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"Cronkite"

TVWorldwide said:
For those interested in the decline of American TV News, I would highly recommend Setven Barnett's The Rise and Fall of Television Journalism: Just Light and wires in a Box? (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011).
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I believe TVWorldwide meant to type "Steven", not "Setven".
 
TVWorldwide said:
For those interested in the decline of American TV News, I would highly recommend Setven Barnett's The Rise and Fall of Television Journalism: Just Light and wires in a Box? (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011). The book's primary focus is on British broadcast journalism, but it includes comparisons to the situation in the U.S. throughout. In this thought-provoking and occasionally polemical volume, Barnett analyzes the structural reasons why American TV journalism went from a much-admired model to a cautionary example of what effects an excessive commercialization of broadcast news can have.


According to Barbara Matusow's history of the network anchors, The Evening Stars (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983), the changing mood of the country also had an effect on Cronkite's ascendancy: As the situation of Vietnam was getting more difficult and political tensions at home were on the rise, people began to prefer Cronkite's folksy and reassuring delivery over Huntley's -- and especially Brinkley's -- detached, subtly cynical style.
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TVWorldwide, I've also heard that the 1967 AFTRA strike (the one that brought us the CBS Evening News with Arnold Zenker) had an effect as well; Huntley crossed the picket line, Brinkley did not, and there was a perception on the part of the viewers that the chemistry between the two was not what it used to be. Any truth to that, from what you know?
 
JeffM said:
Big surprise. Where there's conservazoids there's cheap snark. Like expecting a duck to quack.
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Well, I don't think you can say that as a blanket statement. While I'm certainly on the conservative side of the aisle (and I actually watched the ABC Evening News with Howard K. Smith and Harry Reasoner, and also was a great admirer of Frank Reynolds; go figure), I've come to appreciate Cronkite's dedication to "old-time" journalism and news gathering. He wrote and spoke highly of the profession of "newspaperman," which he extended as a title of honor even to those who worked only in television and had never been in print media. I do think Cronkite leaned to the left, and I find some of his on-air pronouncements (such as that with Vietnam) to be a big questionable, but I have a solid respect for him not only personally, but professionally. In addition, Eddie Barker, the legendary Dallas newsman, had nothing but praise for Cronkite, and that counts for a lot with me. (Of course, that doesn't mean you canonize the man, either.) In other words, I don't think that being a conservative and engaging in cheap snark regarding Cronkite is synonymous.

I have a somewhat lower opinion of Rather, who I think did let his political ideology interfere with his reporting on more than one occasion; nonetheless, I'd much prefer that we have newsmen and women with credentials such as Cronkite, Rather and Jennings, compared to what we have today.
 
Mitchell H said:
I don't think that being a conservative and engaging in cheap snark regarding Cronkite is synonymous.

.
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Perhaps not, but it's tough to deny this is an era in which talk radio and the internet encourage the worst instincts in people on both sides; and I also believe there are still old-time cons who yet blame Cronkite for "getting" Nixon.
 
JeffM said:
Perhaps not, but it's tough to deny this is an era in which talk radio and the internet encourage the worst instincts in people on both sides; and I also believe there are still old-time cons who yet blame Cronkite for "getting" Nixon.
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Jeez, Louise. Some people, encouraged by CBS PR, blame/credit Cronkite for the weather. He was a newspaper man once. He sold out. Can't really blame him. Made a lot of money; ended up "dating" Carly Simon's sister. But real newspaper men, working on real newspapers, "got" Nixon. Then CBS recycled their stuff with graphics and talking heads. But no actual reporting.
 
FredLeonard said:
Jeez, Louise. Some people, encouraged by CBS PR, blame/credit Cronkite for the weather. He was a newspaper man once. He sold out. Can't really blame him. Made a lot of money; ended up "dating" Carly Simon's sister. But real newspaper men, working on real newspapers, "got" Nixon. Then CBS recycled their stuff with graphics and talking heads. But no actual reporting.
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As Foghorn Leghorn would say, a mind like a blotter...soaks it all up but gets it backwards. Where did I say that Cronkite "got" Tricky Dicky? What I said was that conservatives still like to blame CBS and Cronkite for it. Rightly or wrongly, they've been beating that dead horse ever since Spiro Agnew started it. Sheeeesh...
 
Mitchell H said:
TVWorldwide, I've also heard that the 1967 AFTRA strike (the one that brought us the CBS Evening News with Arnold Zenker) had an effect as well; Huntley crossed the picket line, Brinkley did not, and there was a perception on the part of the viewers that the chemistry between the two was not what it used to be. Any truth to that, from what you know?
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Yes, that argument was suggested by Reuven Frank, the legendary producer of the Huntley-Brinkley Report and later the head of NBC News. He wrote about it in his memoir, Out of Thin Air: The Brief Wonderful Life of Network News:

"Long after the AFTRA strike, too late to ask for a survey or an opinion poll to check it, I came to believe that Huntley working those two weeks of the strike and Brinkley not working eroded their audience. [...] No one said so and it may not have been true, but it appeared that Brinkley disagreed with Huntley, that there was a rift. [...] if some perception of friendship or at least cordiality between Huntley and Brinkley swelled audiences, then it is conceivable the public was put off by what it saw during the strike. If people had been attracted to these two men because they seemed to be friends, it made them uncomfortable when that was disturbed, like children when their parents argue. It is not that people chose sides, but what had attracted them had been withdrawn. I do not know that this is what happened; I do know that in television that is all it takes."
 
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TVWorldwide said:
Yes, that argument was suggested by Reuven Frank, the legendary producer of the Huntley-Brinkley Report and later the head of NBC News. He wrote about it in his memoir, Out of Thin Air: The Brief Wonderful Life of Network News:

"Long after the AFTRA strike, too late to ask for a survey or an opinion poll to check it, I came to believe that Huntley working those two weeks of the strike and Brinkley not working eroded their audience. [...] No one said so and it may not have been true, but it appeared that Brinkley disagreed with Huntley, that there was a rift. [...] if some perception of friendship or at least cordiality between Huntley and Brinkley swelled audiences, then it is conceivable the public was put off by what it saw during the strike. If people had been attracted to these two men because they seemed to be friends, it made them uncomfortable when that was disturbed, like children when their parents argue. It is not that people chose sides, but what had attracted them had been withdrawn. I do not know that this is what happened; I do know that in television that is all it takes."
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That was one factor in the eventual shift in dominance from NBC to CBS.

One that gets overlooked often were the sets of the two shows. The Huntley-Brinkley sets were described as looking like an empty ballroom (with a pillar growing out of the top of Chet's head). For breaking news, the set looked like a studio in somebody's basement (with knotty pine panels). Walter, on the other had, was in the editor's slot in what was and appeared to be a functioning newsroom - intended to look like the city room of a small afternoon newspaper at the time. Early on, people - writers and editors - were actually working while Walter read off his TelePrompTer. Walter seemed "plugged in" in a way Chet and David did not. Later, apparently somebody decided all those people doing their jobs were a distraction - or maybe suggested Walter wasn't doing it all by himself (gasp!) - and they made the people leave while the show was on. Later, they got rid of the on-air functioning newsroom entirely (just a vague image of a control room with lots of screens way in back).

Early on, Walter and all the CBS on-air types tried to sound ever-so suave, gracious and even debonair (a hold-over from the Murrow tradition). Later on, they went for a more straight-forward embodiment of the UniPresser type image. Meanwhile, NBC types sounded increasingly bored at having to read news on TV (and it seems like the audience got bored, too).

Nobody was paying any attention to ABC with Peter Jennings and then Frank Reynolds. They paid big bucks for Harry Reasoner and Baba Wawa and eventually started going back to the guys they had dumped.
 
Ever noticed FL's blind spot re female newscasters? "Baba Wawa," "Junior Miss" (Diane Sawyer,) the "fat Barbie-dolls" of local news? "Now you ladies don't worry yore purdy little heads; just stay in the kitchen and let us menfolk talk about the news...got another o'them big fat see-gars there, El Rushbo?"
 
JeffM said:
Ever noticed FL's blind spot re female newscasters? "Baba Wawa," "Junior Miss" (Diane Sawyer,) the "fat Barbie-dolls" of local news? "Now you ladies don't worry yore purdy little heads; just stay in the kitchen and let us menfolk talk about the news...got another o'them big fat see-gars there, El Rushbo?"
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My "blind spot" is "The View" and anyone associated with it, anyone who ever worked for Tricky Dick and former beauty contestants who think winning a swimsuit competition means they have brains. Save your ire for those who hire men for ability and women for looks.
 
FredLeonard said:
My "blind spot" is "The View" and anyone associated with it, anyone who ever worked for Tricky Dick and former beauty contestants who think winning a swimsuit competition means they have brains. Save your ire for those who hire men for ability and women for looks.
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Well, I guess that's how Rush Lardbutt got hired, right Freddie?
 
TVWorldwide said:
here's an interesting review of Douglas Brinkley's book on Cronkite by an academic who's writing his own history of television news:

http://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/the-most-trusted-man-in-america

Charles Ponce de Leon provides interesting insight on something largely missing in Brinkley's book: the FCC regulation that helped serious, no-frills broadcast journalism to reach such heights during the Cronkite era, and the (perhaps inevitable?) deregulation that has led to a marked decline in the quality of TV news since the 1980s.
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BTW, Ponce de Leon's history of TV news is now listed on Amazon, but it won't be published until May.
 
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