Walter Cronkite prided himself on not only being the anchor of The CBS Evening News but the program's Managing Editor broadcasting from a working newsroom in the mid-1960s. |
He had only been on the job a little more than a year when Walter Cronkite finally got his wish.
Over the fierce objections of local affiliates who resented loosing profitable time for local or syndicated programming to the network,
his program, re-named the CBS
Evening News, expanded from
15 to 30 minutes every night on September 2, 1963.
From Sept. 2, 1992, here is a CBS "Up to the Minute" segment on Walter Cronkite's very first "CBS Evening News" from 1963. The lead story that night was about Alabama Governor George Wallace and his stand in the University of Alabama doorway to block a Federal Judge's desegregation order. It turned out there was plenty of news to fill his new half hour time slot.
A week later NBC’s Huntley-Brinkley Report,
the ratings leader among the three
network news programs by a wide margin, reluctantly followed suit. ABC’s lightly
regarded and little watched new program then anchored by the entirely forgotten
Ron Cochran didn’t even bother. It wasn’t until two years later during Peter Jennings’ rocky first tenure in the anchor chair that ABC joined the trend.
At first many critics and the public weren’t sure that there would “be enough
news” to fill a half hour. The early
years were still dominated by the anchors reading
the news. Network correspondents in New York
and Washington could get on the air
easily. But live feeds from other locations
were difficult and expensive. On-the-spot coverage was shot on film, which had to be rushed to network headquarters, developed, printed, and edited which
could mean delays in seeing events from a few hours to days for stories filed
by correspondents half a world away.
But Cronkite was right. The
Sixties were exploding with news.
Just a week before his premier the March
on Washington for Jobs and Freedom featuring Martin Luther King’s dramatic speech had captured the attention of
the nation. The Civil Rights Movement and grainy film footage of cops beating demonstrators would be a staple of the expanded broadcasts. So would rising Cold War tensions symbolized
by yet another Berlin Crisis. In Washington a photogenic President and a glamorous
First Lady drove news cycles, as they were coming be
known.
In November the assassination of John F.
Kennedy and its aftermath would
more than fill the nightly broadcasts.
Still ahead were the great Space
Race, a rapidly escalating War in
Vietnam and the protest movement
against it, a whole counter cultural
movement, and, as always politics,
politics, and more politics.
It must have been a very hot news night when this show was aired on CBS's still un-air conditioned set in New York City. |
By the end of the decade, having vanquished NBC’s once insurmountable lead in viewers and
having established himself as “The most trusted man in America” Cronkite would be clamoring to
expand his program to a full hour. The
affiliates, preferring to expand their local news operations instead blocked his ambition. In its current
configuration as The CBS Evening News With Nora O’Donnell it remains a 30 minute
program and has slipped to a distant
third place among the shrinking audience
for the over-the-air Big Three
television networks.
No comments:
Post a Comment