Twilight of the television idols: Collective memory,network news and the death of Walter Cronkite

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.