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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM JULY 20, 2009
The nightly newscasts already milked the 40th anniversary of NASA's manned mission to the moon last Thursday, making space race nostalgia its Story of the Day. Here they come again, marking 40 years since the first actual moon walk. The recycled coverage had added impetus because of the weekend's obituaries for newsman Walter Cronkite, a major NASA booster at the time. At least today's newscasts maintained a shred of journalistic credibility by deciding not to lead with four-decades-old news. NBC and CBS started with the plight of Bowe Bergdahl, a 23-year-old army private from Idaho who is being held prisoner by Taliban guerrillas in Afghanistan. ABC kicked off with self-generated headlines, reporting on its own opinion poll on the President's popularity.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR JULY 20, 2009: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
HUMAN LANDS ON MOON--A 40-YEAR-OLD HEADLINE The nightly newscasts already milked the 40th anniversary of NASA's manned mission to the moon last Thursday, making space race nostalgia its Story of the Day. Here they come again, marking 40 years since the first actual moon walk. The recycled coverage had added impetus because of the weekend's obituaries for newsman Walter Cronkite, a major NASA booster at the time. At least today's newscasts maintained a shred of journalistic credibility by deciding not to lead with four-decades-old news. NBC and CBS started with the plight of Bowe Bergdahl, a 23-year-old army private from Idaho who is being held prisoner by Taliban guerrillas in Afghanistan. ABC kicked off with self-generated headlines, reporting on its own opinion poll on the President's popularity.
CBS had Mandy Clark cover Bergdahl from Kabul. She reported that the soldier's own unit had launched a 3,000-strong taskforce to try to rescue their comrade. Bergdahl's identity had been kept secret since he went missing at the end of June. Then he was identified by his captors in an online videostream. CBS' Clark reckoned that the video showed the soldier "under duress" whereas Jere van Dyke, her network's in-house terrorism consultant, thought it showed "the appearance of good treatment." van Dyke explained the propaganda message directed at the United States: "We treat soldiers better than you do."
ABC's Laura Marquez and NBC's George Lewis took the yellow ribbon angle, showing the support for Bergdahl in Hailey, his small Idaho home town. "It is a measure of just how close-knit this community is that when people first learned that Bergdahl was the soldier captured in Afghanistan, they kept quiet about it out of concern for his safety," NBC's Lewis noted. He quoted his colleague Jim Miklaszewski's reporting from the Pentagon on the "mysterious circumstances" of the soldier's disappearance from his base in Zirak near the Pakistan border: "Bergdahl came off patrol; dropped off his weapon and body armor; then gathered up a couple of water bottles, a compass and a knife; and left the base alone apparently to meet some Afghans he had befriended."
THE SARCASTIC SECRETARY "I broke my elbow not my larynx." That was the sarcastic soundbite ABC's Martha Raddatz obtained from Hillary Rodham Clinton as the Secretary of State scoffed at reports that she had been marginalized by foreign policy rivals in the Obama Administration. Raddatz was traveling with her diplomatic entourage in New Delhi but the Secretary wanted to discuss North Korea and Iran, not India. Foggy Bottom is "still willing to talk" to Teheran, despite its "deadly crackdown on demonstrators," Raddatz reported. As for Pyongyang, Rodham Clinton chose condescension over conciliation: "Maybe it is the mother in me or the experience that I have had with small children and unruly teenagers and people who are demanding attention--do not give it to them."
BARACK BONAPARTE All three White House correspondents covered the latest twists in the healthcare debate. Sen Jim DeMint, the Republican from South Carolina, went three-for-three as each one quoted his obstructionist plans: "If we are able to stop Obama on this it will be his Waterloo. It will break him." CBS' Chip Reid called DeMint's comment "incendiary" while NBC's Chuck Todd saw the President "back in campaign mode" as he "embraced the political fight."
ABC's Jake Tapper quoted Obama trying to portray opposition to healthcare legislation as opportunist rather than principled in an interview with PBS' NewsHour anchor Jim Lehrer: "There is a certain portion of the Republican Party that views this like they saw in '93, '94. So it was a pure political play, a show of strength by the Republicans that helped them regain the House."
CBS' Reid pointed out that both Republicans and Democrats are running ads, the GOP calling reform "a risky experiment" while the DNC pleads with its own senators that "it is time" for passage. Reid saw "the polls coming down, with the criticism just flowing in from Republicans and even some Democrats really nervous about the bill." Then he gauged the mood in the corridors of the White House: "They really are as confident as ever here."
As for those polls, George Stephanopoulos of This Week walked anchor Charles Gibson through the latest results from ABC News and Washington Post. "Obama is more popular than his policies," Stephanopoulos found, citing an overall 59% approval rating yet only 49% support for his healthcare plan. Not that these data offered any solace to Republicans: comparing the GOP to Obama on healthcare, the preference was 34% to 54%.
DIGITAL DIVIDE The last time the Rural Utilities Service was in charge of expanding broadband access to the underserved countryside, it botched the job, NBC's Lisa Myers reminded us. The service favored suburbs over rural communities; approved loans without requiring completed applications; and subsidized service to communities that already had broadband. So why, Myers inquired, should the Agriculture Department put RUS in charge of another $3bn to bridge the digital divide? "Those are all fixable with the right focus and the right vision," a USDA spokesman assured her.
ROGER & ME Jim Axelrod focused on the continuing decline of Flint in CBS' series on Children of the Recession, produced in partnership with USA Today. "Once proud neighborhoods rot," he demonstrated, as employment has plummeted, streets are empty, homes stand vacant and arson is routine. Genesee County plans to turn city lots into green playgrounds by razing 6,000 abandoned residences. Children will have a safe place to play when they are not hitting their books. The new requirement to graduate high school includes passing grades in algebra, biology, chemistry or physics and a foreign language.
IT’S THE PICTURES THAT GOT SMALL Twentieth Century Props, Hollywood's 40-year-old set decoration supplier, is closing its doors and putting its props up for sale at auction. The movie production business in the Thirty Mile Zone is not what it used to be, NBC's Lee Cowan explained. Drama on television is being replaced by reality. The strike by screenwriters slowed production. So-called runaway productions are being shot outside of California, lured away from Tinseltown by tax incentives. At least Cowan enjoyed a quirky, poignant guided tour through the warehouse's "menagerie of the miscellaneous."
MOONSTRUCK Nostalgia for Apollo 11 took several forms. CBS closed its newscast by reminding us how giddy Walter Cronkite had been about a man on the moon--"the man who took us there and back," as CBS anchor Katie Couric put it. ABC anchor Charles Gibson, who emulated Cronkite's space enthusiasm when he visited the Johnson Space Center in Houston this spring (here and here), confessed that landing on the moon "still gives you chills 40 years later." Filing A Closer Look, Gibson claimed that the astronauts "uplifted America's spirit" at a time when "the Vietnam War was going badly, protest marches, America's youth in open rebellion." Subsequently, "NASA has never had the level of public support it had right after Apollo 11, hard to accept for those of our generation so thrilled by what we had seen." CBS' Bob Orr noted that the anniversary celebration "is tempered by disappointment that America, in the four decades since, has not probed deeper into the unknown."
NBC filed a montage feature of a trio of remembrances. Astronomer Neil de Grasse Tyson, an African-American, remembered his own family being "basically disenfranchised" even as "the greatest epic adventure this species has ever undertaken" got under way. Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin claimed "there was a real fear that if Russia were to get…to the moon before us, that maybe the moon launch could have been used in a weapon way, a war way." Politician John McCain did not know about a "small event like a moon landing." He was a prisoner of war at the time.
“UNWATCHABLE, UNSKEPTICAL, LACKING IN IMPACT, LACKING IN INSIGHT” 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.
NIGHTLY NEWSCAST EMMY NOMS There were twelve different stories on the three network nightly newscasts to be nominated for the news-&-documentary Emmy Awards. Some--like those by Byron Pitts, Armen Keteyian and Katie Couric on CBS--were obvious standouts at the time they aired. Others, to be frank, I found underwhelming. Anyway I thought it would be interesting to check back on how each nominee seemed at the time so I have linked to my contemporaneous blog posts, written before anyone knew the coverage might be deserving of acclaim. As usual, the links to the nominated videostreams are included in each blog post.
December 2007-February 2008: Campaign 2008 Primary Questions (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here)--CBS anchor Katie Couric's candidate questioning innovation set the tone for a new style of political coverage--Reality Gameshow Journalism.
January 2008: Nazi Holocaust Remembered at the Shoah Museum (here)--NBC's Ann Curry is becoming her network's human rights specialist.
February 2008: Military Medical Malpractice and the Feres Doctrine (here and here)--CBS' Byron Pitts looks like an award winner, generating genuine outrage not grandstanding.
March 2008: Iraq Combat Fifth Anniversary of Invasion (here, here, here, here, here and here)--ABC News' institutional investment and tenacity was more remarkable than the individual stories filed by Terry McCarthy, Martha Raddatz, Bob Woodruff and Chris Bury.
April 2008: Military Mental Healthcare Shortfall at Veterans Administration (here, here, here, here, here and here)--CBS' Armen Keteyian followed the investigative journalism playbook, collecting the data, finding the gotcha e-mail, inspiring a Congressional reaction.
May 2008: Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar (here, here, here and here)--ABC's Jim Sciutto and Elizabeth Vargas demonstrate admirable persistence with Sciutto deserving extra credit for undercover work.
May 2008: Sichuan Province earthquake in China (here, here, here, here, here, here and here)--granted ABC's Neal Karlinsky and Stephanie Sy documented heartbreaking images, but they did so no more insightfully than their rivals at other networks.
June 2008: NBC News' DC Bureau Chief Tim Russert dies (here, here, here and here)--NBC's Pete Williams and Tom Brokaw produced heartfelt tributes but they hardly had to put in a special effort to win access to their material.
September 2008: Campaign 2008 GOP VP Nominee Sarah Palin (here and here)--ABC anchor Charles Gibson famously peered over his glasses in a schoolmasterly way yet his longtime morning rival Katie Couric in the end made a bigger splash.
September 2008: TARP Financial Bailout Bill Defeated in House (here, here and here)--throughout the financial crisis, NBC Nightly News provided superior coverage because it was able to rely on CNBC's resources. Here Tom Costello and Kevin Tibbles were supported by CNBC's economist Steve Liesman and Money Honey Maria Bartiromo.
October 2008: Afghanistan Fighting in Korengal Valley (here and here)--NBC's Richard Engel wins kudos for his up close and personal combat videotape. Unfortunately Tyndall Report had a couple of days off on October 20th and 21st when his series started. Sorry about that.
December 2008: Military Orphans (here)--ABC's Bob Woodruff files an old-fashioned tearjerker for the Yuletide holiday, newsgathering that was flawed only because his source was a fellow professional journalist rather than a genuinely disinterested war widow.
CLIMBING DOWN FROM OLYMPUS 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.
CBS had Mandy Clark cover Bergdahl from Kabul. She reported that the soldier's own unit had launched a 3,000-strong taskforce to try to rescue their comrade. Bergdahl's identity had been kept secret since he went missing at the end of June. Then he was identified by his captors in an online videostream. CBS' Clark reckoned that the video showed the soldier "under duress" whereas Jere van Dyke, her network's in-house terrorism consultant, thought it showed "the appearance of good treatment." van Dyke explained the propaganda message directed at the United States: "We treat soldiers better than you do."
ABC's Laura Marquez and NBC's George Lewis took the yellow ribbon angle, showing the support for Bergdahl in Hailey, his small Idaho home town. "It is a measure of just how close-knit this community is that when people first learned that Bergdahl was the soldier captured in Afghanistan, they kept quiet about it out of concern for his safety," NBC's Lewis noted. He quoted his colleague Jim Miklaszewski's reporting from the Pentagon on the "mysterious circumstances" of the soldier's disappearance from his base in Zirak near the Pakistan border: "Bergdahl came off patrol; dropped off his weapon and body armor; then gathered up a couple of water bottles, a compass and a knife; and left the base alone apparently to meet some Afghans he had befriended."
THE SARCASTIC SECRETARY "I broke my elbow not my larynx." That was the sarcastic soundbite ABC's Martha Raddatz obtained from Hillary Rodham Clinton as the Secretary of State scoffed at reports that she had been marginalized by foreign policy rivals in the Obama Administration. Raddatz was traveling with her diplomatic entourage in New Delhi but the Secretary wanted to discuss North Korea and Iran, not India. Foggy Bottom is "still willing to talk" to Teheran, despite its "deadly crackdown on demonstrators," Raddatz reported. As for Pyongyang, Rodham Clinton chose condescension over conciliation: "Maybe it is the mother in me or the experience that I have had with small children and unruly teenagers and people who are demanding attention--do not give it to them."
BARACK BONAPARTE All three White House correspondents covered the latest twists in the healthcare debate. Sen Jim DeMint, the Republican from South Carolina, went three-for-three as each one quoted his obstructionist plans: "If we are able to stop Obama on this it will be his Waterloo. It will break him." CBS' Chip Reid called DeMint's comment "incendiary" while NBC's Chuck Todd saw the President "back in campaign mode" as he "embraced the political fight."
ABC's Jake Tapper quoted Obama trying to portray opposition to healthcare legislation as opportunist rather than principled in an interview with PBS' NewsHour anchor Jim Lehrer: "There is a certain portion of the Republican Party that views this like they saw in '93, '94. So it was a pure political play, a show of strength by the Republicans that helped them regain the House."
CBS' Reid pointed out that both Republicans and Democrats are running ads, the GOP calling reform "a risky experiment" while the DNC pleads with its own senators that "it is time" for passage. Reid saw "the polls coming down, with the criticism just flowing in from Republicans and even some Democrats really nervous about the bill." Then he gauged the mood in the corridors of the White House: "They really are as confident as ever here."
As for those polls, George Stephanopoulos of This Week walked anchor Charles Gibson through the latest results from ABC News and Washington Post. "Obama is more popular than his policies," Stephanopoulos found, citing an overall 59% approval rating yet only 49% support for his healthcare plan. Not that these data offered any solace to Republicans: comparing the GOP to Obama on healthcare, the preference was 34% to 54%.
DIGITAL DIVIDE The last time the Rural Utilities Service was in charge of expanding broadband access to the underserved countryside, it botched the job, NBC's Lisa Myers reminded us. The service favored suburbs over rural communities; approved loans without requiring completed applications; and subsidized service to communities that already had broadband. So why, Myers inquired, should the Agriculture Department put RUS in charge of another $3bn to bridge the digital divide? "Those are all fixable with the right focus and the right vision," a USDA spokesman assured her.
ROGER & ME Jim Axelrod focused on the continuing decline of Flint in CBS' series on Children of the Recession, produced in partnership with USA Today. "Once proud neighborhoods rot," he demonstrated, as employment has plummeted, streets are empty, homes stand vacant and arson is routine. Genesee County plans to turn city lots into green playgrounds by razing 6,000 abandoned residences. Children will have a safe place to play when they are not hitting their books. The new requirement to graduate high school includes passing grades in algebra, biology, chemistry or physics and a foreign language.
IT’S THE PICTURES THAT GOT SMALL Twentieth Century Props, Hollywood's 40-year-old set decoration supplier, is closing its doors and putting its props up for sale at auction. The movie production business in the Thirty Mile Zone is not what it used to be, NBC's Lee Cowan explained. Drama on television is being replaced by reality. The strike by screenwriters slowed production. So-called runaway productions are being shot outside of California, lured away from Tinseltown by tax incentives. At least Cowan enjoyed a quirky, poignant guided tour through the warehouse's "menagerie of the miscellaneous."
MOONSTRUCK Nostalgia for Apollo 11 took several forms. CBS closed its newscast by reminding us how giddy Walter Cronkite had been about a man on the moon--"the man who took us there and back," as CBS anchor Katie Couric put it. ABC anchor Charles Gibson, who emulated Cronkite's space enthusiasm when he visited the Johnson Space Center in Houston this spring (here and here), confessed that landing on the moon "still gives you chills 40 years later." Filing A Closer Look, Gibson claimed that the astronauts "uplifted America's spirit" at a time when "the Vietnam War was going badly, protest marches, America's youth in open rebellion." Subsequently, "NASA has never had the level of public support it had right after Apollo 11, hard to accept for those of our generation so thrilled by what we had seen." CBS' Bob Orr noted that the anniversary celebration "is tempered by disappointment that America, in the four decades since, has not probed deeper into the unknown."
NBC filed a montage feature of a trio of remembrances. Astronomer Neil de Grasse Tyson, an African-American, remembered his own family being "basically disenfranchised" even as "the greatest epic adventure this species has ever undertaken" got under way. Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin claimed "there was a real fear that if Russia were to get…to the moon before us, that maybe the moon launch could have been used in a weapon way, a war way." Politician John McCain did not know about a "small event like a moon landing." He was a prisoner of war at the time.
“UNWATCHABLE, UNSKEPTICAL, LACKING IN IMPACT, LACKING IN INSIGHT” 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.
NIGHTLY NEWSCAST EMMY NOMS There were twelve different stories on the three network nightly newscasts to be nominated for the news-&-documentary Emmy Awards. Some--like those by Byron Pitts, Armen Keteyian and Katie Couric on CBS--were obvious standouts at the time they aired. Others, to be frank, I found underwhelming. Anyway I thought it would be interesting to check back on how each nominee seemed at the time so I have linked to my contemporaneous blog posts, written before anyone knew the coverage might be deserving of acclaim. As usual, the links to the nominated videostreams are included in each blog post.
December 2007-February 2008: Campaign 2008 Primary Questions (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here)--CBS anchor Katie Couric's candidate questioning innovation set the tone for a new style of political coverage--Reality Gameshow Journalism.
January 2008: Nazi Holocaust Remembered at the Shoah Museum (here)--NBC's Ann Curry is becoming her network's human rights specialist.
February 2008: Military Medical Malpractice and the Feres Doctrine (here and here)--CBS' Byron Pitts looks like an award winner, generating genuine outrage not grandstanding.
March 2008: Iraq Combat Fifth Anniversary of Invasion (here, here, here, here, here and here)--ABC News' institutional investment and tenacity was more remarkable than the individual stories filed by Terry McCarthy, Martha Raddatz, Bob Woodruff and Chris Bury.
April 2008: Military Mental Healthcare Shortfall at Veterans Administration (here, here, here, here, here and here)--CBS' Armen Keteyian followed the investigative journalism playbook, collecting the data, finding the gotcha e-mail, inspiring a Congressional reaction.
May 2008: Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar (here, here, here and here)--ABC's Jim Sciutto and Elizabeth Vargas demonstrate admirable persistence with Sciutto deserving extra credit for undercover work.
May 2008: Sichuan Province earthquake in China (here, here, here, here, here, here and here)--granted ABC's Neal Karlinsky and Stephanie Sy documented heartbreaking images, but they did so no more insightfully than their rivals at other networks.
June 2008: NBC News' DC Bureau Chief Tim Russert dies (here, here, here and here)--NBC's Pete Williams and Tom Brokaw produced heartfelt tributes but they hardly had to put in a special effort to win access to their material.
September 2008: Campaign 2008 GOP VP Nominee Sarah Palin (here and here)--ABC anchor Charles Gibson famously peered over his glasses in a schoolmasterly way yet his longtime morning rival Katie Couric in the end made a bigger splash.
September 2008: TARP Financial Bailout Bill Defeated in House (here, here and here)--throughout the financial crisis, NBC Nightly News provided superior coverage because it was able to rely on CNBC's resources. Here Tom Costello and Kevin Tibbles were supported by CNBC's economist Steve Liesman and Money Honey Maria Bartiromo.
October 2008: Afghanistan Fighting in Korengal Valley (here and here)--NBC's Richard Engel wins kudos for his up close and personal combat videotape. Unfortunately Tyndall Report had a couple of days off on October 20th and 21st when his series started. Sorry about that.
December 2008: Military Orphans (here)--ABC's Bob Woodruff files an old-fashioned tearjerker for the Yuletide holiday, newsgathering that was flawed only because his source was a fellow professional journalist rather than a genuinely disinterested war widow.
CLIMBING DOWN FROM OLYMPUS 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.
