact that people lost faith in authority figures in general. This was a social change that we are still grappling with.
Cronkite was the last of the reporters who benefited from this trust and to the extent he could he earned the trust given him. But no one could maintain that trust after him. Nor should there have been.
We trusted Cronkite. Maybe not quite as much as Edward R. Murrow. We believed news reporters in those long gone days.
My family watched him and trusted him. Therefore, I liked him. He went to my alma mater but didn’t actually graduate until I did in the mid-80s because he had a job opportunity and became too busy to finish college.
I was too young to watch the news during his era, but I loved his successor Dan Rather. I even started drawing a comic strip when I was in my early teens, and Dan Rather was a recurring character. (The main character would often watch CBS News hosted by Dan Rather.) For some reason, I always drew him wearing sunglasses, even on the air.
News was not taken very seriously in the early Cronkite days. Radio news was something the FCC required every station to do for 5 minutes every hour, and it was ripped off a teletype and reas by the disc jockey, with all the solemnity of October soybean futures. DJs had a federal license and did what they had to, but some included their personal color. But it would never occur to anyone to slant the news editorially. Few stations wrote news, it was provided by AP or UP and read verbatim, just skipping words that were garbled by line static.
Things changed late 70s, when FM came, bloating the number of stations, and all-news stations figured out that news was easier to make than to find. Cable came then, and cable was not bound by any broadcast fairness doctrine. It was a perfect storm.
I was a radio news reader in 1958, a loca TV news anchor in 1964, it never would have occurred to anybody to present the news any other way than Cronkite’s way. As good or bad as you were, there was only Cronkite’s way. People like Walter Winchell and Paul Harvey were just entertainers, apart from the news.
In terms of influence on broadcast journalism, Cronkite ranks behind Edward R. Murrow, and even behind the great producers like Don Hewitt and Reuven Frank. In fact, I’d argue that Charles Kuralt’s On The Road features were more influential than Cronkite’s straight-ahead reporting.
But Cronkite beat everyone hands down when it came to gravitas. He was serious, deliberate, and he obviously cared about what he was talking about. That made him trustworthy at a time when television was brand new and still trying to figure out how to deliver news.
Somewhere in the CBS archives must be the tape of a live phone-in show Walter Cronkite hosted from the Oval Office with President Jimmy Carter. Over two hours the hotline reportedly got nine million calls of which forty-two citizens got to ask a question and speak with the president.
All that exists online is a brief clip and SNL’s parody.
