Abstract
The death of legendary CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite in 2009 impelled former and present television journalists to revisit both Cronkite as an individual and the journalistic era of the 1960s and 1970s in which he worked. Through a qualitative analysis of television and National Public Radio (NPR) discourse in the four days following Cronkite’s death, this study examines emergent interpretive patterns in the memorializing of the anchor. Beyond a nostalgic return to the past, the death of Walter Cronkite provided the journalistic community with an occasion to discuss the state of television news. By comparing Cronkite and his era with the present, television journalists were able to contrast an era when television news was dominated by only a handful of powerful networks with the fragmented, heterogeneous news environment of the present. As this study demonstrates, collective memory reveals the conflicted state of television journalism through twin narratives of continuity linking a shared past to the present as well as a narrative of decline from an era of mass audiences and cultural power never to be repeated.
Introduction
The announcement of legendary CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite’s death touched off an avalanche of former and present television journalists taking to the air to revisit not only Cronkite’s career, but also the journalistic era of the 1960s and 1970s. Commemorations of Cronkite recalled both his journalistic practices and his cultural place during a time in which US network news broadcasts drew what would come to seem unimaginably large audiences every evening. Surveying this outpouring of reminiscences, Katie Couric, Cronkite’s eventual successor, described the force of this remembering: ‘Say the name Walter Cronkite and for so many people the memories come flooding back’ (CBS Evening News, 19 July 2009). Rather than remain locked in the past, these memories of Cronkite impelled the journalistic community to appraise the contemporary state of television news.
Faced with rapid and uneven change threatening their cultural authority and economic security at the time of Cronkite’s death in 2009, elite television journalists turned to memory to assess contemporary television news at a time when attaining such a perspective proved difficult. Adopting a nostalgic interpretation of an idealized past, journalists remembering Cronkite and retelling the origins of television news simultaneously confronted opinion-driven television news practices, media fragmentation, and the loss of concentrated journalistic power.
This study adds to research on collective memory and journalism by interrogating how journalists intertwine commemoration of a glorified past with the realities of professional decline. Past work on journalism’s remembrances of itself (Carlson, 2006, 2007; Meyers, 2007; Schudson, 1992; Zelizer, 1992) demonstrate how social actors draw on the past to legitimate practices and maintain cultural authority, yet memories of Cronkite provoke questions of what it means when the object of memory no longer applies to the conditions of the present. Cronkite certainly earned near universal praise and admiration, but his legacy can be useful to contemporary television journalists only in a vague sense and not as an elixir for restoring prestige and authority. Thus, discourse interpreting the meaning of Cronkite within the present context of television news gave rise to both a narrative of continuity linking norms and practices associated with Cronkite to present-day television news forms as well as a narrative of decline stressing the diminution of television news’s cultural authority during the past three decades. The incongruity between these positions underscores the complex and shifting relationship between the collective memory of journalism and changing forms of news.
What follows is an examination of how working and retired television journalists extended discourse surrounding the death of Walter Cronkite into a public occasion to interpret the state of television news. A review of collective memory as a conceptual framework for thinking about journalism is followed by a textual analysis of television and radio news transcripts in the four days following Cronkite’s death on 17 July 2009. Discussions of Cronkite articulated the cultural significance of his news work, the alleged power of television news over public opinion, and the decline of the centrality of network television news over the past three decades.
Collective memory and journalism
To study collective memory is to study the creation and circulation of shared understandings of the past (Halbwachs, 1992). As something shared by a community, collective memory differs from individual memory in that the focus is not on a sense of the self as an individual, but on how groups form and maintain common memories essential to members’ sense of groupness (Zerubavel, 2003). Whether a family or a nation, the collective remembering of the past acts as a cohesive force binding its members together by providing ‘common cultural currency’ (Edy, 2006: 3). Beyond a tool for creating solidarity, collective memory allows group members to draw from the past to legitimate present status (Connerton, 1989). Schudson argues that, on one level, ‘interest guides memory to its own purposes’ (1992: 53). Norms of behavior, social hierarchies, beliefs, and constructions of deviance are all maintained in part through an appeal to memory. Understanding cultural authority requires investigating how the power of tradition backs present formations.
Journalists occupy a prominent role within the creation and circulation of collective memory in modern society (Edy, 1999; Kitch, 2008). Although normatively positioned around the present – particularly with television’s ‘breaking news’ and ‘live’ reporting – news reporting continuously invokes the past to commemorate anniversaries (Kitch, 2005), and to make sense of catastrophes (Edy and Daradanova, 2006; Zelizer, 2002), social unrest (Edy, 2006) and political campaigns (Berkowitz and Raaii, 2010). But beyond utilizing memory to tell the news, journalists also rely on collective memory to support their own cultural authority as a powerful public institution central to society’s understandings of itself. As ‘communal autobiographers’ (Meyers, 2007: 723), journalists regularly bolster claims of social importance through recalling past performance (Zelizer, 1992), celebrating anniversaries (Kitch, 2005) and, as this study attests, commemorating prominent journalists (Carlson, 2006, 2007). In such instances, journalists construct meaning about their profession by rerunning past news content and extensively interviewing working and former journalists as well as other prominent cultural and political figures who regularly interact with journalists. What might be considered the internal discourse of community crafting meaning about its work becomes a public conversation (Meyers, 2007).
Studies examining how the journalistic community makes use of collective memory to argue for its continued cultural authority emphasize the creation of narratives of continuity that connect the profession’s past with its present. Such discourse establishes a lineage that firmly grounds news practices and norms in what has come before. To understand this process, it is useful to view journalism as an interpretive community in which its members share not only practices, but common frames for understanding these practices (Berkowitz and TerKeurst, 1999; Zelizer, 1993). For the community, memory is constitutive, as journalism ‘authenticates itself through its narratives and collective memories’ (Zelizer, 1992: 9). Thus, an interpretive community extends beyond mere professional affiliation to indicate a shared identification bolstered in part by how its members remember certain key events.
For journalists, collective memory serves as a strategic symbolic resource through which the community constructs and circulates specific meanings of events and individuals. For example, Zelizer (1992) tracks how television journalists turned the Kennedy assassination from a missed event into the moment of the medium’s cultural ascension – a story that also included Walter Cronkite. Similarly, journalists have long portrayed the Watergate scandal as a crowning achievement of a watchdog press. In particular, Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein became household names signifying quality news work despite much initial evidence that other governmental forces contributed to the downfall of President Nixon (Campbell, 2010). Yet over time the heroic-journalist version of Watergate became a foundational story legitimating investigative journalism and a yardstick from which journalists measured decline in subsequent years (Schudson, 1992; Zelizer, 1993). In retelling success stories, the journalistic community has placed less emphasis on being faithful to the facts of what happened and more on interpreting these stories in a manner that continues to support its authority.
The deaths of prominent journalists further occasion public instances in which connections between past and present are made possible through collective memory (Fowler, 2005). Working and retired journalists come forward to speak about the deceased and his or her era, often invoking a strong dose of nostalgia not only for the individual but for a whole era of news (Boym, 2001; Davis, 1979). Fond remembrances extend to wistful pining for bygone conditions in which news was created and consumed, regularly purported to be favorable to those of the present era (Usher, 2010). This past is unattainable not only because of changing media contexts but also because nostalgia is marked by an idealization of the past. Over time, negative aspects of earlier conditions fall away, leaving the impression of a mostly positive past to be compared to a conflicted present and uncertain future. Nostalgic visions of journalism are conservative in their essence, yet these incomplete visions continue to hold sway in how journalists interpret their work.
This contrast between nostalgic visions of journalism’s past and a critical appraisal of its present could be gleaned in the commemorative discourse following the deaths of newspaper columnist Mary McGrory in 2004 and television news anchor David Brinkley in 2003 (Carlson, 2006). Journalists remembering McGrory emphasized her shoe-leather reporting while, in turn, chastised present-day columnists for being less thorough. Meanwhile, by lauding Brinkley’s careful and calm speaking style, journalists used the commemorative discourse around his death to disparage a burgeoning era of cable television news hosts prone to outbursts – a pattern repeated with Cronkite. As these two cases demonstrate, journalists use collective memory strategically to promote particular visions of journalism rooted in nostalgic visions of the past while criticizing other forms viewed as corrupting the continuity between a revered past and a troubled present.
In the end, research connecting collective memory with journalism serves as a reminder that the past is not a neutral force, but a resource made to fit present and future needs. Journalistic arguments for cultural authority rest, in part, on how the meaning of past events and individuals is made relevant to current practitioners and audiences. This is not to dismiss the past as invented from whole cloth, but a recognition that as interpretive communities continue to evolve in the face of emergent external pressures and internal divisions, so too the valance of memory changes. Far from being stuck in the past, collective memory requires close attention to context. Such is the case of the death of Walter Cronkite in 2009.
This study examines how the journalistic community constructed the memory of Cronkite in the days following his death by focusing particular attention on how journalists reconciled largely nostalgic retellings of his professional and cultural influence with their understandings of the present state of television news. Given that access to news discourse is limited and purposive, we focus on who gets to make meanings about Cronkite, in which outlets this occurs, and how speakers define the past, present, and future of television news.
Method
To track the formation of collective memory, this study encompasses remembrances of Walter Cronkite broadcast on US national television and radio outlets. Transcripts were collected from both network news outlets – CBS, NBC, ABC, PBS – and cable news outlets – CNN, MSNBC, FOX News. In addition, the study includes National Public Radio (NPR) because it provided an outlet for past and present television journalists to discuss Cronkite’s career in the days following Cronkite’s death, and also because Cronkite’s broadcasting career included radio.
The Factiva database was used to collect all program transcripts from Friday 17 July 2009, the day Cronkite died, through Monday 20 July when memorialization of Cronkite essentially ended. This search yielded a total of 33 programs over the four-day period – 12 from cable news channels, 15 from network news broadcasts, and the remaining six from NPR. On CBS, Cronkite’s former network home, seven different news programs included discussions of his career. Although working from transcripts unfortunately precludes analyzing video components of the news programs, the archival availability of transcripts makes it possible to examine, as completely as possible, the body of remembrances of Walter Cronkite that occurred on national television and NPR.
Because the study of collective memory centers on the creation of meaning about the past, the authors employed qualitative textual analysis to analyze the transcripts. Through repeated close readings of these texts, we were able to identify emergent interpretive trends both within and across transcripts. The reliance on direct quotations in the following sections is used to exemplify this discourse while preserving the various speakers’ statements.
The double memory of Cronkite
The death of Walter Cronkite was itself not the real news story being told – only scant attention was paid to the cerebral vascular disease that caused Cronkite’s death, which at age 92 did not warrant surprise. Nor did the death of the retired anchor cause turmoil or raise any larger health or safety issues. Yet Cronkite’s death sparked hours of coverage on cable and network television news dedicated to questions of its meaning to the profession, delivering an outpouring of lavish praise from broadcast news journalists. On MSNBC’s Countdown (17 July 2009), David Shuster offered one such glowing tribute: ‘He was, by all accounts, a legendary, iconic symbol of broadcasting news greatness.’ On the same program former CBS correspondent Daniel Schorr summed up Cronkite’s significance for American culture: ‘Americans tended to see the world through … Cronkite’s eyes.’ Near universal praise and respect followed from both Cronkite’s contemporaries and his successors, but there is more to this discourse than mere praise.
Discussions of Cronkite’s career routinely transcended biography to reflect on a bygone era in which evening television news broadcasts attracted greater audiences. This slippage between Cronkite and the era in which he worked created a ‘double memory’ conflating individual with context. This move extended the scoop of the narrative around Cronkite from the personalized trajectory of his particular career to a broader narrative encompassing the rise and subsequent decline of network television news. Through this interpretive coupling, Cronkite’s death provided an opportunity for the community of elite television journalists to make sense of its path and to reflect on its state in the present. In evaluating Cronkite, commentators evaluated the past and present of television news in ways that added layers of meaning beyond one person.
The ability of journalists to situate Cronkite as a marker for a period of television news was aided by the large gap between his retirement as anchor of the CBS Evening News in 1981 and his death 28 years later in 2009. Cronkite became the emblem of television news in the 1960s and 1970s, a time in which only three networks divvied up the vast majority of television viewers. In the intervening decades, the news environment changed, first with the rise of 24-hour cable news networks and later with online news. Meanwhile, the cumulative audience for the evening network news declined precipitously from 50.1 million viewers at the time of Cronkite’s retirement in 1981 to 22.3 million when he died (Project for Excellence in Journalism, 2010). The remaining audience skews older as well – the average age of a CBS Evening News viewer is 61.5 – which limits optimism about the future of the evening news broadcast.
The double memory-making conflating Cronkite with the era in which he anchored the evening news emerged through repeated efforts to define the former as a symbol of the latter. For example, ABC World News Tonight anchor Charlie Gibson characterized Cronkite’s significance: ‘He was the paradigm’ (Good Morning America, ABC, 18 July 2009). Such statements erode boundaries between Cronkite and his context by suggesting Cronkite to be emblematic of his era. As journalists reflected on the anchor’s career, the story of Cronkite became the story of television journalism.
Any effort to analyze the creation of meaning around Cronkite and television news in the 1960s and 1970s must recognize the restricted range of speakers called on to offer their recollections and evaluations. Cronkite’s former CBS News colleagues – including Don Hewitt, Morely Safer, and Daniel Schorr – and current network anchors – Brian Williams, Katie Couric, and Charles Gibson – dominated the hours of television time dedicated to Cronkite. Former news anchors Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather also were frequent voices. These journalists criss-crossed each other’s networks to speak about their shared legacy, suggesting that the need to commemorate Cronkite supplanted competitive loyalties. The similar backgrounds of these anchors and their investment in hard network news led to a consolidated vision of television news based around the 30-minute evening newscast model. Meanwhile, these journalists either ignored or disdained other forms of television news such as entertainment or partisan-based commentary programs. Thus, by celebrating Cronkite, this community of elite television journalists also defended its vision against intrusion by others. By lauding Cronkite, they in turn lauded themselves through their commitment to this style of television journalism.
With regard to cable news, both MSNBC and CNN dedicated airtime to remembrances of Cronkite. MSNBC, a cable network increasingly prone to a partisan talk show format antithetical to the work of Cronkite, turned to its affiliation with NBC by bringing in former NBC News journalists – and some non-NBC journalists as well – to offer memories of Cronkite consistent with what the networks did. CNN devoted even more time to Cronkite also in a manner consistent with the network coverage. Rather than accenting increasingly divergent cable and network news practices, CNN and MSNBC mirrored the praiseful discourse of the networks. By contrast, the Fox News Channel gave scant attention to the story, except on The O’Reilly Factor (20 July 2009) where praise for Cronkite was used to criticize Dan Rather and to suggest a leftward political trajectory for the press since Cronkite’s era. Nowhere on cable did a significant counter-narrative arise suggesting the preferability of opinion-based television news.
The following sections explore how elite television journalists utilized collective memory in a double sense to recall both Cronkite as an individual and the professional and cultural context in which he worked. First, we show how discussions of Cronkite’s legacy went beyond his professional skill to position him within the broader cultural landscape of the 1960s and 1970s. The subsequent section narrows the focus to Cronkite’s reporting on Vietnam and its purported influence on public opinion and government policy. Finally, we consider how speakers explicitly used memory of Cronkite to comment on the state of television news in 2009 in which the survival of this form remains uncertain.
Uncle Walter: Cronkite’s cultural role
The melding of Cronkite memories with broader nostalgia for the era in which he worked arose as journalists went beyond Cronkite’s role in covering stories to suggest a larger cultural role in how audiences understood the news. Cronkite anchored the CBS News between 1962 and 1981, but memories of Cronkite tended to refer to roughly the tumultuousness of the decade between President Kennedy’s assassination and the resignation of President Nixon. Bookended by tragedy and scandal, the emergent narratives of this era portrayed Cronkite’s cultural role as exceeding his journalistic function. For example, Cronkite’s former CBS colleague Don Hewitt characterized this role using explicitly religious terms: ‘Walter became not only everybody’s anchorman, he was everybody’s minister, priest, and rabbi’ (Early Show, CBS, 29 July 2009). Hewitt’s augmenting of Cronkite’s well-known journalistic role with therapeutic and ritualistic ones suggests the anchor’s cultural authority stemmed from a combination of professional practices and a particular presence. Thus, when journalists remembered the stories Cronkite covered, they also adopted a nostalgic tone in trying to define the personal qualities that made Cronkite exceptional (Carlson, forthcoming).
Remembrances of Cronkite on CBS, his former network, commonly depicted Cronkite as not merely a news anchor, but as a source of social coherence during an era of upheaval. On the CBS Evening News (18 July 2009), Ted Koppel imbued Cronkite with a cultural function beyond the provision of trustworthy news:
Walter Cronkite was the man that most Americans turned to, to find out what was happening, to be comforted in times of stress, to be reassured that as bad as things might be, there was a feeling of continuity. He provided that continuity five nights a week.
On the same broadcast, Howard Stringer, a former CBS executive and later CEO of Sony, described this binding function more succinctly: ‘His authority and his calmness held the nation together … during critical times.’ Similarly, longtime correspondent Bill Plante portrayed Cronkite as reassuring during an interview on the CBS Early Show (20 July 2009): ‘it was Walter’s presence, his reassurance, that helped people make sense of those troubled times in the sixties and seventies.’ Meanwhile, the CBS News website described Cronkite as guiding the country: ‘Cronkite was the steadying force during a time of national sorrow’ (CBSNEWS.com, 2009). This move to advance Cronkite’s cultural role beyond providing information differentiated Cronkite from the present not only by the size of his audience, but also through his relationship with viewers as a reassuring guide. That discussions of this role arose in CBS programs may relate to the ratings decline of the Evening News from first place during Cronkite’s tenure to third place in 1995 and on through the present (Project for Excellence in Journalism, 2010). With the network’s evening newscast mired in the ratings, recalling viewers’ emotional connection to Cronkite served as a nostalgic reminder of an earlier time in which CBS News stood above its competitors.
Outside of CBS, commentators in other television news outlets specified ‘trust’ as Cronkite’s defining characteristic, often in reaction to the social strife occurring during his time as news anchor. Assessments of Cronkite as ‘The Most Trusted Man in America’ counterpoised his steadfastness with rapid cultural change stirring around him. Cronkite’s ability to reassure viewers was seen as stemming from the trust they placed in him to help navigate uncertainty. CNN’s John Roberts, a former CBS correspondent, noted this trust:
[A]nything that came out of Walter Cronkite’s mouth, you could believe, because you knew that he believed in it and that he felt it to his core. (Campbell Brown, CNN, 17 July 2009)
In remembering Cronkite, Roberts and others continually contrasted Cronkite’s ability to elicit trust with an excess of public distrust aimed at journalists in 2009. Daniel Schorr also picked up on the issue of waning trust to discuss a larger cultural shift:
His legacy is that there was a time when people told us things that we believed in and trusted in inherently. Nowadays, however, is he right, is he wrong, whatever – the legacy of Walter Cronkite was trust. (Weekend Edition, NPR, 18 July 2009)
Schorr nostalgically contrasts trust as a quality of both Cronkite and other institutions of his era with changing perceptions of journalism in the twenty-first century.
Reflections on Cronkite’s trustworthy and reassuring manner regularly employed familial language. Rather than a distant celebrity broadcasting to millions of people from a New York studio, journalists expressed their trust in Cronkite as if he were family. As a token of this closeness, many commentators chose to use the nickname ‘Uncle Walter’, as Tom Brokaw remarked:
It was not by accident that he was often referred to as Uncle Walter, the avuncular figure who seemed to be coming over on Thanksgiving morning to help you get ready for the dinner that night and then sharing with the rest of the family the stories of what were important in their lives. (Saturday Today, NBC, 18 July 2009)
The adjective ‘avuncular’ derives from the Latin for ‘maternal uncle’ and demonstrates that while a product of the one-way mass communication model of news, Cronkite managed to establish feelings of a deeper relationship with his viewers. The seemingly collapsed distance between televised events and viewers’ living rooms was also cited by Good Morning America anchor Kate Snow:
He was part of the family bringing the world into our living room every single night, from JFK’s assassination, landing on the moon, the Vietnam War, we remember it vividly. (Good Morning America, ABC, 18 July 2009)
Although the news stories Snow mentions were followed closely by millions at a time when network newscasts drew vast audiences, memories repeated throughout the coverage of Cronkite’s death indicated a more personal connection.
In addition to portraying Cronkite as familial, the use of ‘Uncle Walter’ suggested a custodial dynamic between television journalists and their audiences. Positive memories of Cronkite as close, familiar, and reassuring indicated a general desire for journalists to copy this role in the present. Journalists lauded Cronkite for, as Andy Rooney put it, ‘giving the American people what they needed to know, not what they wanted to hear’ (All Things Considered, NPR, 17 July 2009). ABC anchor Charles Gibson advocated for this vision of the news to be retained: ‘it is what people need to know that you need to keep in mind. And I think that’s what Walter’s example is’ (Campbell Brown, CNN, 17 July 2009). In trying to understand the appeal of Cronkite that made him so successful, journalists came away with a vision of television journalism that locates arguments for cultural authority in the work journalists do to judge what is worthy of the public interest, even if the public is resistant.
In summary, memories of Walter Cronkite in the days after his death merged his journalistic role with a bygone cultural role for television news in which journalists were entrusted with helping audiences cope with social change. Beyond reading news headlines, journalists recalling Cronkite’s work imbued him with familial qualities of being a reassuring guide, trusted to make decisions regarding newsgathering on the audience’s behalf. This nostalgic view positioning the evening network newscast as a central institution in American life at one level suggests a continuity with persistent forms of television news stretching into the present. Yet these memories simultaneously give rise to comparisons between past and present suggesting the decline of network news, a pattern running through the following sections.
News as power: Cronkite, Johnson, and Vietnam
Of the 19 years’ worth of stories Cronkite covered as CBS Evening News anchor, three specific events repeatedly surfaced following his death: the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy, his 1968 reporting from Vietnam following the Tet Offensive, and the moon landing in 1969. For Kennedy’s death and the moon landing, Cronkite was most often remembered for his genuine display of emotion – actually tearing up on air for a few seconds while delivering the confirmed announcement of Kennedy’s death, enthusiastically babbling ‘whew, boy’ as Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon. By contrast, Cronkite’s reporting on Vietnam has, over time, come to be remembered within journalism history as a controversial example of the power television news wielded in the network era (Campbell, 2010).
Following the Tet Offensive in early 1968, Cronkite went to Vietnam to report on the status of the war, which culminated in a 27 February 1968, special titled ‘Report from Vietnam: Who, What, When, Where, Why?’ Cronkite closed the broadcast with an editorial statement concluding that the war could not be won and that a ceasefire should be negotiated. Weeks later, President Johnson would make the unexpected announcement that he would not run for a second term, a decision often traced back to his supposed reaction after viewing Cronkite’s editorial: ‘If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.’
Throughout the days following Cronkite’s death, a popular-but-erroneously condensed version of the story emerged locating Cronkite as the central individual responsible for shifting public opinion of the Vietnam War. For example, in an interview with Katie Couric, CNN’s John King presented a neat version of the Vietnam reporting and Johnson’s reaction:
I want to take you back in time. Walter Cronkite goes on the air in February 1968 and he says on the air that the United States is mired in a stalemate. And President Johnson, we would later learn in the history books, told his aides: ‘If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.’ Will any television anchor in today’s age, when the business is so different, ever have that power? (Anderson Cooper 360, CNN, 17 July 2009)
Couric automatically assented before moving on to how media fragmentation undercuts any such power today. Journalists often repeated this account as exhibiting Cronkite’s power, although the evidence supporting it is thin. As Hallin (1986) argues, public opinion had already shifted against the war by 1968, attributable more to disagreements among elected officials than to news reports. Cronkite’s editorial coincided with this ongoing sea change in how people thought about the Vietnam War.
In addition to Cronkite’s putative power over public opinion of the war, Cronkite’s influence on Johnson is also subject to debate. In recalling Johnson’s alleged assessment of having lost public support following Cronkite’s editorial, journalists regularly used the passive voice to avoid attribution. For example, in a package story on Cronkite, ABC’s Nightline (17 July 2009) reported that ‘Johnson is said to have lamented if I’ve lost Walter Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America’ (emphasis added). In another vague statement, CNN’s Anderson Cooper prefaced the quote as something Johnson ‘reportedly said’ (Anderson Cooper 360, CNN, 17 July 2009). In spite of little evidence supporting Johnson’s supposed statement – and much casting doubt on its authenticity – the phrase has become familiar within journalistic lore (Campbell, 2010). In the context of the memory-making following Cronkite’s death, it took on added significance in establishing Cronkite’s stature as well as indicating the power of television news.
Despite the dubious claim that Cronkite had single-handedly altered public opinion and ended Johnson’s hope for a second term, journalists portrayed the episode as proof of Cronkite’s unparalleled power as news anchor. On PBS’s NewsHour with Jim Lehrer (20 July 2009), Gwen Ifill explained this power as a matter of trust: ‘Cronkite became the most trusted man in America during a time when a single broadcaster’s voice could change the course of history.’ By propping up a version of Cronkite’s Vietnam reporting that inflated his influence, journalists could in turn transform this episode in a benchmark from which to measure subsequent decline. This occurred through journalists expressing awe at the alleged influence of the Vietnam editorial before noting how different it was for television news in 2009. On CNN, Larry King expressed this fall from power for television journalists: ‘[Cronkite] could change public opinion. No one broadcaster could do that today. No one can even touch it’ (17 July 2009). King’s colleague Wolf Blitzer similarly suggested ‘that level of influence certainly doesn’t exist today’ (Campbell Brown, 17 July 2009). Likewise, a report on ABC’s Nightline (17 July 2009) recalled the mythical version of Cronkite’s Vietnam reporting before remarking:
That really couldn’t happen today, one journalist so trusted by so many that his words could matter so much. It’s a different world now, and the way it is just ain’t the way it used to be.
In sum, inflated accounts of Cronkite’s Vietnam editorial demonstrate the malleability of collective memory. Speakers shape past events to serve their needs in the present. In this instance, television journalists nervous about declines in viewership embellished what actually occurred in 1968 in a manner that inflated not only Cronkite’s influence on public opinion, but the power of television news during the height of the pre-cable, pre-internet network era. Such recollections called attention to Cronkite’s position as anchor within a television structure consisting mostly of three choices at a time when larger numbers of viewers routinely watched the evening news. In creating this gulf between past and present, journalists turned the editorial into a symbol separating an era of powerful network television news from a present in which such power appears impossible. Despite unsupported assertions about this power, the story became a yardstick from which to measure the decline of network television news over the four decades between Cronkite’s editorial and his death – a topic taken up in the next section.
The end of powerful television news
Throughout the four-day stretch of Cronkite commemoration, journalists often focused on the past through stories about his career and life and the replaying of a parade of clips showing Cronkite announcing Kennedy’s death, proclaiming the Vietnam War to be unwinnable, and exuberating over the first moonwalk. However, in important ways discussions of Cronkite did not limit themselves to the past. Instead, remembrances of Cronkite created a space for television journalists to discuss the current state of television news – and news in general – using Cronkite as the gauge from which to measure journalistic performance and the changing role of television news as an institution in American life at the time of his death in 2009.
Efforts to use Cronkite’s past to talk about the present required defining Cronkite as a symbol of both a set of news practices and a news environment. With regard to news practices, journalists repeatedly and emphatically emphasized Cronkite’s work ethic and adherence to norms of objectivity as markers of value above other personal qualities that might explain his success. Cronkite’s devotion to objectivity was commonly invoked, despite, as the above section indicated, ample attention to moments when Cronkite veered away from objectivity. These incidents were marked by displays of emotion – as in the moon landing and the Kennedy assassination – or opinion – as in his editorial following the Tet Offensive. While they were widely acknowledged, journalists set aside these incidents as atypical departures from his standard practices. In doing so, the community preserved an image of Cronkite as a strict devotee of objective news in contrast with the rise of opinion in contemporary television news.
Support for an image of Cronkite as a hardworking, objective journalist could be found in efforts by former colleagues to distinguish Cronkite as a reporter – as well as managing editor – rather than merely a news reader. Daniel Schorr described Cronkite’s own view: ‘He didn’t want to be just another pretty face … And he didn’t want to be simply handed copy all the time’ (Countdown, MSNBC, 17 July 2009). Don Hewitt, another CBS coworker, recalled Cronkite’s work practices:
Walter read assiduously. He talked to everybody who could possibly know something more about a story than he did. He was the newsman’s newsman. (Larry King Live, CNN, 17 July 2009)
Apart from identifying Cronkite as a reporter rather than a news reader – his autobiography is even titled A Reporter’s Life – journalists also portrayed him as the epitome of objective news.
The portrayal of Cronkite as embodying professional attributes of neutrality and thoroughness while reaching a large audience created interpretive space for journalists to lament the state of the news in 2009. Frequently, journalists contrasted the era of Cronkite as a time of collective viewing with a modern television news landscape of multiple choices arrayed across the political spectrum. In this argument, viewers migrated away from a view of news as an authoritative and neutral accounting of events – with the presumption of evening broadcast news as non-ideological – to outwardly partisan programs reaffirming their beliefs while eschewing other potential views. NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams, a self-professed Cronkite disciple, lamented the widespread acceptance of such journalistic trends:
These days you can wake up and there’s already a cable network that agrees with you and you can watch it all day in total agreement with … its political bent, and it’s hard to conjure up the past, where there were just three choices on television. (Larry King Live, CNN, 17 July 2009)
Implicit in this critique is a defense of a limited array of network news outlets as a more appropriate model for television than a diffuse assortment of programs featuring partisan commentary. Similar to Williams, NPR’s Scott Simon ended a commentary lauding Cronkite by invoking the loss of popular, objective news for audiences who instead:
look for like-minded people who want a view of the news that will reassure them that they’re right, that that’s the way it is. But in the welter of news sources, who will they trust to tell them when it’s not? (Weekend Edition, NPR, 18 July 2009)
This nostalgia for non-opinion news, while still the dominant form of network television news at the time of Cronkite’s death, coincided with a critique of the shift from a small number of general audience news outlets to a wider array of outlets in which no one television news source dominates. Fragmentation had made it impossible for news outlets to reach a wide swath of the country, a point made by news producer Susan Zirinsky:
There’s just a lot more flashlights out there now, and sometimes … it’s harder to have a unique voice. The cacophony of the world that you and I inhabit to this day is so loud that you have that dramatic impact. It’s harder today. It’s the nature of the beast. (Campbell Brown, CNN, 17 July 2009)
Concerns over audience fragmentation prompted two common questions in televised remembrances of Cronkite: whether Cronkite could have succeeded in the modern news environment and whether it would ever be possible to have another Cronkite. Most commentators answered negatively, simultaneously reinforcing the singularity of Cronkite while providing room to comment on the news context of 2009. For example, Ted Koppel rejected the notion that another Cronkite could appear because of the expansion of media outlets and resulting audience fragmentation:
You might have a perfectly talented journalist who is able to combine all the wonderful qualities that Walter had, but the environment is so different today with the literally hundreds of channels that are available on cable television, satellite television. (Talk of the Nation, NPR, 20 July 2009)
To Koppel, the explosive growth not only of news networks, but of television generally prevented any individual journalist from claiming the cultural status once held by Cronkite.
Other journalists shifted the focus from Cronkite as an individual to express their unabashed nostalgia for a media era dominated by a few well-watched television channels. On his CNN program Reliable Sources (19 July 2009), media critic Howard Kurtz took the meaning of Cronkite a step further to symbolize a bygone era of American culture:
[Cronkite] also represents an era that has slipped away, an era of mass audiences, before cable, before the Internet, before bloggers and Twitterers, when much of the country waited for the headlines at 6:30. An era when the news business was still held in high esteem, when the anchor of the CBS Evening News could be called ‘the most trusted man in America.’ And so in mourning this 92-year-old man who died Friday night, we’re also mourning an America that has faded into the mist of history.
Here Cronkite is made to represent an entire cultural era now considered remote because of shifting levels of trust in institutions and the transformation of media. In particular, the number of media outlets has greatly expanded between the era of Cronkite and the present. As a result, according to NPR’s Scott Simon, ‘No one person in news will probably have that kind of audience and authority again’ (Weekend Edition, NPR, 18 July 2009). Notably, this was not a neutral statement by Simon, but one tinged with regret.
The death of Cronkite invoked strong feelings among journalists charging that the diversification of news through the fragmentation of television outlets and the rise of online news sources has been socially detrimental. This perspective was visible in an exchange on the CBS Early Show (18 July 2009) between current NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams, his predecessor Tom Brokaw, and Early Show anchor Harry Smith. In praising Cronkite, Williams also promoted the era of strong network news:
[I]t’s unfashionable to say this, but I think in one aspect, we were a little bit better off as a country when we only had two, three choices … in the evening to watch. In this respect, it did give us a communal experience. … [W]here I grew up the houses were so small, we could see the light reflection in our neighbors’ windows on either side of us enough so that we knew that they, too, were watching … Cronkite. Not much diversity of media or viewpoint there … but it gave us kind of a central notion of our nation and our world. And we tended to talk about it the next day because we kind of knew and assumed that we were seeing the same thing the night before.
Smith quickly reiterated Williams’s defense of the network news era:
[W]hat’s interesting [is] this notion that these networks would say this half hour of time is going to be actually devoted to news, and it created a tone for the culture. Because, as Brian suggested, we all watched and we all did talk about it the next day. The culture has changed a lot. And I think maybe we were, as Brian suggested, better served in that time.
As others did, both Williams and Smith extolled an era of mass audiences in which viewers shared the common experience of watching the same newscast – or a similar one broadcast at the same time. What was left unsaid was the corresponding authority such conditions granted to television journalists at the time. Brokaw, however, while still an effusive supporter of Cronkite, took issue with the nostalgic vision of Williams and Smith by pointing to the restrictions of having only three rather homogenous news outlets for the bulk of national television news:
I think the country is, probably, when you stand back, better off to have the many choices that it has. … There were some big stories that the Evening News and all of its glory, the NBC Nightly News, the ABC News didn’t pay quite enough attention to. We saw the world through the prism of white, middle-aged men who lived mostly on the Eastern Seaboard.
The clash of viewpoints expressed above illustrates the complexity of comparing different eras of news. In Cronkite, Williams and others like him found an argument supporting a news environment defined by the exclusivity of outlets with the premise that these outlets created quality news shared by everyone. While perhaps alluring to Cronkite’s television news heirs, Brokaw complicated this vision by pointing to problems that arise with a limited number of analogous news outlets. A homogenous set of journalists produces news on fewer topics covering fewer viewpoints.
To summarize, memories of Cronkite became a vehicle for interpreting the present state of television news. Cronkite’s death provided an opportunity to nostalgically reminisce about an era of network television before its power had been diluted by the spread of cable and satellite services, and now, online sites. Journalists, both contemporaries of Cronkite and his successors, constructed Cronkite as the ultimate measure of television journalism before turning to a critique of the present.
Conclusion: Continuity and decline
As an iconic figure in television news, it is not surprising that Walter Cronkite received the amount of coverage that he did following his death at age 92. Cronkite’s run as anchor coincided with the shift to a 30-minute news broadcast in 1963 and lasted through the height of the broadcast television audience before audience decline set in during the early 1980s. His death occasioned a four-day celebration of his life and work, peppered with a trove of clips and stories from colleagues. But it was also a moment in which the journalistic community turned to the perspective afforded by collective memory to consider its own condition in 2009. These reminiscences of Cronkite yielded a complicated narrative comprising two interrelated yet somewhat contradictory interpretations of Cronkite’s meaning for the community, that of continuity and decline for broadcast television news.
Narratives of continuity encompass efforts to enjoin past and present within an enduring tradition. The devotion of many hours of television time to memories of Cronkite suggests the continued relevancy of Cronkite to television journalism despite the generational gap separating his retirement and death. Over this course of televised remembering, Cronkite’s death supplied access to past events useful for speakers in the present wishing to argue for the continued authority of television news. Through Cronkite, television journalists were able to defend a particular style of mass-consumed television news emphasizing neutrality and objectivity. But beyond merely lauding a set of practices, the veneration of Cronkite implied that broadcast television news deserves a seat atop the hierarchy of US journalism and the consequent cultural authority accompanying this role. It is in this vein that journalists waxed nostalgically not merely for Cronkite as individual, but for a media landscape in which a more limited television news sector wielded power over public opinion and collective understandings of the world. In this view, the concentration of audience attention was deemed superior to supplying a plurality of voices and opinions. Or, more critically, by extolling the mass audience characteristics of the bygone broadcast television era, journalists largely ignored the inherent constraints of such limited coverage that left many stories unreported and many groups unrepresented.
Despite appealing to a narrative of continuity connecting Cronkite to the present, journalists simultaneously adopted a narrative of decline for broadcast television news. Although still lauding Cronkite, elite television journalists situated him as the symbol of a fundamentally different era of influence for television news, one that was now gone and would never return. For example, in recalling Cronkite’s supposed power in changing public opinion regarding Vietnam, reporters looked past its historical impact to instead express awe at the ability of a journalist to wield such power over public opinion. It wasn’t the history of the Vietnam War that was invoked, but the memory of the cultural role of television news. With the expanded media landscape of 2009, Cronkite’s usefulness to contemporary television journalists remained quite limited. His value as a model for future journalists could only be articulated in an abstract sense of encouraging familiar normative commitments to accuracy and seriousness. Attempts at greater specificity failed because of the insistence of Cronkite’s singularity and the fleetingness of his era. At the time of his death, Cronkite no longer offered a workable template for television journalism.
This mixture of continuity and decline indicates how the collective memory of journalism cannot be simplified into a linear narrative in which journalists in the present draw authority from the veneration of their predecessors. Instead of leveling journalistic history, memory instead reveals deep-seated uncertainty rampant within a television news sector grappling with declining audiences, proliferating choices, and a lack of cohesion regarding what television news should look like. While it may seem like a paradoxical claim on its surface, the present study demonstrates the utility of memory for analyzing contemporary change within journalism. Many measures exist of the altered material conditions of the news landscape, but memory grants access to the interpretive conditions of journalists seeking to understand their changed environment and to find new ways of working within their new constraints as well as new modes for supporting their claims to cultural authority.
The collective memory of Cronkite, in particular, shows how journalists confronted with change cling nostalgically to a glorified and overly simplified past. This idealization of an earlier period of television news leads to an inherently conservative position that constrains the community’s ability to imagine positive change for the future. While nostalgia may be comforting, in the end, television journalists’ remembrances of Cronkite found no panacea for fragmented audiences, competing television news formats, widespread distrust of journalists, and the growing influence of online news. Instead, these journalists took the opportunity of Cronkite’s death to peer back longingly at a departed era when a few television networks spoke to so many at one time.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank Caroline Jack for her help with the data collection as well as the anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback.