When giants ruled the news

I couldn't help but notice this factoid the other day, regarding the amount of trust Americans have in the way the mass media reports the news. As you can see from the chart below, the number who think that the media reports the news "fully, accurately and fairly" is pretty much at an all-time low, while the corresponding number who have no trust and confidence in the media is at an all-time high. 

It's a measure of how far we've come from the days when Walter Cronkite was the "most trusted man in America." The peak of American trust in the news media occurs in the mid-1970s—in the wake of Watergate and the Vietnam War—when over 70 percent had a "great deal/fair amount" of trust in what they saw on television news, heard on the radio, or read in newspapers; today, it's less than 40 percent.

This isn't any great surprise to those who've been paying attention over the last few years. Indeed, in many of the classic television groups I belong to, people lament the state of today's news and long for the days of the giants, names like Cronkite, Huntley and Brinkley, Brokaw, Jennings, Reynolds, and others. Back then, so the story goes, they gave us the news "they way it was" in an era of "honest, true media reporting," when news anchors "didn’t give their opinion of the news" and could be counted on to give us reporting that was neutral, unbiased, straightforward, and true. 

Of course, we ought to know better than this. As someone once observed, one of the interesting things about nostalgia is being old enough to remember how things were received at the time. And at that time—the Sixties, let's say, into the early Seventies—there was plenty of controversy about the news media. Remember Vice President Agnew's speech on the "Nattering Nabobs of Negativism"? That comment, and the positive response to it by many in America—the "Silent Majority," they were called—should remind us that at the time, the talking heads of the news, the anchor men, were seen as anything but neutral, unbiased, or straightforward. Granted, subsequent events, and the widespread cynicism that was borne from them, appeared to justify much of the news coverage in the 1960s, leading to the high approval rating that we see in the first years of the chart.

The accusation most frequently leveled against network newscasters was that they were presenting personal commentary, not identified as such, under the guise of reporting. It was enough to get Frank Reynolds sacked from the ABC Evening News; Reynolds, a passionate man about whom it could be said that at times he wore his heart on his sleeve, answered that "I think your program has to reflect what your basic feelings are. I'll plead guilty to that."* ABC came to be known during the Vietnam years, sardonically, as the "Administration Broadcasting Company," due in large part to Howard K. Smith's staunch support for the War. This was, mind you, the same Howard K. Smith who had been sacked at CBS after a documentary on the civil rights riots in Birmingham that he had sought (and failed) to conclude with Smith quoting Edmund Burke that, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing," 

*Listen to Reynolds opining on the need for gun control during ABC's coverage of Robert F. Kennedy's shooting; no matter how you feel about the issue, you have to wince a little at interjecting this kind of commentary into a breaking news situation.

NBC, anchored by the team of Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, was often thought to be the most liberal of the three networks. Brinkley, answering the charge that his reporting lacked objectivity, countered, "If I were objective, or if you were objective, or if anyone was, we would have to be put away in an institution because we'd be some kind of vegetable. Objectivity is impossible to a human being." Huntley, who had to backtrack from unflattering comments he'd made about Richard Nixon during an interview, insisted that he "never allowed his opinions to influence newscasts." His greatest controversy, perhaps, came after delivering a commentary in which he said that "the nation’s meat industry was 'sick' and that one of the consumer's greatest problems was 'too much fat in our beef' "; at the same time, he promoted "Chet Huntley’s Nature Fed Beef," which touted "quality and flavor, plus low fat and high protein." NBC ordered Huntley to "trim his name and face" from the product. 

And Cronkite, the most trusted man in America, found himself in the eye of the storm throughout the decade, from his controversial 1968 commentary following the Tet Offensive in which he pronounced the Vietnam War a "stalemate" and called for the United States to negotiate a way out*, to his tête-à-tête with Chicago's mayor Richard Daley during the 1968 Democratic Convention, when Cronkite called Daley's police force "a bunch of thugs," only to be accused of going soft on Daley in their interview the following night in an attempt to paper things over—a moment which Brinkley would refer to as "the low-water mark" of Cronkite’s career. Following that Tet commentary, Cronkite's critics would call him a traitor, and worse; his longetivity and avuncular nature would burnish his reputation over the years, but for a significant segment of the viewing audience, he would always remain a picture of liberal bias. And lest we forget, CBS's Daniel Schorr and Marvin Kalb were both on the list of Nixon's political opponents.

*According to this article, Cronkite's importance in the rise of public opposition to the war has been greatly overstated through the years. It should also be noted that Eric Sevareid, Cronkite's CBS colleague and commentator, had come to much the same conclusion about Vietnam in 1966, two years earlier. Nonetheless, LBJ was moved to pronounce that Cronkite was "out to get" him.

Now, my point in all this isn't to dump on these news giants. I grew up watching them give the evening news. Chet and David are still my favorite anchor team; I have the greatest admiration for Frank Reynolds, even though I frequently disagree with him; and Cronkite never came across as confused or misinformed. Harry Reasoner and Howard K. Smith were steady and authoritative, the closest team to Huntley and Brinkley. Peter Jennings was an excellent anchor, but you also respected him as, first and foremost, a reporter; he wasn't likely to make a statement such as free speech being a catalyst for the Holocaust, for example. As were so many others who gave the network news its credbility through the years: Frank McGee, Bill Ryan, John Chancellor, Jules Bergman, Robert MacNeil, Hughes Rudd, Liz Trotta, Marlene Sanders, and oftentimes Dan Rather. And don't forget Jim McKay; his work during the Munich Olympic Massacre in 1972 was as good as anything any reporter has ever done on live television.

You have to keep in mind, however, that no matter what you read, no matter what people remember when they talk about Cronkite, Brokaw, Jennings, et al, the news media has never not been controversial, never not subjected to accusations of bias. But what these news giants all had in common is that they did their jobs with a gravitas and professionalism that presumed a knowledge and command of events; their broadcasts presented hard news, done with a sense of authority, even elegance. One recalls Huntley, while giving a report on the Profumo affair in England in the 1960s, referring to Christine Keeler, not as a prostitute, but as a trollop; you got the idea that using the word "prostitute" was too common, beneath Huntley's dignity as a newsman. 

Yes, they had their biases; yes, there were probably too many times when they crossed the line between reporting and commentary. But for the most part, you didn't get the feeling that they were intentionally misrepresenting the news, distorting the truth, fabricating the stories, or simply suffering from incompetence. Whatever one might have thought of their opinionating, they couldn't be accused of disguising their motives or misleading the public as to where they stood.

Compare this to what we see too often on what passes for the news today. You get the impression, watching them emote, leading with their feelings, openly manipulating the facts by the very nature of the stories they choose, redefining news itself as "human interest." Granted, the way in which we get our news has changed irreversably; between social media and 24/7 news channels, the evening news can never be what it once was, a half hour roundup of the day's headlines. But there's just this sense that the people giving us the news, whether on the networks or cable, are not, for the most part, serious people. Instead, they give the impression of having gotten their jobs based on their looks, their smile, the way they dress, how they read off a teleprompter, or to fill in the blanks on a diversity checklist. Many critics suggest that the news anchors of the past would be appalled by the state of today's news, and I don't doubt this for a minute.

No, the point of this, and, I can assure you, there is a point, is that we don't have to pretend that the Cronkites, the Brinkleys, the Jenningses, were beyond reproach, that they never made mistakes, that they always and everywhere toed the line in an impartial, neutral manner. As reporters, they would insist that we present them as they were, not as we might want them to be. It is enough to say that they were giants, that they represented a time that seems long ago, and that we probably will never see their likes again. TV