This summer seems like it’s been the summer of death. The Grim Reaper has claimed one of Charlie’s Angels, a 50-year-old kid who’d held a baby out a window, a defense secretary who’d been responsible for the Vietnam War, and an Irish-American author who, in old age, was still complaining about his awful childhood. Now the most trusted man in America has joined them.
I’m not talking about Barack Obama, or Roger Ebert, or Bill Gates. (They’re all still alive.) No, it was a 92-year-old named Walter Cronkite. For 30 years in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, “the Cronk” was the face of the evening news. He’d put on his reading glasses and tell it like it was.
Cronkite knew how to describe strange events in faraway places in ways that people could understand. He told you both sides of the story. He asked the right questions. He knew what was important and what wasn’t. He gave every story an air of drama, without being melodramatic. He understood that news should be fascinating, but not entertaining.
He brought the Vietnam War, the deaths of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and the moon landings into Americans’ living rooms; and he read the news with authority, ending each broadcast with the words “And that’s the way it was, this Thursday, October 4” (or whatever day it was).
Surveys consistently rated him the most trusted man in America. (His resemblance to Captain Kangaroo, the host of a popular children’s show on the same network, certainly helped. I always thought Kangaroo was Cronkite on his days off.)
Fairness was the rule
Cronkite’s journalistic standards came from what was known as the “fairness doctrine”. This set of rules was enforced by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which issues licenses to television and radio stations. In exchange for use of the public airwaves, the FCC required stations to use some of their airtime to present news and discussion of matters of public interest. Contrasting but balanced opinions were to be presented as well, and identified as such. If a station said something negative about a particular person, the person had to be told within 24 hours and given the opportunity to respond on the air — which many did.
The stations themselves, however, tended to see news as a problem. It was expensive to do well, and could not pay for itself. The harm to the stations’ finances could be minimized if more viewers could be attracted. But Cronkite was still on the air.
In 1978, his competitors at the ABC network revamped their newscast with brightly colored flying logos, music and news anchors in different cities. It had what I think was a hidden political agenda as well: each night’s newscast counted the days that American embassy staff had been held hostage in revolutionary Iran. This embarrassed Jimmy Carter’s government one day at a time and cost him the 1980 election.
CNN brought flying logos of its own when it began service in 1980. Worse, if the news could be spread out over 24 hours instead of condensed into half an hour, there was less of a need to edit it and distinguish between what was important and what was not.
In 1987, the government of Ronald Reagan got rid of the fairness doctrine. Reporters could now decide how to present their own stories. Suddenly it was possible to slander people on the air. This opened the door to stations with very politicized agendas, the Fox News Channel being the most familiar example.
Cronkite wouldn’t have approved of news anchors commenting on the stories they’d just read or humiliating their guests by shouting at them. “Report the news. Don’t be the news” is what he would have said. And that’s the way it was.
