TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/81/81.42

Text File | 1992-09-25 | 12KB | 223 lines

                                                                                March 9, 1981

PRESS

The Age of Cronkite Passes


For nearly 20 years now, millions of Americans have first
learned about the bad news--and sometimes the good--from the
reassuring baritone of Walter Cronkite. With his retirement
this week as anchorman from the CBS Evening News goes the man
who more than anyone else has shaped and given stature to the
role. In the fickle high-risk arena of television, where
admiration swiftly changes to boredom or dislike, Cronkite, "the
most trusted man in America," has been the stablest on-screen
presence of them all. His departure is forcing a restudy, at
all three networks, of the job itself.

Being anchorman isn't something that everybody can do, but it
is something that hundreds can. Millions of advertising
dollars, and each network's prestige, turn on how well this or
that person delivers roughly the same news, introducing brief
snatches of picture coverage and reading words that usually were
written by others. Can Cronkite's replacement, Dan Rather, with
that four-square forthrightness of his, and his adrenalized
ambition, keep the loyalty of those accustomed to Cronkite's
businesslike, low-key delivery?  Or will NBC's John Chancellor,
another in the trusty Cronkite mold, steal away some of CBS's
audience?  Will ABC news, which tried to de-emphasize the
anchorman and gambled on hi-tech flashiness instead, be able to
lift itself out of third place?  The air is full of expensive
uncertainty.

Cronkite, who won't be 65 until November, is leaving the Evening
News earlier than expected. He does so to make way for Rather,
to whom CBS is paying $8 million over a five-year period to keep
him from being raided by ABC. But if Cronkite is relaxed about
stepping down from the Evening News, he seems the only one at
CBS who is.

Rather is a hustling, intense reporter with a staccato style.
Will he be able, like Cronkite, to leave a steadying impression
of calm underneath all the turmoil of the news?  In Rather's
eagerness to keep his commitment to 60 Minutes too, he has been
taping so many segments in advance that his smile has lately
seemed a little tenser. He also knows that around CBS there
were those who would have preferred Roger Mudd (who, being
passed over, defected to NBC) or the amiable Charles Kuralt,
whose CBS morning news has become something of a hit. The other
two networks are also in the mood for change, but are waiting to
see how well Rather works out.

Roone Arledge, the man who has upgraded ABC's World News
Tonight, is convinced that with new technologies in news
gathering and the departure of Cronkite, "no one person will be
that important to an evening broadcast."  But considering CBS's
twelve-year dominance of the rating under Cronkite, it could be
argued that there is still something up to date about Cronkite's
old-fashioned approach to the news.

Cronkite's believability rests on his ability, in an artificial
environment, to project naturalness. It is a quality Cronkite
shares not so much with other anchormen, but with Ronald Reagan.
Both are sons of the Middle West who, in other surroundings and
in more expensive suits, are determined to remain so. Both
convey the impression that "what you see is what you get."  What
you don't see may not be contrary to what you do see, but it is
different. In both Reagan and Cronkite, there is obviously more
than easygoing amiability.

Back in their Middle Western days, both men did radio broadcasts
of away-from-home baseball games, when a minimal telegraphed
strike-or-ball message had to be fleshed out into an
imaginative description of a game unseen. For Reagan (called
Dutch then, though unlike Cronkite he has no Dutch in him) it
was good actor's training. Cronkite says with a grin:  "If I'd
been Dutch Cronkite and stayed with baseball, I might be
President now."  Instead, this week he is interviewing the
President. For Cronkite those game broadcasts were valuable
experience in ad-libbing, but also an introduction to show biz
in the presentation of the news, a subject that disturbs him to
this day.

Given the big salary, the chance to participate in history, to
mix with the great and to be sought out by the celebrated, given
the obsequiousness of headwaiters and the adulation of admirers
(which he enjoys but puritanically tries not to enjoy too much).
Cronkite has done a reasonably good job of holding self-
importance at bay.

In his final week as anchorman Cronkite is at his desk as the
bright light turn on about ten minutes before the broadcast, in
the low-ceilinged newsroom on Manhattan's West Side. In
shirtsleeves, Cronkite reads through the copy with a stopwatch,
addresses a question over his shoulder to whoever should know
the answer ("Don't we have any more on this?"), occasionally
turns to the typewriter to rephrase a sentence. Nobody speaks
to him unless spoken to. The same sort of invisible cocoon
isolates a professional football coach on the sideline from the
players around him. Someone unobtrusively places Cronkite's
jacket behind him. He stands up, puts it on, sits again, shoots
his sleeves, exposing those large cuff links. The CBS Evening
News, to be watched by 18.5 million people, is on the air.

"I get very impatient with what I think are impositions and
idiocies or incompetence or sloppiness," Cronkite says. "I'm
a very difficult boss. I'm also very impatient with myself.
If I've dropped the ball, I start screaming and hollering at the
entire production. I hate that in myself. I haven't been able
to cure it."

The slightly beat-up set, with Cronkite in the middle of what
looks like a newspaper copy desk, is the way Cronkite wants it.
Let other networks experiment with big anchor desks like
airline counters, glitzy overhead lighting like a Vegas hotel
lobby, or space-age backdrops of multiple TV screens--Cronkite
knows the value, in maintaining listener loyalty, of what he
calls the "old shoe" factor. It irritates him when young
interviewers ask him how much of the broadcast he writes, as if
this alone distinguishes a newsman from an announcer (his
written contribution is "purely whimsical--from 0% to 50%,"
Cronkite says; Chancellor writes more of his). The choice and
editing of stories matter more to him.

Cronkite is an old-fashioned newspaperman, a good one and proud
of it. He was in the first group of war correspondents to fly a
bombing mission over Germany. After the war, he covered
Stalin's bleak and hostile Moscow for United Press. Out of his
U.P. experience, and his concern that so many millions get their
news only from TV, Cronkite tries to see to it that CBS runs
more news items, even brief ones, than the other networks. He
persists in the mannerisms and discipline of the older medium
as if this guarantees his integrity--and the integrity of the
news--in television's less pure environment of hucksters, big
money and pizazz.

Television's personality cult, though it has enriched him,
troubles Cronkite. The inflated salaries of anchormen, when
compared, he says, with those of "print journalists who for
heaven sakes are as good or vastly better," clearly reflects
marketable personality. His defense is a little pat:  "Compared
to rock-'n'-roll singers, we ought to make more than we make.
Compared to teachers and newspaper journalists, we're vastly
overpaid."  He adds:  "I don't even like looking at tapes of
myself. I probably could improve my performance immensely if
I studied what I'm doing. The idea repels me, I don't want to
be a personality, a presenter, a show-biz thing. I resisted a
long time going to contact lenses. When a person needs glasses
why do they have to hide the fact?  That was a big hassle around
here."

CBS tried to devise special glasses for him that wouldn't
reflect the strong lights. Nor would Cronkite move from the
newsroom to a high-ceilinged studio where "they could have saved
me some years in appearance on the air by proper lighting."  He
was insisting on a point:  "It's not the picture of me that
counts. It's what we are saying and doing."  John Chancellor
says:  "The fact is, those of us who are serious middle-aged
journalists have sheltered in the lee of his success."

Dan Rather will be sitting at Cronkite's desk next week, but
restlessly. He doesn't like the word anchorman, and sees
himself more as "a lead correspondent. I want to grab a pencil
and get out of the office. I do not intend to be an inside
man."  But until Rather has shown that he can hold on to
Cronkite's audience, CBS wants him at that familiar desk.

Roger Mudd, who is being groomed for anchorman at NBC, also
considers himself a reporter, though his expertise is mostly
about the Washington scene. NBC is staying with Chancellor as
anchorman, though he has the contractual right to move to
commentaries instead. Cronkite and Chancellor, eleven years his
junior, have a quality that is rare among on-camera
personalities, though not among the new staffs of the networks.
This is an ornery insistence that serious news should get its
due weight, with or without pictures. (Cronkite also deplores
those cliche pictures of gas pumps and checkout counters.)

Over at ABC, Roone Arledge introduced the pictorial wizardry
that other networks have had to copy. Last year, with strong
Iran coverage, ABC began to overtake NBC. In recent weeks,
however, NBC has steadfastly stood off the challenge (CBS has
an average 27% of the evening new audience, NBC 23%, ABC 22%).
Arledge may soon be making changes. Among his multiple
anchors, Max Robinson might be shifted out; Frank Reynolds'
status is unclear; Arledge hopes to sign up Tom Brokaw, who is
unhappy doing NBC's Today show, which has diminished the
journalistic reputation he earned as a White House
correspondent. Arledge, however, foresees the decline of the
anchor role:  "If something happens in Europe an hour before the
broadcast, we can get pictures and accounts back here on the
satellite so you rarely need a person to sit there an tell
stories."  Maybe so, ABC news keeps the eye busy, but there are
still complaints that it leaves the mind confused. Over at CBS
they speak of the "magic number," up to seven minutes, that the
anchorman should be on screen, to give cohesiveness to the news.
This may become the battleground of post-Cronkite television
news:  whether pictures or content will dominate coverage.

Cronkite himself, proud of the television tradition he embodies,
is seething about the news programs he sees too often on local
stations, where "all it takes today to be an anchor person is
to be under 25, fair of face and figure, dulcet of tone and well
coiffed--and to be able to fit into the blazer with the patch
on the pocket."  For such show-biz tricks he blames greedy,
indifferent station owners with no commitment to news
responsibility. He is exercised by those communications schools
that ignore writing, reporting and editing, "move right into
Makeup I, Makeup II, Trenchcoat I and Trenchcoat II," and
produce graduates "without any depth of understanding."

Is this just an older man's lament at changing fashions?
Certainly television news is at its best when it shows rather
than tells--the events witnessed, the participants seen and
heard. The trouble comes when fires more spectacular than
damaging, or sensationalized "tragedies" from the police beat
displace news of consequence but lacking in zingy illustrations.

After Friday there will no longer be anybody around to say with
insistent confidence, "And that's the way it is."  Much will be
lost if there are not enough people in the glittering new
technological era to uphold, with that same insistence, Walter
Cronkite's fierce devotion to the news that matters.

Newswatch/Thomas Griffith