The Extemporaneous Newscast: The Lasting Impact of Walter Cronkite's Local Television News Experiment

Abstract

Walter Cronkite was an accidental television pioneer. All he wanted to do was cover the Korean War for CBS radio, but circumstances pushed him into television news and kept him there. Regardless of how he got there, Cronkite's first instincts on how to connect with the viewer on live television provided a great training ground for his coverage of major breaking news stories later in his career and became accepted as the proper approach for reporters at live news events. Cronkite sensed that television was a more intimate medium than radio and he needed to keep eye contact with the viewer. So he avoided using a formal script in his Washington, D.C., local newscasts. Instead, he immersed himself in the news and presented the top stories extemporaneously, with few notes. The delayed development of television news in Washington, D. C. especially for CBS, provided Cronkite the opportunity to forge ahead with an approach that would have been quashed in a more advanced television market. This project explores Cronkite's experience as radio commentator for a series of middle west stations, followed by a few years in local television news to examine his extemporaneous approach to television news and how it positioned him to become one of the most important figures in broadcast news history.