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Walter Cronkite's death, having been heavily covered over the weekend, was only mentioned in passing. NBC anchor Brian Williams said Cronkite "taught everyone how this job should be done and then some." In 1998, I wrote an essay on Cronkite's CBS Evening News for the Freedom Forum's Media Studies Journal (ISSN: 1057-7416). I analyzed a month's newscasts from the Vanderbilt Television News Archive and compared them with Dan Rather's newscast 30 years later. The Media Studies Center has since closed and its journal's contents were never posted online. So I post the essay here. It is called Climbing Down from Olympus.
Even a decade later, it is one of the finest pieces of content analysis I have ever produced. I am quite proud of it. Cronkite's Evening News was "unwatchable, unskeptical, lacking in impact, lacking in insight." Please give it a read.
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