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So much has changed in the technology of television journalism in the last 30 years that it is hard to recognize Dan Rather's current half-hour nightly newscast as the successor to the CBS Evening News he worked on as White House correspondent under Walter Cronkite back in 1968.
To a modern sensibility, the television news of Cronkite's time seems ponderous, unidimensional, monotonously male--almost unwatchable.
To a modern ear, accustomed to the noisy skepticism of the White House press corps, icons of television journalism, such as Marvin Kalb, sound timid and uncritical.
To a modern eye, exposed to Desert Storm's Highway of Death, Bosnia's concentration camps and to the bloated bodies of Rwanda's genocide, the visual horrors of the Vietnam War seemed suppressed, relegated to second place beside procedural diplomatic debates.
To a modern nose, trained to sniff out any cynical October Surprise in the waning days of a Presidential campaign, Cronkite's coverage of the most exciting election in decades smelled suspiciously sanitized--detached from the life-and-death decisions about the conduct of the war.
Unwatchable, unskeptical, lacking in impact, lacking in insight? These criticisms are, of course, unfair. They merely reflect the predilections of the modern television viewer, attuned to denser information, a faster pace, a harder sell and more vivid video. To compare Cronkite with Rather fairly this analysis must first pinpoint the important differences between the CBS Evening News of 1968 and of 1998 and then distinguish between them. Which are determined by the enormous changes in television technology, which by changes in CBS News' journalistic ethos.
Tyndall Report has monitored the content of the three networks' nightly newscasts for the last decade, developing a database which measures what stories and topics are covered, the balance of domestic and foreign, inside and outside the Beltway, hard news and features, and the deployment of resources, reporters and various televisual formats. To measure the differences, a month's worth of Cronkite's 1968 newscasts, courtesy of the Vanderbilt Television News Archives in Nashville, were subjected to the same scrutiny. The statistics cited here compare one month's content in 1968 with an average for the CBS Evening News for the first four months (January-April) of 1998.
That month was November. Some stories live in memory to this day. Richard Nixon defeated Hubert Humphrey in the Presidential election, but only by a whisker. Lyndon Johnson halted the bombing of North Vietnam on election eve in an attempt to jumpstart peace talks in Paris. Other passing stories are forgotten--currency speculators challenged the French franc; a coalmine explosion in West Virginia killed 78 miners.
This one-month timeframe was ample to identify the changes in televisual style and story selection over the past 30 years, since these formats and procedures reflect long-term--and therefore relatively stable--management decisions about editorial policy, production values and deployment of resources. A single month was less definitive for drawing conclusions about the coverage of individual stories--in particular the Presidential election and the Vietnam War--so we use those examples to illustrate CBS' approach to the news in general, not to generalize about CBS' overall handling of those two specific longrunning stories.
In 1968, television news was struggling to carve out a distinctive, contemporary niche. How to be something more than a combination of two older media, the radio and the movie newsreel? As old-fashioned as it looks now, this new medium was straining to exploit the cutting-edge technology of its time. The talking head was one such novelty. The anchorman was prominent 30 years ago (7.4 min per newscast of face-time in 1968 v 4.3 today) not only to fill the space left by a lack of hard-to-get video. He also represented an innovation of the medium: a trusted, familiar persona providing stable perspective to a maelstrom of global events. A second innovation was the television camera's ability to be on the scene when major news was being made live. Unfortunately this ability was technologically constrained. Television cameras needed better lighting conditions and more elaborate pre-broadcast preparations than today. Cronkite's crew specialized where they were able to--so the newscasts of 1968 overflowed with press conference soundbites, orchestrated set-piece news events.
This means that to a modern eye, an evening of Cronkite's coverage looks like an edited C-SPAN highlight reel. For example, the crucial diplomatic story of November 1968 was the prospects for the Paris peace talks: five days before Election Day, Kalb's lead story was a series of soundbites from Secretary of State Dean Rusk's press briefing. Kalb repeated, without comment, Rusk's verbose denials that Johnson's decision to halt the bombing of North Vietnam was influenced by the pending vote. It is unimaginable that David Martin, the contemporary CBS News national security correspondent, would file a report in which an official's soundbites would so stand alone: they would be edited for length, put in a political context, integrated with conflicting comments by partisan experts, juxtaposed with archive clips showing previous contradictory comments and illuminated by Martin's own editorial gloss.
Obviously video editing facilities were so rudimentary back then that the CBS Evening News would have been unable to file such a report. But would it have wanted to? Unglossed public soundbites were used so routinely 30 years ago that they appeared to be a point of pride--a major selling-point of the newscast. For the Nixon-Humphrey-Wallace election, CBS News had plenty of in-house political scientists to file their own analysis. Yet instead the viewer got a two-minute long soundbite, with no graphics, no statistics, from pollster Louis Harris' post-election address to the National Press Club--a presentation that nowadays would only be visible on C-SPAN.
In its attempt to showcase the type of journalism that it could do uniquely well, this immature medium actually distorted the definition of what was newsworthy: the mere act of a newsmaker stating a position on the record before the camera constituted news. Words became facts. Speaking was action. The dominant running news story of the month was the Vietnam War. It occupied 23% (98 min out of 430) of the entire CBS Evening News newshole during the month of November 1968. Yet the lack of global satellite feeds meant that on most nights Vietnam coverage was divided into three parts: the breaking war news was read by Cronkite at the anchor desk without videotape from US military dispatches; filmed feature stories from the field presented untimely war footage, typically GIs jumping out of and back into helicopters; and the headline stories were assigned to correspondents covering the jockeying for negotiating positions in Paris. The coverage of Vietnam is now characterized in lore as a living-room war, but back then, at least in November 1968, words carried so much newsmaking weight that most Vietnam coverage consisted of living-room diplomacy rather than living-room battles.
Television, now the most visual of all news media, was abstract back then, concentrating on policy issues expressed by talking heads in news-conference soundbites. Ironically, modern video technology's ability to take hand-held cameras to where the action is has made television's news values more old-fashioned--more like early 20th century newspapers--than they were 30 years ago. Now they focus more on concrete events, less on spoken ideas. The action-packed video, which is a staple of modern newscasts--crime (7 min/month in 1968 v 26 today), transportation accidents (12 min v 21) and natural disasters (2 min v 42)--was beyond the reach of the cumbersome television technology of the 60s. CBS News veterans may make it a point of pride that they once focused on the weighty and abstract issues of the day. They may have been making a virtue out of necessity.
Even in the domain of the soundbite, the capability of modern television technology to capture and edit the pithy turn of phrase has taught our public officials discipline. The ability to translate complex and nuanced issues into vivid one-liners has become a prized contemporary political skill. The loss of the extended soundbite of yesteryear may have deprived television viewers of a few graceful, well-structured paragraphs--but it has also concentrated speakers' minds. Politician who want to get their point across on the nightly news nowadays must think clearly and come straight to the point: unlike 30 years ago, circumlocution now ends up on the editing room floor.
What sort of newscast would Cronkite's crew have wanted to produce if they had had the tools? Scattered piecemeal throughout the newscasts of 1968, unintegrated and isolated, were to be found all of the elements which make up an electronically-gathered news report filed by a modern television journalist. Soundbites were there but modern editing was not: so some entire items were just one lengthy quotation. News analysis was delegated to the magisterial figure of commentator Eric Sevareid. The same is true for human interest: it was represented in as much quantity as nowadays but it was compartmentalized and assigned to the overworked wordsmith Charles Kuralt, the single most heavily-used CBS reporter during November 1968, in his soft On The Road features.
By contrast, a routine two-minute report on Rather's newscast is a Cronkite half-hour in microcosm: breaking actuality footage from any imaginable remote location is edited with newsmakers' soundbites, analysis from experts, a vox pop example to show the human side, often with explanatory graphics and file footage also thrown in. Nowadays both the average news report (148 secs in 1968 v 118 today) and the average feature (205 secs v 168) are roughly half a minute shorter than in 1968 but modern production techniques allow them to contain incomparably denser and more complex information.
In 1968, CBS News was able to uphold two distinct journalistic values simultaneously: its technological commitment to report the news with cutting-edge television techniques; and its institutional separation of straight hard news reporting from commentary-and-analysis from human interest. In 1998, technology has rendered those 30-year-old departmental distinctions unnecessary. The fact that Cronkite's news used all these elements serially rather than intercut indicates that the modern short-soundbite, tightly-edited, multi-layered report may not have been anathema in 1968--it was just out of television's technological reach.
And as much as 1998's Evening News looks modern next to the 30-year-old videotapes from the Vanderbilt Archives, no medium ages as quickly as television. In another 30 years, who knows, an interactive screen may virtually transport citizen-viewers to the site of the latest breaking news event enabling them to become newsmakers. In such a scenario, many of the ethical decisions Rather's reporters make now about their practice of journalism--for instance, the distinction between reporting on and participating in newsmaking--may also seem, in retrospect, to have been merely making a virtue out of technological necessity.
Even though the primitive state of television technology may explain CBS Evening News' devotion to inside-the-Beltway soundbites back in 1968, their ubiquity profoundly affected the tone of Cronkite's newscast. In practice the effect of treating the unchallenged assertions of the powers-that-be as prima facie newsworthy endorsed their legitimacy and that of their policies as well. This would hardly have harmed Cronkite's appeal to his audience since this was an ideology which would have sat well with his viewers, many of whom assumed that their elected officials were worth paying attention to and that their federal government was important in their lives.
Back in 1968, the unskeptical tone reporters used to bridge the soundbites from a State Department briefing or a Nixon Transition team news conference would have seemed like uncontroversial straight reporting; the same techniques applied today would look like stenography, even flackery, for government officials. Similarly Cronkite's choice of vocabulary in reporting on the Vietnam War presumably raised no eyebrows at the time: actions by either the Vietcong or the North Vietnamese Army were routinely attributed to "the enemy." The CBS Evening News of 1968 saw no problem with equating its perspective with that of the United States' war effort. Add to this the decision to assign the sole slot in the newscast for critical analysis to commentator Sevareid--with his measured tone, his fondness for long-term historical perspective and his preference for continuity over confrontation in national leadership--and the tone of CBS' 60s newscast was Olympian, even elitist, the voice of the establishment.
And the tone was also sexist. The world we saw in 1968's CBS Evening News was a man's world. Obviously if a newscast devotes itself to showcasing the uncontested public pronouncements of the powerful at a time when the ruling elite happens to consist almost entirely of white men, few women's voices will be heard. In November 1968, CBS quoted extensive soundbites from only one woman politician--National Liberation Front diplomat Thguyen Thi Binh at the Paris peace talks. And CBS News, being part of that elite, partook in its preferences. Of the 41 different journalists who filed reports during November 1968, only one was female: Marya McLaughlin was assigned to cover Lady Bird Johnson. Birth control was a huge controversy. Pope Paul VI had published his encyclical in opposition to artificial contraception. Daniel Schorr filed CBS' lead story from the American Conference of Bishops in Washington DC when they decided that Catholics who used contraceptives would not be excommunicated. His story focused on the dispute between the bishops and a group of rebel pro-birth-control priests and, unthinkable today, Schorr did not quote a single woman.
Perhaps the crush of world events also explains why Cronkite's Evening News devoted so much less time than Rather's to domestic social issues. The Vietnam War was no isolated foreign preoccupation. The Soviet Union had only recently sent tanks into Czechoslovakia. As the Cold War was getting chillier, CBS responded by assigning most of its in-depth feature segments in November 1968 to anti-US militancy at home and abroad. Bert Quint filed a three-part series on Communism in Cuba. Charles Collingwood narrated a two-part series on the efforts of North Vietnamese civilians to repair the damage of saturation USAF bombing. Back home, a three-part series investigated whether the Students for a Democratic Society were unAmerican.
The CBS Evening News refused to condemn radicals and Communists out of hand: instead it sought them out, tried to understand their ideology, and interrogated the flaws in their arguments. Combine the scrupulous attention to power inside Washington, implicitly validating the federal powers established by the New Deal, with the inquisitive investigation of leftist challenges to US power outside the capital and you have the ingredients for that rote 70s conservative complaint against the network news: part of the "liberal East Coast establishment." Back in 1968, of course, a liberal was as terrifying a bogeyman for those on the left wing as he was for the right.
The changes that are obvious in the 1998 CBS Evening News are no recent arrivals. As long ago as the early 80s, CBS News President Van Gordon Sauter was castigated for going soft when he took advantage of ENG technology to increase the visibility of ordinary Americans on the nightly news at the expense of Washington newsmakers. In the early 90s, Sauter's successor Eric Ober supervised a series of cost-cutting closures at CBS' foreign bureaus which led to even greater domestic content: 30 years ago almost half the newscast was devoted to overseas coverage; that is now almost halved (46% in 1968 v 26% today).
Admittedly the United States was fighting a war back then and one of the proper rewards of peace is the freedom to tend to domestic concerns. CBS News should not be criticized for the United States' good fortune in finding itself not at war, hot or cold, in 1998. Nevertheless, both then and now the CBS Evening News has to strike a balance between two impulses in story selection: the familiar, covering what viewers already know about, their daily lives and concerns; and the exotic, explaining strange places that challenge the viewers' received norms and world views--even at the risk of the liberal label.
The main difference in journalistic story selection between the two CBS newscasts then and now is not in the ratio between hard news and features-interviews-commentary. That has remained virtually unchanged (257:173 min in 1968 v 246:168 today). The difference is in the balance between the familiar and the exotic. The modern newscast pays more attention to women's issues (10 min/month on sex-&-family in 1968 v 17 today) and contains an even larger increase in topics such as health-&-medicine (5 min v 24) and drugs-alcohol-tobacco (1 min v 20). In short, it is more concerned with news-you-can-use about the viewers' lifestyles.
And then there are the differences which have nothing to do with journalism but with network television as a medium. The lazy pace of the soundbites, the extended use of Cronkite's talking head, the discursive writing of Sevareid's commentaries and Kuralt's On The Road features all offered an impression of unhurried authority.
Why shouldn't they seem unhurried? They had more time! Back in 1968, CBS sold only six minutes of commercials during the half-hour newscast, leaving Cronkite just under 23 minutes of editorial content and just over 60 seconds to go in and out of commercial and to open the program and sign off: "That's the way it is." Not only did Cronkite's viewers have no remote controls at their fingertips to wander off elsewhere, he was barely off-screen long enough for them to hanker for other news content: none of the advertising interruptions lasted longer than a minute.
Compare that with Rather's contemporary task. CBS sells more than eight minutes of advertising to Madison Avenue and reserves another 40 seconds to promote its own programing. The longest commercial island lasts 130 seconds. Fully two minutes of the newscast is devoted to persuading viewers to stay loyal, with headlines detailing the day's top stories at the start of the half hour and teases for upcoming items before each commercial. That leaves only 19 minutes for editorial content. Cronkite's face-time on camera 30 years ago averaged over seven minutes per newscast; Rather's today averages just over four. None of those three minutes have gone to increased reportorial coverage; all of them are now commercials, promotions and teases.
Gone is Cronkite's avuncular authority. CBS, by addressing its viewers more as consumers to be courted, less as citizens to be informed, has changed the role of the anchor. Rather is now part newsreader, part un-self-confident pitchman.
Cronkite's times produced an abstract and global newscast but with an elitist, insider's view. Rather's news is more populist, skeptical, parochial and diverse. Cronkite's problem was that the weighty foreign and domestic policy issues of his day were disembodied, presented as the meditations of the great-and-good in the establishment. Rather's problem is that his news is too concrete: plenty of action but little meditation. How to present the public policy issues of the day from a popular perspective is a conundrum that neither newscast solved. Cronkite tended to present the policy without the public. Rather evokes the voice of the people--but can focus too closely on the particulars of the story of the day to find its general impact on public policy.
Eric Mink, an award-winning television critic for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the New York Daily News for more than 20 years, makes the following points by e-mail:
Where your piece was generous, I thought, in forgiving the Cronkite newscast for the flaws relating to techological impediments, I would be more negative:
I would point out that the "face-time" comparisons you noted also were a reflection of Cronkite's own insistence that correspondents' on-air exposure be limited, except in special circumstance (as I was told by CBS Evening News employees after Cronkite's departure). I would note that he was the founder and first beneficiary of the oft-criticized Cult of the Anchor. I would point out that his facile criticisms of the "direction" of TV news began only after his forced retirement -- and note that Rather wrote pointed criticisms of TV news, including of CBS, in op-ed pieces published while he was Evening News anchor and managing editor. I would note that Cronkite was particularly ineffective at protecting the resources of the news division while he served, post-retirement, as a well-compensated member of the CBS Inc. board of directors. I would ask questions about Cronkite's acclaimed "commentary" about Vietnam after his rushed post-Tet trip, which I've always thought was weird in the context of all the fine print reporting of those days. I would point out, too, that even Cronkite-era technology would have permitted using the unique visual and aural communications qualities of television to give stories more impact, make them more accessible and hence improve their journalism -- except that there was never any evidence that Cronkite, mired in the mindset of the illustrated headline service he felt TV newscasts were, understood these qualities in the least.
Thanks for sending out your piece, which I'm afraid will be overlooked as journalists today, beset from all directions, rush to deify a Cronkite who certainly was no news deity and, as your cool, data-driven analysis demonstrated, was not even the Cronkite people have convinced themselves he was.
A reader--he prefers to remain unidentified here--sent me the following disagreement by e-mail:
Mr Tyndall,
I read your post comparing the CBS Evening News of 1968 with the CBS Evening News of 1998. In spite of the shortcomings you discussed, I'd take the news values of 1968 over the news values of 2009 in a heartbeat. In 1968, broadcast news was still seen as a public service and not as infotainment that was expected to turn a profit.
24 hour cable news programming with hucksters and demagogues like Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Lou Dobbs, Joe Scarboough, and Chris Matthews and missing white women stories is far more unwatchable and lacking in insight than the CBS Evening News of 1968.
Your criticism of the CBS Evening News of 1968 rings very hollow on the heels of the outrageous dereliction of duty and complete abdication of responsibility by the network newscasts and 24 hour cable news channels concerning the death of Michael Jackson.
I'd submit that the average tv viewer was better informed with the 3 network newscasts and other network news programs that existed in 1968 than the average tv viewer of today with 24 hour cable news. Why don't you compare the hours of cable news programming devoted to Laci Peterson, Stacy Peterson, Anna Nicole Smith, Chandra Levy, and Natalee Holloway against the hours of network newscasts devoted to hard news in the late 1960's and early 1960's..
The 24 hour news cable channels are destroying broadcast journalism with their shamelessly low standards.
The only things better about broadcast journalism today as opposed to 1968 are C-SPAN, the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, and NPR's Morning Edition, All Things Considered and Talk of the Nation.
The defense of TV executives that the Michael Jackson coverage is simply a reflection of their response to viewer demand is both laughable and dangerous. This is like parents allowing their children to eat all the junk food they want for a week, while allowing them to avoid eating vegetables and other foods they don't like.
I recognize that part of the role of newspapers and broadcast news is to recount the major events of the day. The other missions of the MSM are to provide the relevant facts I need to know so that I can make informed, well-reasoned decisions as a voter, a citizen, and a consumer; report on the workings of government, business, and other powerful entities; and hold these entities accountable for their actions.
The rundowns of ABC World News, CBS Evening News, and NBC Nightly News were completely gutted for several consecutive nights to make room for the Michael Jackson story. I don't have the data at my fingertips, but I'd estimate that 18-19 minutes of the 3 network newscasts were devoted to the deaths of Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett on the day news of these deaths broke. On the second day, I'd estimate that the Michael Jackson story took up well over a third of the airtime of the 3 network newscasts.
I wish I could view the original rundowns of the 3 network newscasts to see which stories disappeared into a black hole in order that I could be provided every single detail related to the lives and deaths of Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett. Devoting 18-19 minutes out of 23 minutes of NBC Nightly News, CBS Evening News, and ABC World News to the deaths of Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett is far more obscene and objectionable than the exposure of Janet Jackson's breast during a Super Bowl halftime show.
In my view, the 3 network newscasts should be sacrosanct. The only occasions when these programs should ditch their normal format to cover one story are: if we sustain another 9/11 style attack, the President is the victim of an assassination, or there is a natural disaster comparable in scale to Hurricane Katrina.
When Brian Williams, Charlie Gibson, and Anderson Cooper shirked their duty to report actual news in favor of pontificating with awe and reverence about Michael Jackson's moonwalk they ceased being journalists and became celebrity publicists. They disgraced their news organizations and their profession.
One of my favorite lines from Barack Obama's inaugural address was "The time has come to set aside childish things." By deciding to go full-bore in covering the death of Michael Jackson, the MSM chose to set aside serious things in favor of childish things. If Obama sometimes merits criticism for "playing politics", the tv networks surely merit a boatload of criticism and condemnation for shamelessly "playing ratings" with their over-the-top coverage of Michael Jackson's death.
We need more people like Walter Cronkite, Eric Severeid, Howard K. Smith, John Chancellor, Marvin Kalb, Edwin Newman, Garrick Utley, Roger Mudd, Daniel Schorr, Sander Vanocur, Ted Koppel, and Frank Reynolds. We need less people like Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Michael Savage, Laura Ingraham, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Joe Scarborough, Lou Dobbs, and Chris Matthews.
Cronkite, Severeid, Smith, et. al. provided viewers with information and thoughtful, intelligent commentary. Beck, O'Reilly, Hannity, et. al. are dumbing our culture down to death with lies, distortions, hate mongering and fear mongering.
Of course Cronkite wasn't God, but the nation sure as Hell was better served when he and his colleagues dominated the airwaves than today with the knuckle dragging neanderthals ruling the airwaves.
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