The End of the Evening News
As Walter Cronkite passed away last week, we remember that the era of “the most trusted man in America” on the evening news is long gone.
By Matt Zeitlin
July 20, 2009
Walter Cronkite talks on the phone at his office prior to his final newscast as CBS anchorman in New York City. Behind him is a framed Mickey Mouse cartoon and his Emmy award. Famed CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite, known as the ‘most trusted man in America’ has died, Friday, July 17, 2009. He was 92. (AP Photo/File)Following Walter Cronkite’s death this past Friday, the New York Times tried to translate the event to the YouTube generation. The Times’ Media Decoder blog quoted Sean McManus, the president of CBS News, saying, “There probably will never be anybody who has the presence and the stature and the importance that Walter Cronkite had in this country.” It seems that McManus wanted to impart that there really was a time when a news anchor could seriously be called “The Most Trusted Man in America.”
By all accounts, Cronkite’s title was deserved: Cronkite was there to record history. He was a rock of authority and compassion when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. His declaration that the “bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate” was the moment when the American mainstream began to turn against the war. When just a year and a half later, Apollo 11 landed on the moon, it was Cronkite’s boyish wonder that reflected the collective awe at America’s achievement.
But for Americans under the age of 40, Cronkite belonged to a time that seems totally alien today. When Cronkite gave his last broadcast in 1981, today’s under-40 population would have been 11 at the oldest. Many, like me, weren’t even born yet. Today, CBS still isn’t capturing the advertiser-coveted 25 to 54 age demographic. Of the roughly 5.3 million people who watched the CBS Evening News this year the week of July 6, only 21 percent were under 55. This June, CBS notched its lowest rating share ever.
During the Cronkite era on the CBS Evening News, he delivered what was called “the magic,” the six minutes at the beginning of the show that recounted to America what happened that day. It’s fitting that as Cronkite left the news world, CNN burst onto the scene in 1980. Two years later, it launched CNN Headline News. The 24-hour cycle of breaking news broadcasts had began. With a constant stream of breaking news, CNN and Headline News marked the beginning of the end the evening news platform.
CNN was the only news network to have live footage of the Challenger disaster. (Cronkite himself had made the short list of potential passengers.) Cameras toggled between shots of the disintegrated rocket and shuttle raining down from the sky and the shocked reactions of viewers at Cape Canaveral. As America was treated to the bureaucratic drone of NASA’s public affairs officer declaring that a “major malfunction” had occurred, there was no space for a Cronkite-like figure to mediate the nation’s reaction.
Today’s media universe is the kind where a news cycle sparked by TMZ can digest a story long before Cronkite would be giving “the magic.” The number of news sources has also proliferated, reducing the traditional bastions of authority—the three national networks, ABC, NBC, and CBS—to lumbering relics.
At the same time that the news world has diversified, American’s faith in the media has collapsed. According to Pew Research Center, between 1985 and 2007, the portion of Americans who thought news organizations were “immoral” and “hurt democracy” respectively jumped 19 and 14 percent respectively. In 1985, four years after Cronkite’s departure, 55 percent thought news organizations “get facts straight” and 34 percent said that the stories are “often inaccurate.” By 2007, the numbers flipped; the numbers showed 53 percent thought news was “often inaccurate.” Last year, only 22 percent of poll respondents believed “all or much” of what the saw on CBS News. A combination of technological advancement, cultural splintering, and the rise of explicitly partisan news sources has made a Cronkite like figure impossible to even imagine today.
Still, this post-Cronkite world is, in many ways, an improvement over the old. If the news media is supposed to be the guardian of our democracy, than having one white man from St. Joseph, Missouri, as its face makes the entire enterprise seems less than democratic. And while Cronkite had unimpeachable credibility with much of the American public, it’s simply naïve to think that the Voice of God model represented by Cronkite is a sustainable or credible way to deliver news that ought to hold the government accountable to the public. Cronkite may really have been the secular saint as depicted in the obituaries, but even if we wanted to go back to that time, we couldn’t. The media and culture is too permanently splintered, and with the advent of TiVo and the Internet, people can choose to consume their media instantly, which means that no one person will have a platform that will allow him to dictate the news to everyone.
At the same time, it’s worth recounting what we’ve lost. We’ve lost the potential for a single, respected and popular figure to hold the government accountable. When Cronkite returned from reporting in Vietnam in February of 1968, he delivered his famous editorial where he declared that the War could not be won, and President Johnson’s said, in reaction, that he had lost “Middle America.” Although the last troops wouldn’t leave until 1975, Cronkite’s broadcast marked a turning point when skepticism of the war became mainstream. Today, when we think of the media’s relationship with the public and war, we think of much of the news media’s shameful capitulation and water carrying for the government in the run-up to the war in Iraq. Perhaps a figure seen as the “most trusted man in America” could have steered us away from the folly of Iraq. Unfortunately, no single person today could.
Matt Zeitlin is an editorial intern for Campus Progress and a sophomore at Northwestern University. Follow him on Twitter.
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