Walter Cronkite Staged a News Coup at CBS

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 losing 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.  

Nora O'Donnell, the only woman among the three network anchors will be replaced after the Election by a pair of men.

In its current configuration as The CBS Evening News With Nora O’Donnell it remains a 30 minute program. When she leaves the anchor chair after the November elections she will be replaced by a male tag-team of John Dickerson, political editor for CBS News and Maurice DuBois, a local news anchor on New York station WCBS.  Shades of Huntley and Brinkly that they hope will jump start ratings for the now perennial bottom dweller. The program will be moved back to its former home at the CBS Broadcast Center in New York.  David Muir at ABC leads the ratings competition among the Big Three heritage networks and Lester Holt still helms NBC Nightly news.

None have the influence of Cronkite to generations who get most of their news on the phones from a plethora of platforms, many of them driven by ideological bias.