For more than three decades ending in 2009 when he died, the name Walter Cronkite meant ‘credibility’. America’s most famous TV anchor/reporter Walter Cronkite was known as the “most trusted newsman” of the nation who gave the Americans the most accurate, objective and balanced news in an authoritative way.
The credibility was well earned because when he presented the CBS evening news, it was presumed that his team must have gathered some “behind the news” information, and that his bulletin will have some scoops and also that when in the end he will sign off by saying “That’s the way it is”, we knew that is the way it was.
He said in an interview (with this reporter) that it was not easy to come up with something like “that’s the way it is”. He figured out that the half-an-hour news bulletin could not have very long stories. So he thought he needed a “one line sign off” to sum it up. But it had to be a line that will lend itself to the mood of the top story of the day; a line where he could have a happy expression while saying it, or could be sad or sardonic. So that sign off lent itself to all three moods.
But when he used it the first night, the CBS President called saying he did not like it. He told Walter that when he says “That’s the way it is” he is presuming that he and his team will be correct all the time. It is misleading, he said, because there may be a time when it actually is not that way.
I couldn’t agree more with the CBS president because Walter’s demeanour and voice were so authoritative that when he said those words, every one believed him. But the president agreed to let him use it for some time and see the audience reaction, which eventually was positive and Walter kept using it until the end of his career at CBS Evening News.
Walter never thrust his personal views in the news. By not editorializing, he had earned so much credibility that when one day he said he thinks the United States should get out of Vietnam, the then president Lyndon Johnson openly declared that he had lost the country’s support for the Vietnam War. As he was reading the news one day, Cronkite said that he will have a personal view after the break. People like me wondered why a man, who carefully avoids editorial comments in the news, is going to express his own view on his national TV channel. Minutes later, he came back and said he was going to deliver his personal view. And then he said the most famous eight words that had a far reaching impact, “I think, we should get out of Vietnam.”
Cronkite served as anchorman and managing editor of the CBS Evening News from 1962 to 1981. During the interview Walter discussed the events he covered: the Kennedy assassination, the moon landing, the Vietnam War, and Watergate. But the ‘man landing on the moon’ story was his favorite. He said he was so emotional about it that when the actual landing took place, all he could say was “Oh, wow, we”. I wish I could have interviewed him today again about the digital onslaught and the changing nature of TV news. But here is an excerpt from an interview he gave four years before his death to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer.
BLITZER: Where does Walter Cronkite go when he wants to get the news?
CRONKITE: I go to my newspapers first. They’re more complete than broadcast [news] today. The misfortune with broadcasting today is that all... do not take enough time to give us all of the facts and the background... I wish that my network of CBS and the other two... would spend more time with their magazine programmes giving us documentaries to back the news and interpret the news for us, or broadcast time in the half-hour evening news report programs. As we all know, with the commercial time taken out ... we’ve got 17 or 18 minutes (in a half-an-hour news bulletin).
We’ve got one of the most complicated nations in the world, particularly today. We’ve got a complicated world in which we presume to be leaders. And we’re trying to cover all the important news in those two great bailiwicks in 17 or 18 minutes. We simply can’t do it. And, of course, meanwhile, you’ve got your 24-hour news on yours and other networks, with your talk shows added in. You’re doing quite a job in competition.
BLITZER: What would you do if you had your way? What would you advise news organizations to do right now?
CRONKITE: Give news a little more time and I request that they also, in their news time, not entertain. We’re not entertainers. We’re journalists. And we need more time to do our job well. So that’s the way it was with Walter Cronkite, who is needed desperately by today’s India.
(Author/analyst Ravi M. Khanna has covered South Asia for Voice of America from Washington and New Delhi for more than 24 years.)
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