Part of our world
On Facebook memes, distant news bureaus, and why even Walter Cronkite wasn't giving audiences the full story
A meme that circulates on Facebook groups with names like "Baby Boomer Fun Events" proposes that "Younger Americans will have trouble believing this," but "there was once this guy named Walter Cronkite, who would read the news on television every weeknight. He didn't seem to have an agenda [...] He would just read the news, and then we would all just make up our own minds about what we thought."
■ It's a charmingly sentimental statement -- and the claim isn't all that far from what Cronkite himself probably would have said about his own coverage. Cronkite seems to have authentically thought of himself as a neutral, unbiased source of news and information.
■ But even if Cronkite did a respectable job of trying to report without fear or favor, it's misleading to believe that he was as neutral as the ideal might have suggested.
■ When Cronkite decided the running order of the stories to be covered on his evening news broadcast, or used his authority as managing editor of the broadcast to devote more or less time to a story, or chose to quote one source rather than another, he applied a set of values and made a judgment.
■ Inevitably, those judgments reflected values and opinions. And they were subject to the constraints of a newscast constrained by time and resources: News tends to be covered more thoroughly by television when there's a camera nearby. When Cronkite would sign off by saying, "And that's the way it is", it gave a false impression of comprehensiveness. Whatever one might think of Dan Rather's other faults, his use of the much more restrained "That's part of our world tonight" actually did a better job of reflecting the limits of reality to the audience.
■ Media literacy in Cronkite's day, as well as our own, requires the audience to realize that no tale of the day is complete, no single perspective is definitive, no report can hope to uncover all of the motivations behind events, and no journalist (no matter how aspirational or high-minded) can be completely without bias.
■ Reporters generally can and should strive to be both thorough and fair, and reasonable efforts should be devoted to earning the trust and goodwill of a fair-minded public. But audiences, too, need to realize that even Walter Cronkite wasn't really "just reading the news".
