The TV Zone

As mentioned this morning, I wanted to give the few readers who happened by today - the eve of Cronkite's funeral tomorrow - a quick flavor for his style, work, approach and (above all) professionalism. Here's the April 4 1968 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. assassination broadcast, notable for a few things.

First, Cronkite is - as always - straight ahead, matter if fact, and completely unemotional, which pretty much characterized his style the day of JFK's murder.

Second, he reads from a paper, eschewing a TelePrompter for reasons I can't begin to explain. I believe the TelePrompter had been invented by 1968 (and in fact, originated in the 1950s) though may not have been in widespread use. Or perhaps it's possible Cronkite saw the device as a frivolity, or (worse) something that would inject artifice into a broadcast where no artifice was welcome.

He did embrace it, eventually, and I've posted his opening of the 1979 broadcast on the Three Mile Island disaster. In the space of a decade, Cronkite's style had morphed from a just-the-facts to a just-the-facts with a little more oomph and rhythm.

Third, and - oh yes - there's this observation too, from Andrew Tyndall, w ho did a content analysis of Cronkite's broadcasts from '68 (he wrote this up a decade later). Says Andrew, a respected news content analyst: "To a modern sensibility, the television news of Cronkite's time seems ponderous, unidimensional, monotonously male--almost unwatchable. To a modern ear, accustomed to the noisy skepticism of the White House press corps, icons of television journalism, such as Marvin Kalb, sound timid and uncritical."

As you watch the MLK open, it's helpful to realize that perhaps as many as 30 million people were watching. For many of those, this may have been the first they had heard...