And That's the Way It Is?

There was a time, longer ago than most of us who remember it would like to admit, when most people in the country could identify the three national television news anchors. Well, except for ABC; at the time it seemed as if ABC could not identify its own anchor.

We each had a favorite. In my house it was NBC, with Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, though this probably had a lot to do with the fact that of the two television stations available in central Missouri the NBC station came in strongest. CBS, with Walter Cronkite, came out of Jeff City, 30 hilly miles away, and was a little fuzzy always and unwatchable some of the time. We had no ABC affiliate.

The job of a newscaster is to deliver the news, which we care about, and not his opinion of the news, which we don’t care about. This was understood. Occasionally an anchor would write a book that gave his view of things. Those who were interested could buy the book. Generally, few did.

There would occasionally be a small scandal when an anchor would give an off-air opinion, but little came of it and it usually didn’t much affect the on-air product.

That changed on February 27, 1968. That’s when Cronkite, during his nightly newscast, announced his opposition to the war in Vietnam. Cronkite would be shakily listed as “the most trusted man in America” in 1974, and much was made of it thereafter, despite its flimsy pedigree: He was chosen over the likes of Marlon Brando, Joe Namath, Jesse Jackson, and 12 others in a poll of women sponsored by a cigarette company and conducted by its advertising agency; in other polls, he wasn’t even the most trusted news anchor.

Following Cronkite’s Vietnam pronouncement, Lyndon Johnson, president of the United States at the time, reportedly turned to his press secretary, Bill Moyers (later a CBS on-air news personality) and said, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America,” though the quote has been variously disputed. The commentator Mona Charen later wrote, “Johnson misread the situation.  Cronkite did not speak for middle America, but instead for the liberal intelligentsia and for a growing segment of the Democratic Party.” Cronkite was henceforth a darling of the lefties. When he retired from his anchoring duties in March 1981 he joined the CBS board of directors.

He had committed the cardinal sin of making himself the news. While this did wonders for his social standing, it cast CBS News into a pit from which it has not emerged; indeed, the network has since then dug itself ever deeper. Nor did Cronkite himself reform as to news ethics: I was at CBS News when, because I raced sailboats, I received a mass-mailing letter from Cronkite urging me to donate to the New York Yacht Club’s effort to launch an America’s Cup challenge.

Cronkite was scheduled to cover the 1987 Cup races in Australia. His having raised money for one of the competitors was as stark a violation of CBS News Standards — an actual published document, known as “the white book” — as there could be. I took the letter to work, just to point out to colleagues that the rules didn’t seem to apply to all of us. One well-known colleague made a photostatic copy of the letter, blanking out my name, and took it across the street to Emerson Stone, the vice president of news practices. Cronkite got pulled off the plum assignment. It may have been the last time the white book’s provisions were enforced.

When Cronkite retired from the evening news he was replaced by Dan Rather, who had made his name covering Hurricane Carla as a local anchor in Houston in 1961, and who had gone to to varied on-air reportage jobs at CBS. At the National Association of Broadcasters convention in 1974, Richard Nixon spoke and afterwards took questions. Rising to ask a question, Rather received a round of applause and Nixon, attempting humor, said, “Are you running for something?” to which Rather responded, “No sir, Mr. President, are you?” People began to think Dan might have a screw loose.

Everyone thought he did after he showed up late one night in 1986 at a New York City police station, beaten and bloody, saying he had been attacked by a man who asked, “Kenneth, what is the frequency?” The band REM would later do a song based on the encounter.

Other nutty things occurred, including Rather’s bizarre wardrobe changes for his newscasts. This was the source of much merriment in the CBS newsrooms, both television and radio. For a short time he ended his newscasts (they were never called “shows” at CBS) by saying the word “courage,” which puzzled everyone. It achieved its peak when one day, when he was ending his show with a story about Mexico, he had someone phone Ingrid, whose multilingual duties on the foreign desk required her to work overnight, and ask her what “courage” was in Spanish. Many of us would have paid real money for her to say it was “cojones,” but she apparently liked her job, even though the translation is arguably accurate, and gave a more polite translation.

Not long after, a fellow radio news editor called me from the cafeteria, a floor below out newsroom. “You have to see this,” he said. I went down and he gestured around the corner from the cafeteria entrance, where there was a pay phone. I looked. There, on the phone, was big Dan, in full Secret Squirrel attire — trench coat, brimmed hat pulled low, I think I remember sunglasses — whispering anxiously into the phone. Back in the newsroom we joked that there was probably no one on the other end of the line. Everyone in the building was of the view that Dan had gone loopy.

It got crazier. In January 1988, Rather interviewed George H.W. Bush, the vice president, who was running for president. Bush’s campaign wisely insisted that the interview be live, arguing that CBS, which since Cronkite had carried water for the Democrats, would edit a pre-recorded interview to cast him in the most unfavorable light. The live interview became heated, with Bush getting the better of it.

But those things were just the preliminaries. In the news media, every four years there is a rush to find the “October surprise” that brings down the Republican candidate. Why always the Republican? Because the national media are located in New York and Washington, D.C., and they are of the view that the rest of the country, which tends to vote Republican, is kind of a drag on those places’ good time. In 2004, Dan Rather either participated in, or credulously bought into, an attempt to phony up an October surprise in September. On September 8, Rather appeared on the once-authoritative “60 Minutes II” program with documents he said proved that George W. Bush, then seeking the presidency, had slacked off while serving in the Texas Air National Guard in the early 1970s. They were so obviously fake that the show hadn’t ended before the internet was alive with the proof of their falsity. It was, as the saying goes, a story too good to check. Rather appeared on the show a week later, saying the documents were fake but true. Seriously. You can watch it at the link.

Ultimately, CBS issued an apology. Of sorts. The “60 Minutes II” show got canceled. Rather was soon out. He was “promoted” to some fancy title that, the joke was, led to an elaborate office doorway which opened onto the alley next to the CBS Broadcast Center on West 57^th^ Street. He left CBS before long.

The reputation of CBS News had now been set in stone. I can testify that there were honest, unbiased reporters there, but they kept it a secret.

Lately, CBS seems to have undertaken to restore those days of glorious insanity, but now they aren’t putting the weight of it on just one person. No, it is now a corporate wokeness thing. And they are putting enthusiasm but not brains into it.

Just this fall:

• Hosting the vice-presidential debate, CBS announced that the answers would not be “fact-checked” during the debate. Then the two CBS interlocutors, Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan, jumped in to “correct” Republican candidate J.D. Vance. They kept at it, several times, and cut off his microphone when he attempted to point out they were in error. Which they were.

• The current successor to the respected Emerson Stone, Mark Memmott, sent out a memo saying that CBS reporters are henceforth prohibited from referring to Jerusalem as being in Israel.

• In an interview with antisemitic author and darling of the Upper West Side Ta-Nehisi Coates, “CBS Mornings” co-host Tony Dokoupil asked tough questions, the sort of thing reporters have historically been supposed to do. The whiners in the newsroom, the sort who were surprised that Walter “Where’s the Beef?” Mondale wasn’t elected president in 1984 (he received 13 electoral votes out of a possible 538, and yes, some in the CBS newsroom were truly surprised that he lost). There were newsroom woke struggle sessions over the interview. Dokoupil was made to weep and apologize. The owner of CBS said Dokoupil had actually done a good job. Recordings of some of the struggle sessions were leaked, so CBS organized the sessions that followed into smaller groups, lest the news about CBS News be broadcast. Ironic, isn’t it.

• The once-respected “60 Minutes” did an interview with Kamala Harris and released an excerpt ahead of broadcast. But when the interview aired, Harris’s answer had changed from her usual Harris hash to a cogent, if content-free, sentence. They had edited it to make her look good. They have refused to release a full transcript, though they released a full transcript when CBS interviewed Donald Trump in 2020. Criticized for obviously shilling for Harris, after a week the network released a ridiculous statement — and no transcript. “The portion of her answer on 60 Minutes was more succinct . . .” the network said. “Remember, Mr. Trump pulled out of his interview with 60 Minutes and the vice president participated.” Well, yeah — wouldn’t you? (When Fox News Channel interviewed Harris, the entire interview was broadcast, no edits.) It sure seems CBS is trying to hide something, and the vigor they’re putting into keeping it a secret strongly suggests it must be pretty awful.

• Just last night, the CBS Evening News with Norah O’Donnell led with an already-discredited story in The Atlantic that included an anecdote, denied by many who were there, which claimed that Trump had said reprehensible things about a female soldier of Hispanic descent who had been murdered. (Said the dead woman’s family lawyer, “After having dealt with hundreds of reporters in my legal career, this is unfortunately the first time I have to go on record and call out Jeffrey Goldberg @the Atlantic: not only did he misrepresent our conversation but he outright LIED in HIS sensational story. More importantly, he used and exploited my clients, and Vanessa Guillén’s n’s murder… for cheap political gain.”)

“I don’t appreciate how you are exploiting my sister’s death for politics — hurtful & disrespectful to the important changes she made for service members,” wrote. the murdered woman’s sister. “President Donald Trump did nothing but show respect to my family & Vanessa. In fact, I voted for President Trump today.”

But, hey, CBS led with it, so as many as almost four and a half million people (third among the broadcast networks) saw it. And if they’re watching CBS for news, they might be gullible enough to believe it.

Once upon a time it made me proud to say I worked at CBS News. Then I was there for a while and, well, not so much. And it has gotten much worse since then.

Walter Cronkite used to close his show with, “And that’s the way it is.” It really wasn’t, but it was fairly close to what a reasonable person might have thought was the way it is.

No more. Not for a long time.