Douglas Brinkley says he got the idea to write a biography of Walter Cronkite from David Halberstam. During a casual conversation on a long car ride, Halberstam told him that Cronkite was “the most significant journalist of the second half of the twentieth century,” and that someone ought to write his biography. Within days, after making sure that no one was already at work, Brinkley was on the case.
The life he produced, “Cronkite” (HarperCollins), is long and hastily written, and it’s not immediately apparent what Brinkley’s take on Cronkite is. Much of the biography is quite critical. In the end, though, Brinkley is determined to back the claim that Halberstam made on that momentous car ride.
The Cronkite story has become part of a much larger, decline-of-the-news narrative—the narrative that the new HBO series “Newsroom” is built on, for example, and that Cronkite’s deposed successor as CBS News anchor, Dan Rather, pursues in a new book, “Rather Outspoken” (Grand Central Publishing). Some of that narrative may be true, but a lot of it is Camelot, and extracting the facts without damaging the myth is a delicate business.
Before Cronkite began his tenure as anchorman on “CBS Evening News,” his career was, as Brinkley suggests, longer on résumé-building than on newsbreaking. Cronkite was born in 1916, near Kansas City. His father was a dentist. When Walter was ten, the family moved to Houston. He entered the University of Texas in 1933, but dropped out after two years, then bounced around, working at a wire-service outfit, at a local newspaper, and on radio. He got his first major professional break in December, 1942, when he was assigned to the London bureau of United Press (later U.P.I.).
In 1942, London was the place for an American reporter to be, because London was where the king of American correspondents, Edward R. Murrow, was based. Murrow’s on-air career had begun adventitiously. He had gone to Europe as an employee of CBS radio, assigned primarily to set up broadcasts of cultural events. He had no reporting experience. In March, 1938, he was in Warsaw when he got a call from one of his associates, William Shirer, who was in Vienna, and who told him that the Germans had entered Austria. It was the Anschluss. Murrow told Shirer to fly to London, where CBS’s main facility was, while he scrambled to get to Vienna. He arrived there, via Berlin, two days later. On March 13th, with a German censor at his elbow, he went on the air describing the scene, and a star was born. So was the legend of CBS News.
Within a few years, Murrow’s eyewitness accounts of the bombing of London had made him a celebrity, and he had begun acquiring an entourage of handpicked disciples known as “the Murrow Boys,” a group that eventually included Eric Sevareid, Charles Collingwood, Richard Hottelet, and Howard K. Smith, all of whom went on to have major careers in network television. Murrow took notice of Cronkite, and offered him a job reporting for CBS from Stalingrad. Cronkite accepted, but when U.P. responded by giving him a raise Cronkite changed his mind. Brinkley thinks that this was the source of permanent friction between the two men.
Cronkite’s beat was the airbase at Molesworth, where he interviewed crews of the American Eighth Air Force after cross-Channel bombing runs. He went on a few runs himself; Brinkley doesn’t tell us how many, but probably only a few. They were extremely dangerous, and there was little journalistic value in repeating the experience. (Murrow went on more than twenty. He had an irrational relationship to danger.) Cronkite also covered the D Day invasion and the liberation of Europe, though he was not near the front lines. When the war ended, he was assigned to Moscow, where political conditions made real reporting impossible. He returned home in 1948, and was hired as a radio newscaster by KMBC, the CBS affiliate in Kansas City.
In 1950, he got his start on television, hosting a late-evening news recap on a CBS-owned station in Washington, D.C. Two years later, he was asked to cover the Republican and Democratic National Conventions after Murrow turned the assignment down. Brinkley suggests that Murrow, like most radio newsmen, didn’t take television seriously. What Murrow didn’t take seriously, though, was television news, then simply a fifteen-minute recitation of stories redacted from wire-service reports. (Network evening news shows did not go to thirty minutes until 1963; CBS was the first to do so.)
In fact, Murrow dominated CBS News in the early nineteen-fifties with two weekly half-hour programs in prime time. One was the hard-news “See It Now,” launched in 1951, which Murrow co-produced with Fred Friendly. Its most celebrated shows were the attacks on Senator Joseph McCarthy, broadcast live in March, 1954. Eight months later, McCarthy was censured by the Senate, and his career was finished. Murrow’s other program was the ultra-soft “Person to Person,” started in 1953, on which he interviewed celebrated people. Murrow also did newscasts five nights a week on CBS radio.
Cronkite’s career at CBS proceeded by fits and starts until the chairman of the company, William Paley, chose him to replace Douglas Edwards on the evening news, in 1962. During his nineteen years as the nightly news anchor, Cronkite also anchored or co-anchored CBS’s coverage of most of the major-party political conventions; he covered every NASA space shot, from Mercury to the Apollo moon landings; and he was on the air seemingly non-stop during national events like the Kennedy assassination and the Bicentennial celebration.
In 1981, when he was sixty-five, he voluntarily stepped down as news anchor. He was replaced by Dan Rather, his own choice for the post. He was given a show, “Walter Cronkite’s Universe,” but it was cancelled after a single season. (It was the usual thing when a star is involved: the network said the show had failed to find an audience; Cronkite said the network had failed to promote it.) In 1984, he co-anchored the Democratic National Convention with Rather. It was not a happy match, and that was pretty much it for Cronkite. Although he lived, in normal good health, for another twenty-five years, his television appearances were infrequent.
What accounts for his stature? Cronkite was on television a lot in his heyday, but his run of nineteen years as an anchorman was not exceptional. In a hyper-Darwinian medium in which few prime-time programs manage to survive and reproduce for more than three years, longevity is one of the hallmarks of the position. Between August, 1948, and March, 2005, CBS News had just three anchors (excepting the short, unhappy co-anchorhood of Connie Chung). Edwards had read the evening news for fourteen years before Cronkite replaced him. John Chancellor anchored “NBC Nightly News” for twelve years, and was succeeded by Tom Brokaw, who lasted twenty-two years. Rather was anchor for twenty-four years. Peter Jennings was behind the desk at ABC for thirty years. (One level down in the network pecking order: Chuck Scarborough is in his thirty-eighth year anchoring the news at WNBC, in New York. There is reportedly a portrait of Chuck hidden in an attic.)
Nor was “CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite” always the most watched TV news program. Before 1968, CBS’s evening news and its Convention coverage were both consistently beaten in the ratings by NBC, which featured Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, a very effective buddy show. Somewhere along the way, though, Cronkite turned into the gold standard for television newsmen. And he became known as “the most trusted man in America,” a phrase that Brinkley invokes repeatedly.
Cronkite read with a highly distinctive delivery his scripted portions of a twenty-minute news broadcast—what was left of the half hour after Sevareid’s commentary (which Cronkite resented) and the commercials—and he was an indefatigable ad-lib describer of live events. But he was a studio man. He called sources and interviewed Presidents, but, with one famous exception, he did not do much boots-on-the-ground or investigative reporting during his reign as anchor. Front-line reporting was not his job. And he was notoriously a softball interviewer. Broadcast network news lost viewers after Cronkite went off the air, but that wasn’t because people missed Cronkite. It was because they got cable.
When it comes to the substance of Cronkite’s reporting, Brinkley throws many bricks onto the Halberstam-was-wrong side of the scale. He thinks that Cronkite’s wartime coverage was blatantly biased. “Most correspondents supplied the puffery only as necessary, to remain on good terms with the P.R. officers,” he says. “Cronkite eagerly wrote propaganda for the good of the Allied cause. He was a reporter for Democracy.” Brinkley suggests that some of Cronkite’s dispatches during the liberation of Europe were deliberately misleading about Allied progress.
To beat the competition during the 1952 Republican National Convention, Cronkite and the news director, Sig Mickelson, bugged the room where the Party’s credentials committee met, then gave on-air reports based on what they overheard. Brinkley thinks that this helped secure the nomination for Eisenhower, who happened to be a close friend of Paley’s—though the claim is a stretch, and that does not seem to have been Cronkite’s intention. (The information about the bugging is not new, incidentally. The source is Cronkite’s own memoir, “A Reporter’s Life,” which was published in 1996 and became a No. 1 best-seller.)
Cronkite was genuinely fascinated by space exploration. Brinkley acknowledges this, but he thinks that Cronkite’s coverage of the space program was motivated partly by ambition—“the heavy truth about him in the late nineteen-fifties was that he had signed up to promote the U.S. Air Force, seeing space as a beat he could own”—and partly by Cold War politics. “Understanding that the American people were keen to beat the Soviet Union in space, Cronkite, the veteran sports broadcaster”—Cronkite had covered football occasionally when he was starting out—“cloaked his reporting in almost jingoistic, high-octane nationalistic, anti-communist rhetoric,” Brinkley says. “He was more NASA collaborator than reporter.”
Brinkley implies that Cronkite pulled his punches (he’s inconsistent about how deliberately) in his coverage of Lyndon Johnson, because of Johnson’s business relationship with CBS. In 1943, Lady Bird Johnson purchased a radio station in Austin; it became a CBS affiliate, and a source of considerable wealth, and Johnson developed a close association with the president of CBS, Frank Stanton. Brinkley also argues that, for many years, Cronkite was disinclined to be critical of Johnson’s Vietnam policies, because he supported military intervention in Southeast Asia himself and because he had a hard time believing that the government would lie.
Then, in 1968, everything changed—and this is the mighty brick on the other side of the scale. That is when Cronkite stopped being the quasi-official voice-over on the newsreel of American public life and became an actor in the events he covered. The catalyst was Tet. On January 30th, during Tet, the Vietnamese New Year, the North Vietnamese Army and the Vietcong broke a ceasefire and launched a surprise offensive in more than a hundred cities and towns in South Vietnam. The initial reports were of heavy American and South Vietnamese losses. (In the end, Tet was a military disaster for the North, but it was a political victory for them in the West.)
At CBS News, in New York, Cronkite read the A.P. wire and was stunned. “I thought we were winning the war!” he is supposed to have shouted to his producers. To his great credit, he decided to go to Vietnam and make his own assessment. The offensive was still under way when he arrived. He interviewed generals and G.I.s, and he travelled to places where the fighting was intense. Brinkley says that Cronkite and his team barely got out of Saigon alive.
The upshot was a CBS News special, “Report from Vietnam,” broadcast in prime time on February 27th. The program surveyed the state of the war as Cronkite had observed it, and, at the end, he delivered a personal commentary. (Brinkley tells us that it was likely entirely written by one of the show’s producers, Ernest Leiser.) The only realistic conclusion he could draw from what he had seen, Cronkite said, was that the war was a stalemate.
It was at this moment, Brinkley says, that Cronkite “became more significant than a mere Nielsen ratings winner on the nightly news merry-go-round.” (Actually, Cronkite had been losing the ratings race to NBC until very recently.) “He entered the main-game annals of American history.” Johnson is supposed to have watched the program, and, when it was over, to have remarked that if he had lost Cronkite he had lost Middle America. A little more than a month later, on Sunday, March 31st, Johnson announced, in a televised address, that he would not seek another term as President. The Vietnam broadcast and the Presidential reaction have become known as “the Cronkite moment.”
Soon after “Report from Vietnam” was broadcast, Cronkite attended a private, off-the-record lunch with Robert F. Kennedy, then the junior senator from New York. Brinkley says that Cronkite urged Kennedy to enter the Presidential race and run in the Democratic primaries against Johnson. Kennedy replied that he would if Cronkite would agree to run for the Senate from New York; Cronkite demurred. “Cronkite forfeited electoral politics,” Brinkley says, “to protect the integrity of American journalism.” On March 16th, Kennedy announced his candidacy for President. And from that point on, Brinkley thinks, it was Cronkite Unbound. He had shed his Cold War world view, and he had broken the barrier between news and opinion. The newsman had become a player.
The trouble with this inspiring little story is that most of it is either invented or disputed. Johnson’s reaction to the broadcast appears to have been first reported in Halberstam’s big book on the news media, “The Powers That Be,” which came out in 1979. Halberstam said that Johnson watched the broadcast in Washington, then said to his press secretary, George Christian, that “if he had lost Walter Cronkite, he had lost Mr. Average Citizen. It solidified his decision not to run again.” “It was the first time in American history that a war has been declared over by an anchorman,” Halberstam wrote. Brinkley quotes the sentence with approval.
But, as W. Joseph Campbell, following up on research by David Culbert, explains in “Getting It Wrong: Ten of the Greatest Misrepresented Stories in American Journalism” (2010), Johnson did not see “Report from Vietnam” when it was broadcast. He was in Austin, attending a birthday celebration for Governor John Connally. When Cronkite delivered his commentary, Johnson was giving a toast. There is no solid evidence that Johnson ever saw the show on tape, either, though the White House did tape it.
Interviewed about the incident in 1979, Christian was unable to recall exactly which comments of Cronkite’s Johnson might have been reacting to, or when, or what exactly Johnson had said. Later, in an oral-history interview, Christian was presented with the claim that Cronkite’s program was pivotal to Johnson’s decision not to run, and replied, “I don’t buy that. It didn’t quite happen that way.” Johnson’s speeches on Vietnam after February 27th were as hawkish as ever. Not only is there little evidence that the broadcast had an effect on Johnson; there is little evidence that it had an effect on public opinion. Opinion-poll numbers on Johnson and the war had already begun to shift. Even in the mainstream media, the view that the war could not be won was becoming conventional wisdom by 1968. The Times and the Wall Street Journal had already carried pieces suggesting that the conflict was unwinnable. (Brinkley implies that it was Cronkite’s commentary that emboldened the Journal to criticize the war, but the Journal editorial appeared four days before the broadcast.) On March 10th, three weeks before Johnson’s withdrawal, NBC broadcast a report on which Frank McGee said not that the war was “mired in stalemate,” which is what Cronkite had said, but that it was being lost.
At first, Cronkite himself didn’t think the program had made much of an impact. CBS did not receive an unusual number of letters after the show, he wrote in “A Reporter’s Life,” and “there was no reaction from the administration, official or unofficial.” He says that he later learned that the President “and some of his staff” had watched the broadcast with Christian and Bill Moyers. “ ‘The president flipped off the set,’ Moyers recalled, ‘and said: ‘If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America,’ ” Cronkite wrote. Cronkite doesn’t say where Moyers said this, but Moyers was no longer working in the White House in February, 1968. He had left in 1967 to become publisher of Newsday.
Contrary to what Halberstam seemed to suggest, Johnson did not make his decision to withdraw from the race for President after hearing Cronkite’s report. He had been contemplating it for some time: on the day he delivered the January, 1968, State of the Union address, he carried a piece of paper announcing his withdrawal in his pocket but decided not to use it. A much more likely catalyst for Johnson’s announcement on March 31st was Kennedy’s entry into the race. Theodore White’s account of Johnson’s decision to withdraw, in “The Making of the President 1968,” makes no mention of Walter Cronkite.
Did Cronkite expedite Kennedy’s decision? The claim that Cronkite told Kennedy that he had “a duty” to run has been around for a while. Martin Plissner, who was involved in CBS’s Presidential campaign coverage for many years, repeats it, without attribution, in “Control Room: How Television Calls the Shots in Presidential Elections” (2000). The only source Brinkley provides for that journalistically inappropriate conversation is a column published in the Washington Post, in 2009, by the man who was Kennedy’s press secretary at the time, Frank Mankiewicz. Mankiewicz, who is reportedly writing his memoirs, is now eighty-eight. Pressed about his story, in an interview with Brian Lamb, on C-SPAN, Mankiewicz was vague about when the lunch took place. Lamb showed him a clip of Cronkite’s Vietnam broadcast; Mankiewicz said he thought the meeting happened before that.
Brinkley ignores Cronkite’s own account of the conversation. In “A Reporter’s Life,” Cronkite says that he did not encourage Kennedy to enter the race; he only asked him why, given his unhappiness with the Administration, he didn’t run against Johnson. And he explicitly says that Mankiewicz was not present. It was just the two of them. Cronkite recalls speaking with Mankiewicz on the phone shortly afterward, and sensing that Mankiewicz was “a little miffed” that he had not been allowed to sit in. Either Cronkite was lying in his memoirs or this was a politically motivated rumor.
Brinkley notes that there has been some “scholarly controversy” about these events, and he even cites Campbell’s book. But he is determined to preserve the Cronkite moment by inserting the retrospective legend back into its slot in the postwar time line. When Johnson announced his decision not to run, Brinkley writes, Cronkite’s “Report from Vietnam” was “immediately seen as a catalyst by pundits in the Monday newspapers. . . . Cronkite turned dove, and the hawk Johnson lost his talons.” Searches of the print media on Nexis and ProQuest yield not a single mention of Cronkite in the reaction to Johnson’s speech. Few journalists thought that Cronkite’s skepticism about the war was a big deal. In 1968, you did not need an anchorman to know which way the wind blew.
The story behind Cronkite’s reputation as the most trusted man in America has also required some cosmetic attention. In 1972, an opinion research outfit, Oliver Quayle and Company, asked people which public figures they trusted most. Of the choices the company provided, Cronkite came out ahead, scoring seventy-three per cent. CBS was not reluctant to publicize this result; and, informed that he was now the most trusted man in America, Cronkite said, “I’ll be glad to wear the crown.” The poll “confirmed overnight what had long been apparent,” Brinkley writes: “Cronkite was the ultimate reliable source.”
The Quayle poll was a survey of voters in only eighteen states, and the question about trust was a “thermometer” question designed to measure the general level of trust in public figures. Cronkite was the only newsman on the list. All the rest were politicians. In second place behind Cronkite was “average senator” (sixty-seven per cent), followed by Edmund Muskie (sixty-one per cent). As Jack Shafer has noted in Slate, in a survey taken in 1974, specifically of attitudes toward television newscasters, Cronkite finished fourth in the best-liked category, behind Chancellor, Harry Reasoner, and Howard K. Smith. In 1985, a Gallup poll gave Cronkite the highest believability rating among (mostly) people in the news business. By then, of course, he was off the air.
Cronkite came to believe (and Brinkley agrees) that the man who put him out in the electronic cold was Rather. After stepping down as anchor, Cronkite could easily have gone to ABC News, which, under the new leadership of Roone Arledge, was building its brand aggressively, or to CNN, which had been founded in 1980. Both networks tried to hire him. But he chose to stay at CBS, thinking that the network would want to use him. It was a choice he came, quite bitterly, to regret. He concluded that Rather regarded him as competition, and that the network supported its new evening-news star. “It can be said that Rather was the only man whom Cronkite despised,” Brinkley writes.
Rather is not an easy person to like. Howard Kurtz, in his book on the television-news wars, “Reality Show” (2007), says that Rather had few real friends inside CBS News, where he worked for more than forty years. “Dan’s a liar,” Rather’s onetime “60 Minutes” colleague Morley Safer told Brinkley, “and an unbelievably paranoid guy.” But, in “Rather Outspoken,” Rather is unfailingly admiring of his reporter colleagues and his producers. Loyalty is his book’s great theme.
The book is principally a defense of the story that got Rather removed from the anchor job and ultimately from CBS—his 2004 “60 Minutes” report on George W. Bush’s service in the Air National Guard, in which Rather relied on documents, purportedly detailing Bush’s delinquency, of dubious provenance. There is also some career recapping in the book (before 1981, it was an amazing career), and efforts to explain some of the weirder moments during his tenure as anchorman, such as the night he walked off the set when coverage of a tennis match ran over and the network went black for six minutes. He does not explain his decision, on his first broadcast, to deliver the news standing up. (Brinkley says Rather made that decision minutes before airtime, because he refused to sit in Cronkite’s old chair.) It’s all written in the rhetorical blend of “Gladiator” and the Grand Ol’ Opry that is Ratherspeak. Kurtz notes that Rather is a person “who even in private could talk like a medieval knight.”
Rather has only agreeable things to say about Cronkite in “Rather Outspoken.” He does have disagreeable things to say about the president of CBS and the head of the news division. But the villain of his story is Sumner Redstone, who, at the time of the National Guard debacle, was the chairman of Viacom, which owned CBS. (Unwisely, Rather sued CBS and Viacom after he was let go. The case was tossed out.)
Rather’s belief is that he was thrown under the bus by corporation men who betrayed the legacy of CBS News to protect their profits. “From the days of Edward R. Murrow through civil rights, through Vietnam, through Watergate and into the 1980s,” he says, “reporting the truth, regardless of who was trying to cover it up . . . was a virtue unto itself and needed no further justification. This fundamental doctrine was handed down from CBS patriarch William S. Paley himself.” Of Rather’s many loyalties, the ultimate one is to that legacy. He really does believe in Camelot.
When people talk about the corporatization of network news, they mean that something that was once run in the service of truth and the public interest is now being run according to the principles of the marketplace. No one seems to remember that television networks are corporations to begin with. They are creatures of a particular political, financial, and legal environment, and, as that environment changes, they adapt. CBS didn’t become corporate when Viacom acquired it. The Columbia Broadcasting System was a corporation when Paley—already a wealthy man; his family was in the cigar business—bought it, in 1928.
Paley was nothing if not a businessman. A number of associates have testified to his obsession with profits. As Sally Bedell Smith showed in her biography of Paley, “In All His Glory” (1990), and as Lewis Paper described, in more detail, in “Empire: William S. Paley and the Making of CBS” (1987), Paley’s commitment to the news was largely a function of legal and political conditions—it varied as the conditions varied—and of his sense of news programming’s impact on his bottom line. CBS made much more money from its soap operas and situation comedies, deliberately dumb programs like “As the World Turns,” “The Beverly Hillbillies,” and “Gilligan’s Island.” A news division satisfied the “public service” requirements of the F.C.C., whose commissioners are appointed by the President, and which could at any time have broken the networks’ oligopolistic grip on the broadcast spectrum.
Paley’s CBS was not the place Dan Rather imagines. In “Getting It Wrong,” Campbell discusses Murrow’s 1954 “See It Now” programs on McCarthy. He notes, as have others, that those shows were very late in the day. People who knew Murrow wondered why he waited so long: by 1954, McCarthy had been hunting witches for four years, though not a single person he accused of being a spy or a subversive was ever proved to be one. Murrow and Friendly did not pretend that they were out front on the issue. Murrow read anti-McCarthy editorials from a number of newspapers on the first of the 1954 programs, and cited a speech attacking McCarthy that had been delivered on the Senate floor earlier in the day.
Murrow’s program was powerful television, in part because it used a lot of footage of McCarthy, one of the least telegenic of men. But McCarthy was ultimately brought down by the Army-McCarthy hearings, which were held from April through June of 1954. That was where Joseph Welch, the counsel for the Army, confronted McCarthy with his famous denunciation: “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” Although the hearings were televised, CBS didn’t carry them. ABC did; CBS ran soap operas. The television critic of the Times, Jack Gould, wrote that ABC, not Murrow, killed McCarthy. And even Friendly later admitted that it was ABC’s coverage, more than the “See It Now” program he had produced, that led to McCarthy’s demise.
Paley was upset by Murrow’s broadcast. CBS declined to buy newspaper ads for the program, and when the Paleys called Murrow after the show it was Mrs. Paley who did the talking. Paley might have been unhappy partly because of the Fairness Doctrine, which required networks to air opposing viewpoints, something with little appeal to sponsors. (McCarthy did go on CBS to respond to Murrow, though his loopy performance did not help his case.)
Paley was also allergic to controversy because he didn’t want to alienate viewers or politicians, and after 1954 he undertook to shut Murrow and Friendly down. The program started being moved around on the schedule; people in the industry began to refer to it as “See It Now and Then.” Finally, in 1958, after a stormy argument, in Paley’s office, between Murrow and Paley, with an astonished Friendly looking on, the show was killed. Five months later, Murrow gave a speech in Chicago criticizing television for “decadence, escapism, and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live,” and Murrow and Paley, who had been close friends since meeting in London during the war, did not have a civil conversation again until just before Murrow’s death, of cancer, in 1965.
The history of television news is studded with career-damaging journalistic train wrecks. Conflict was built into the system from the start: airtime is finite, and some percentage had to be sold to sponsors, most of whom preferred to be associated with the upbeat and the noncontroversial. Paley pushed Howard K. Smith out of CBS in 1961, because he thought that Smith’s sympathetic coverage of the civil-rights movement was too opinionated. (This opened the door for Cronkite to be named anchor.) In 1965, CBS reassigned Safer from Vietnam to London because of the reaction to Safer’s report on the torching by American soldiers of the village of Cam Ne. (Rather replaced him.)
Paley and Stanton forced Friendly out in 1966, when he made a fuss about CBS’s decision to stop broadcasting George Kennan’s testimony at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on the war in Vietnam. NBC, which had little going for it anyway in daytime programming, carried the proceedings; CBS showed reruns, including a fifth broadcast of an episode of “I Love Lucy.” Six years later, Paley ordered a news program on Watergate to be cut down, in response to complaints from Nixon’s aide Charles Colson. In short, Rather’s ouster after the National Guard broadcast belongs to a distinguished tradition.
It was always a battle getting controversial subjects and opinions on the air in the era of the broadcast networks, whose motto might have been “Offend no one.” Cable, which has a very different business model, is another story. Since cable viewers are billed just to watch, no matter which channels they prefer, opinion pays. The makers of cable news don’t need to attract everyone; they just need to establish a loyal niche audience. A piece of your monthly cable payment goes to Fox News, whether you care for it or not. A piece goes to MSNBC.
Journalism and history are about getting things right. But the past has many uses, and one of them is to inspire the present. People in any profession like to create an imaginary past, populated by the Ones Who Came Before. Sometimes, we figure these people to be narrow-minded fools and feel motivated to demonstrate our own superior tolerance and sophistication. More honorably, if not necessarily more accurately, we imagine our predecessors as nobler and braver than our small and anxious selves—as men and women who stuck up for principle and, by their righteousness, moved the world.
At the end of the first episode of “Newsroom,” the news anchor, played by a gruff Jeff Daniels, is congratulated by the head of the news division, a gruff Sam Waterston, after an aggressive report on an oil spill. A bottle of Scotch is produced, as befits the gruffness. The Waterston character wants to encourage his newsman to continue to speak his mind on the news he reports. “Anchors having an opinion isn’t a new phenomenon,” he tells him. “Murrow had one and that was the end of McCarthy. Cronkite had one and that was the end of Vietnam.” Don’t let it be forgot. ♦