The Evolution – Or Is That Devolution? – Of The "Evening News"
The posting brought an email from TV news monitor Andrew Tyndall, who alerted me to a piece he wrote for the Media Studies Journal in 1998. Tyndall's piece contrasted the "Evening News" of 1998 to the "Evening News" as it looked in 1968. The piece is not online – and the Media Studies Journal is no more – but I managed to dig it up, and I wanted to share a few excerpts.
Tyndall argues that "[i]n their attempt to showcase the type of journalism that their immature medium could do uniquely well, the television journalists of 1968 actually distorted the definition of what was newsworthy. The mere act of an official stating a position on the record before the camera constituted news. Words became facts. Speaking became action."
He uses as an example a November 1968 story on the prospects for the Paris peace talks. "Five days before Election Day, Marvin Kalb's lead story was a series of sound bites from Secretary of State Dean Rusk's press briefing," writes Tyndall. "Kalb repeated, without comment, Rusk's verbose denials that Johnson's decision to halt the bombing of North Vietnam was influenced by the pending vote. It is unimaginable that David Martin, the contemporary CBS News national correspondent, would file a report in which an official's sound bites would so stand alone: They would be edited for length, put in a political context, integrated with conflicting comments by partisan experts, juxtaposed with archive clips showing previous contradictory comments and illuminated by Martin's own editorial gloss."
There are reasons to be skeptical of this more modern treatment, of course – are comments from agenda-driven "partisan experts" really so illuminating? But Tyndall's point is important, and it suggests that Cronkite's famed authority in the anchor chair may have come from more than just his personal gravitas. The limited technology available to reporters in 1968 meant that context and opposing viewpoints were less integrated into the broadcast, and thus sound bites were more likely to stand as facts. That gave the "Evening News" an air of straightforwardness that may well have been misleading.
Writes Tyndall: "Back in 1968, the unskeptical tone reporters used to bridge the sound bites from a State Department briefing or a Nixon transition team news conference would have seemed like uncontroversial straight reporting. The same technologies applied today would look like stenography, even flackery, for government officials."
We'll have more discussion of Tyndall's piece tomorrow, including a look at one way in which today's "Evening News" compares unfavorably to that of the Cronkite era.