Television: The Most Intimate Medium

TELEVISION

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By his own definition, the man behind the big U-shaped desk is a managing editor. All day, with wire-service teleprinters clacking behind him, he and his associates have kept a close watch on the spasmodic flow of the world’s news. They have assigned stories, selected pictures, edited and rewritten copy. They have argued the relative news value of a battle-action file from Viet Nam and bloody films of students rioting in Djakarta; they have checked on the latest peace rumor out of Washington, the day’s speeches at the U.N. Now, deadline is approaching, and the big problem is whether that World Series game out in Chavez Ravine will end in time for them to carry the score.

So far, the frenetic activity would be familiar to any newsman on any big-city daily. But deadline brings a difference. No presses roll. Show business moves into the newsroom, and lights dim beyond the rim of the desk. The day’s debris is shoved off into the shadows. As technicians man their equipment, a makeup expert goes to work on the managing editor. At the last moment he runs a comb through his blond hair, shrugs a neatly pressed jacket over his wrinkled shirtsleeves, and shoots his French cuffs. It is 6:30 p.m. Cameras zero in, and CBS’s Walter Cronkite Jr. begins his half-hour evening report. Now, by his own definition, his role has changed. On the color TV tube he becomes part editor and part ham.

Out of this unlikely combination, Cronkite has constructed an on-screen personality that makes him the single most convincing and authoritative figure in TV news—no mean rank in a medium where competition is uncompromising, where the three nationwide networks scrutinize one another’s shows and crib from one another’s operations in a desperate drive for the top of the ratings. As a better-informed public has demanded more and more information about current events, TV news programs have changed from loss leaders and have begun to start paying their way. And as the networks have made the most of them, news shows like Cronkite’s have become one of the most important and influential molders of public opinion in the U.S. Some 58% of the U.S. public get most of their news from television, reported an Elmo Roper poll last year.

How To Be Used. For better or worse, television has become an established part of the democratic process—a fact of life in the U.S. that is not lost on any politician. Senator Robert Kennedy candidly admits that he would rather appear for 30 seconds on an evening news program than be written up in every newspaper in the world. “President Johnson,” says White House Press Secretary Bill Moyers bluntly, “feels that television offers him the most direct, straightforward and personal way to communicate with the people. It is not someone else’s attitude or interpretation of what the President said. It’s the purest form of communication, and I think the most desirable.”

Today the well-heeled political candidate spends all he can to buy television time. When money runs low, he uses his ingenuity to organize “news events”:—a post-office dedication, say, or an appearance with an illustrious visitor—anything that will lure the ubiquitous television camera. “I know we’re being used,” admits NBC’s David Brinkley, as he looks ahead toward November’s fast-approaching election day. “I simply decide how to handle the story on the basis of who is using us, and how, and why.”

However the story is handled, its impact is predictable. Together, the Cronkite and Huntley-Brinkley reports are watched by an estimated aggregate of 30 million people, and it is claimed that 70% of that audience is made up of adults. One particularly popular news special, such as Pope Paul’s visit to the U.S. last year, can easily focus the attention of 150 million viewers. Even at the dullest point of the Fulbright hearings on Viet Nam, several million people were tuned in.

“Newspapers try to transmit facts,” says Voice of America Director and onetime NBC Correspondent John Chancellor, “but television is the transmission of experience in its rawest form.” Putting the pageantry of a Kennedy or a Churchill funeral into countless living rooms, is an achievement that the most moving newspaper description cannot duplicate; the sight of a young Dominican being shot in the back by a U.S. paratrooper can jolt the home viewer far more than any account of the same tragedy in print.

No Back Pages. “Television,” says ABC’s Howard “K. Smith by way of explanation, “is not just a picture medium. It is pictures, plus words, plus personality.” When the words and the personality belong to a Walter Cronkite, they generate what CBS Vice President Gordon Manning calls “believability.” Talking to the camera as if it were an attentive stranger, Cronkite projects an air of friendly formality, of slightly distant courtliness. His millions of viewers at the other end of the tube respond with consistent warmth.

No matter how ordinary the event, no matter how stirring the picture, the news that Cronkite and his colleagues bring into the American home always carries a kind of subliminal authority. The effect can be traced, says Cronkite, to the almost embarrassing intimacy of the camera. Even more important, he says, everything the viewer sees and hears comes to him on what amounts to an electronic front page. What the managing editor chooses for him, he cannot avoid. He cannot skip from headline to headline and browse among stories. They are all read aloud, right to the end. “There are no back pages in our kind of journalism,” says Cronkite. Everything is up front where it cannot be overlooked.

Amplifying Prejudices. As a result of its extraordinary impact, TV news has become a powerful force encouraging social ferment. Early in the civil rights revolution, Negro activists made it perfectly clear that wittingly or unwittingly, the TV cameraman was their ally. Marches were staged and demonstrations timed to get full coverage. By reporting the whole movement, TV added to its momentum. The sight of Bull Connor’s dogs attacking Birmingham Negroes served as a catalyst for the conscience of most of the nation.

To be sure, as TV news cameras moved north with the civil rights riots, their films had another effect. Ironically, television, which had given such a boost to the civil rights movement, began to obstruct it and contribute mightily to the white blacklash. “Take the case of some recent footage on the Atlanta riots,” says M.I.T. Political Scientist Harold Isaacs. “What you saw was a black blur of a face, two shining eyes, flashing teeth—shouting ‘Black power!’ That stirs up all too basic reactions in people.” Says V.O.A.’s Chancellor: “It’s a mistake to think that TV alone makes up people’s minds on broad questions. What it does is amplify their prejudices.”

It can also gather its audience into a cohesive whole with a sureness that is unmatched in any other area of communications. By its coverage of the assassination of President Kennedy and the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald, TV news demonstrated its tireless capability and versatility. For millions upon millions, the President’s funeral became a heart-moving personal experience. “Television held the country together over the transition period in a unique way and helped preserve the whole democratic process,” says onetime FCC Chairman Newton Minow, who exempts TV news from his charge that the medium is a “vast wasteland.”

Space from All Angles. Aware that they now have on their hands a commodity of indefinable power and, inevitably, incalculable value, the networks are putting more time, money and ingenuity than ever into their news programs. Both CBS and NBC now allot about one-quarter of their programming to news and public affairs, ABC somewhat less. The Cronkite and Huntley-Brinkley reports, which used to run for only 15 minutes, were increased to a half-hour in 1963; and ABC’s Peter Jennings with the News will go to a half-hour this January. Together, the three networks will spend $148 million on news this year—their budgets have been boosted 200% from five years before.

For the coverage of astronautics alone, the networks will shell out a combined $20 million this year to handle all angles of the story—from anxious wives awaiting the return of the astronauts to the various manufacturers who have contributed to the space capsule. With 30-to 40-man staffs in Viet Nam, CBS and NBC spent over $500,000 apiece on war coverage last year. With the help of the Early Bird communications satellite, TV managed live coverage of the Gemini 6 splashdown.

Out of Context. The range is virtually unlimited, the impact almost awesome, the promise increasingly impressive. Yet there is general agreement that TV news still falls short of its potential. “It is hard for television newscasting to serve the more mature purposes of journalism,” says Harold Fleming, director of the Potomac Institute. “It is hard for TV to give perspective, to put things in context.”

Cronkite, for one, agrees. TV, he feels, is shortchanging the vital, reportorial aspect of journalism. “The networks,” he says, “including my own, do a first-rate job of disseminating the news, but all of them have third-rate news-gathering organizations. We are still basically dependent on the wire services. We have barely dipped our toe into investigative reporting.”

For one thing, even though the networks are steadily building up their reportorial staffs, they still have too few men in the field. In Washington, a correspondent may cover Capitol Hill one day, the Labor Department the next; on the following day a story may take him out of town. He has little time to develop expertise in any one area.

Once a story is assigned, the reporter goes to work and a kind of “tyranny of time” sets in. Interviews are filmed, the films are given to leather-jacketed couriers who hop on motorcycles and rush to the studio while the reporter chases down the next subject for camera and sound crews. By the time the reporter himself gets back to the studio he sometimes finds that the producer has put his story together in a surprising manner. After being told that he will be given 10 seconds in which to mouth an introduction to a 20-second slice of film, with perhaps 15 seconds of narrative later on, the reporter is likely to explode: “Yeah, but when do I get to tell what else happened?”

Cold-Eyed Calculation. Holding equal sway with the tyranny of time, is the tyranny of pictures. To the TV reporter, his producer is a man who dotes on “fender-bender footage”: auto crashes, fires, demonstrations, fights.

The more striking the pictures, the greater the chance that they will get on the air. “This is the boy-oh-boy, look-at-the-people-riot syndrome,” says one CBS correspondent. A correspondent’s response to the syndrome is understandable. Getting on the air is the name of the game—especially if the reporter himself is visible on film while supplying comment; under the TV fee system, he earns at least $50 extra every time he appears on-camera.

Then there is the matter of money. The expense of flying film from Viet Nam, for example, developing it on the West Coast and then leasing a line for $3,000 an hour to transmit the pictures to New York for inclusion in a program, is likely to have an overbearing effect on news judgment. Even if the pictures do not live up to the raves cabled in by the man in the field (who probably had not seen them and was depending on his photographer’s word), they may price their way onto the program.

It is that same sort of cold-eyed calculation that keeps the network news programs where they are on the TV schedule—always on the unhappy edge of “prime time,” which runs generally from 7:30 p.m. to 11 p.m. Nobody in the management end of the business wants them on prime time because their low Nielsen ratings (generally around 14) would presumably keep people from dialing in any high-rating entertainment show (Nielsen rating: 21) that followed. And no local stations want a network news program at 11 p.m.—which is where Cronkite would like to be—because they can make twice the money at that time with local spot ads on their own local news show. So Cronkite goes on at 7 p.m. in the New York area, just when the average commuter has arrived home to concentrate on his first martini. In Chicago, he is broadcast at 5:30, in San Francisco at 6:30 and in Los Angeles at 7. A large share of his potential audience is inevitably lost.

Old Objectivity. Of almost equal importance is the tyranny of advertisers. Though the newsmen, with good reason, proclaim their freedom, the sponsor’s influence is still apparent. Commercials, the newsmen occasionally boast, are restricted to a small percentage of a news program’s time, far less than the percentage of space given over to ads in successful newspapers. But it is also true that those commercials appear right in the middle of the electronic front page. Few newspapers give their advertisers such considerate treatment.

And network executives are notoriously timid about antagonizing anyone —particularly the people who pay their bills. Which means that there is a pervading reluctance to take sides on any issue. “I find an almost excessive lack of bias on television,” says Howard K. Smith. “We are afraid of a point of view. We stick to the old American belief that there is an objectivity. If a man says the world is round, we run out to find someone to say it is flat.” Network executives are also quick to delete any portion of a news program that might offend any powerful segment of the audience. Top management, said the late Edward R. Murrow, “with a few notable exceptions has been trained in advertising, research, sales or show business. But by the nature of the corporate structure, they also make the final and crucial decisions having to do with news and public affairs. Frequently they have neither the time nor the competence to do this.”

Little has changed since Murrow’s speech almost a decade ago. Summing up for all those now who make their livings “dealing with producers, directors, business executives, salespeople, sponsors, agents, set designers, accountants and all others in the new, huge superstructure of human beings hovering over the frail product,” CBS’s Eric Sevareid was hard put to describe the rigors of putting on a news program. “The ultimate sensation,” he finally decided, “is the feeling of being bitten to death by ducks.”

Raw & Lively. To be sure, all the tyrannies of TV news are constantly fought against and often held at bay. Few, if any, network producers worried about offending Deep South viewers with their civil rights coverage, for example. ABC earned the nickname, “African Broadcasting Co.”; CBS became the “Colored Broadcasting Co.”; NBC, the “Negro Broadcasting Co.”

Of all the shows on all the networks, it is Cronkite’s that most consistently triumphs over the built-in drawbacks of TV newscasting. His reporters have learned to respect his news judgment; his producers have learned that he will back that judgment with a fierce pride. Despite the cost, he will not hesitate to remake the tape of his show when new film or a new story cries out for space—even after the original broadcast has already gone on the air in some parts of the country. He is determined to keep up with what he and other TV commentators like to call the “raw news,” the “hard news” of day-to-day events—which is to say, the late-breaking stories that have always made up some of the liveliest stuff of journalism.

For all the lure of news in the raw though, it was wariness born of long experience as reporters that caused Cronkite’and his executive producer Ernest Leiser to hesitate and worry for hours over whether to run the now-famous film sequence showing U.S. Marines in August 1965 burning a Vietnamese village. Were the pictures fair to the U.S.? To the Marines? Or was their message somewhat out of balance? In the end, it was decided that the pictures were simply too good to pass up. So, along with a narration by CBS Correspondent Morley Safer, Cronkite’s audience saw a filmed report that represented most of what is best and most of what is distressing in TV’s coverage of the war.

Message of Urgency. The very sight of Safer, gaunt and haggard, out there in the midst of battle, brought the war to the screen with undeniable immediacy. It testified to the reporter’s scorn for danger as he tracked down his story. No Marine rifleman was more exposed to enemy fire than Safer and his crew as they lugged their bulky equipment to the outskirts of the hamlet called Cam Ne. The very sound of Safer’s voice, excited yet sure, carried a message of urgency. “This is what the war in Viet Nam is all about,” he intoned, as the camera panned over crying women and old men. In his careful solemnity there was an echo of CBS Hero Edward R. Mur row reporting World War II on radio: “This is London.”

It was clear what Safer meant. To him, the war in Viet Nam was all about husky, well-equipped Marines burning down an entire village, leveling 150 homes “in retaliation for a burst of gunfire.” If there were Viet Cong around, Safer said, “they were long gone.” And the Marines, he intimated, were wreaking a kind of harsh vengeance as the day’s operation burned homes, “wounded three women, killed one baby, wounded one Marine and netted four prisoners—four old men who could not answer questions put to them in English. Four old men who had no idea what an ID card was.”

Perhaps the emotional phrases were only to be expected in an emotional situation. And the fact is that even if Safer had gone out of his way to try to explain or excuse the Marines at Cam Ne, his words would have had little effect. To try to put pictures of one village burning into proper context, to balance that one incident against all the other activity that makes up the war in Viet Nam, would be all but impossible. On TV news, pictures make their own frontpage context; it takes a skillful script indeed to give them an added dimension, to remind the viewer that they are only part of the story. All too often the reporter in the field only adds a little wordy color, or asks an inane question: “Seen action like this before, Marine?”

Bang! Bang! Bang! NBC’s Chet Huntley, for one, is worried that too many TV reporters in Viet Nam concentrate far too much on Safer-like shots, the kind of flaming action that ensures an appearance on the air at home. The military thinks that too many correspondents are out there for their “own personal aggrandizement,” Huntley told a Variety reporter recently. ABC’s Howard K. Smith took the same tack when he returned from a recent visit to Viet Nam. During the Buddhist demonstrations, he said, “television gave the impression that the whole country was rioting, instead of 2,000 out of 17 million.” Television, he complained, “still gives the impression that it is an American war out there. You never see a Vietnamese action.” His colleagues, he said, were completely ignoring all the work on pacification. They look for what will get on the air, “and that’s bang, bang, bang. We’re missing all the nation building.”

Others among the regular Saigon TV corps agree. “Let’s be truthful,” said one of them in TV Guide as he offered a straightforward explanation for all the battle footage he and his competitors are sending home. “Here in Viet Nam you can get your face on the network news three or four times a week. It’s risky, but it’s money in the bank. We’re all war profiteers.”

The accusation is harsh. Viet Nam is TV’s first war; the medium’s mistakes are due as much to overall in experience as they are to individual overinvolvement. The networks are learning fast; the quality of their coverage is improving steadily. It had better. By next year, if the Viet Nam conflict continues, a new communications satellite high over the Pacific may make live coverage available. Then TV’s first war will become the first war brought home to the American living room even as it is fought.

News Sense. Apart from its troubles with the “raw” news of immediate events, television has demonstrated that it is perfectly possible to unite film with text in a news program that is both balanced and provocative. Taking one of the most abstruse and complex of current topics—the Common Market—John Chancellor made it understandable as well as entertaining in a special that few critics thought would come off. By examining some of the blatant misuses of federal highway funds, Brinkley showed what a cutting edge investigative TV work can have. Many people have ridden the fabled Orient Express, but NBC’s Edwin Newman was the first to take a television camera along, and he exposed the ride for the grueling, unglamorous trip it is. “Why do we have to wait for the Fulbright committee to examine our China policy?” asks Edward P. Morgan. “Television should have gotten the idea well beforehand.”

To meet such criticism, says Cronkite, the television industry will have to train its own journalists. It will have to build a corps of correspondents with well-developed news sense and a disciplined news judgment. Until that happens, however, TV will continue to raid the other media—as it did in the case of Walter Cronkite, who has worked for both radio and television and brought to them a pervasive background of news experience.

Born in St. Joseph, Mo., brought up in Kansas City, Cronkite found reporting far more exciting than his studies and dropped out of the University of Texas in his junior year. For a short while he found his niche as a radio sportscaster, and he achieved a measure of local renown with his talent for the then-popular practice of replaying football games with nothing but wire-service copy, a sound-effects man and his own fertile imagination to give the listener the effect of an on-the-spot description. He improvised elaborate descriptions of players and cheerleaders, even pretended to recognize friends in the stands. Once, when the wire broke down, he kept a game going for 20 minutes on imagination alone. “I marched them up and down the field—with frequent and protracted time outs. When the wire finally came back, I discovered that Notre Dame had scored. I had them on their own 20-yd. line. I had to get them all the way back downfield to score in a hurry.”

Success with Chalk. The sportscaster soon grew restless in radio; it involved too much show business to suit him. Besides, he had met a girl named Mary Elizabeth Maxwell, and he had the distinct impression that she would not marry him until he became a bona fide reporter. Cronkite joined United Press in Kansas City, Mo., and Betsy married him. They have three children: Nancy Elizabeth, 18, Mary Kathleen, 16, Walter Leland III, 9.

In 1942, Cronkite became a U.P. war correspondent. He covered the North African landings, then the air war out of London. Put in charge of U.P.’s operations in the Low Countries after the invasion, he often arrived in towns ahead of liberating Canadian troops. “I got a lot of garlands and heard a lot of welcoming speeches. The Canadians were not amused.”

At war’s end, Cronkite went to Moscow for two grim years as U.P. bureau chief. Back in the U.S., he was offered a job as a KMBC radio correspondent in Washington. The pay was good, but Cronkite was dubious. “News is a newspaper’s business,” he bluntly told KMBC, “and it isn’t radio’s business.” He finally accepted, though, at double his U.P. salary, which, after ten years, was still only $125 a week. When the Korean war broke out, he was hired by CBS and made an impromptu TV debut giving a lecture on the war, complete with chalk and blackboard. He was such a hit that against his better judgment he was soon shifted to television news. “It was a time,” he says, “when no self-respecting newsman wanted anything to do with this new electronic beast.”

Cronkite was not long in getting the beast under control. In 1952, CBS News Director Sig Mickelson picked him to anchor the network’s coverage of the national political conventions, and he did such a workmanlike job that he found himself in the top rank of newscasters. Suddenly he was a star. He began to have his own news shows—Twentieth Century and Eyewitness to History.

Drowned in Din. Despite Cronkite’s unqualified success as a newsman, the network persuaded him to try to be an entertainer as well. Reluctantly, he agreed to host a CBS morning program to compete with Dave Garroway’s Today Show, and he found himself a hostage to show business. A gag writer was hired to write his lines, and he lost control of the program. “I was reasonably charming,” he insists to this day, “but the whole thing didn’t work out.”

One morning when he arrived for work, he learned from a TV gossip column that he had been replaced by Jack Paar. “In the course of the day, I discovered that the Hollywood version of the networks is quite correct. I called CBS executives all day long and couldn’t reach a single one. The order was out to all secretaries that no one wanted to talk to me.” It was small consolation to open his mail and read one brief letter: “Jack Paar won’t be as good as you. I know—I’m his mother.”

After that debacle, along came Huntley-Brinkley with their breezier approach to the political conventions of 1956. “I was the old hand,” says Cronkite, “but they received the critical attention.” To make matters worse, by the 1964 conventions, the network competition was out of hand. Lugging their equipment with them, TV reporters swarmed over the convention floor. Quiet and restrained, Walter Cronkite tended to get lost in the crush. CBS executives became so panicked by the Huntley-Brinkley ratings that they rigged Cronkite with a new headset—one earphone tuned to the podium, the other to the control room. Their anchorman could not make much sense out of anything. “It was as bad a job as I have ever done,” he remembers. Completely agreeing, CBS replaced him at the Democratic Convention with the team of Roger Mudd and Bob Trout. The replacement got even worse ratings than Cronkite.

Demoted though he was, Cronkite bounced back. The audience for his evening news program, which he had taken over in 1962, continued to grow. “Sometimes Cronkite goes too far and tries to tell everything like the New York Times,” says Fred Friendly, who, as CBS news president, used to be Cronkite’s boss. “But he is a success because he cares so deeply for the news.” As Cronkite puts it: “I like working with the commodity, in the way a farmer likes to work with the black soil of Iowa.”

Although he now earns $200,000 a year—a combination of fees and a base salary of about $25,000—Cronkite is still easygoing and gregarious. Thanks to his philosophy, “If it’s for sale, buy it,” he owns a 35-ft. ketch that he sails with his family in the waters around Long Island. In the 1950s he took up sports-car racing, even drove a Lancia in the Sebring twelve-hour race. Once, while tearing through the Great Smoky Mountains, he went off on a turn and plunged 100 feet into a stream. He was well belted in, and he emerged unhurt, but these days Betsy frowns on the sports-car bit.

In a business where ulcers are an occupational disease, Correspondent Cronkite seems to have only one persistent worry: that he may be shrinking. “When I was a young man,” he says, “I could happily say I had achieved the American ideal of being six feet. Now I have to stretch hard to make it.” Retorts his wife: “Nonsense, Walter has always been just a hair under six feet.”

No Snow Job. Whatever his height, Cronkite has earned top billing in a star system that rivals any in show business. Alongside him are Huntley and Brinkley; ranking just below are such newscasters and commentators as CBS’s Sevareid and Harry Reasoner, NBC’s Frank McGee, ABC’s Howard K. Smith. Wherever they go, the stars are instantly recognized. When they cover a story, their presence makes a story in itself. Their casual power to shape the news is immense. Ralph Renick, news director of Miami’s Station WTVJ, says he will never forget the expression on Cronkite’s face after his program ran a film of Negro children being beaten by whites in Grenada, Miss. “He positively recoiled,” says Renick. “That hurt look was the most powerful kind of editorializing. It was as effective as Huntley and Brinkley getting their opinions across by sly side comments and making mouths.”

The stars themselves have mixed feelings about playing the role of what Brinkley calls the “all-wise, all-knowing journalistic superman.” Brinkley is bothered because “it’s just impossible to know everything that is happening all the time, to really know what you’re talking about.” Cronkite has further complaints. Among the 1,000 or so letters he receives each week are some disconcerting notes from women who claim to have discovered a secret message in his broadcast beamed to them alone and are eager to arrange a tryst. But no such beefs from the stars will make the system go away. “People tend to believe certain individuals in times of crisis,” says Sevareid. “They get a feeling with a broadcaster. They know if he is trying to do a snow job.”

In the battle of the stars for ratings, Huntley-Brinkley and Cronkite seesaw back and forth as public tastes vary between a preference for the wry quip and the more stolid Cronkite style. Though he thinks a Brinkley bon mot is well worth waiting for, New York Times TV Critic Jack Gould admires Cronkite’s “uncanny ability to fight fatigue.” As a critic in the Providence Journal put it: “Viewers rarely recall or relish a Cronkite statement. They believe it instead.”

No Bulk. They believe it despite all the lingering aspects of show business. Resentful as TV newsmen are of the very word “show,” the smell of grease paint still clings to their programs. Last week CBS announced that its newsmen would be making one-shot appearances on entertainment shows to publicize their election-night broadcasts. Thus Cronkite, among others, will soon make his debut on I’ve Got a Secret and Captain Kangaroo.

By now they will take it in stride. Television news knows its power. It has come a long way since the days when pencil journalists demonstrated their contempt for their upstart rival by carrying clackers to news events to foul up sound tapes and by unplugging the cables of the TV equipment.

The networks, Cronkite is happy to say, have shown considerable restraint and responsibility in not stooping to a tabloid treatment of the news, the crime and sex coverage that he is sure could quadruple their audience. They are moving, he believes, not in the direction of sensationalism but toward greater professionalism. The widespread use of communications satellites, he says, will cut down the high costs of landline charges; and with the savings, he hopes, the networks will build up their news-gathering services. Further miniaturization of equipment will make TV teams less obtrusive when they go out on a story. One man equipped with a pocket or lapel camera will be able to replace five. “He won’t attract attention,” says Cronkite. “He won’t make news by just being there. A source will talk more easily when the lights and the big eye are not on him.”

However much television news im proves, though, Cronkite is convinced that it can never replace printed news. Though he feels that a half-hour news program is the equivalent of the front page of a very good newspaper, he realizes that all those other pages are still missing. “We do such a slick job,” he says, “that we have deluded the public into thinking that they get all they need to know from us. And the people, if they are to exercise their franchise intelligently, need a flow of bulk information. We can’t give it to them.”