Here's what he said about Dan Rather,
CRONKITE: Well, I think that there was a general feeling among quite a lot of us around the CBS shop and, indeed, some of the viewers, that Dan gave the impression of playing a role, more than simply trying to deliver the news to the audience.Yeah, I think Cronkite was being diplomatic about Rather, given some of back story about Cronkite's retirement and Rather taking over the anchor position at CBS.
...
BLITZER: Bob Schieffer, as you know, is going to be the interim anchor of "The CBS Evening News," a good friend of all of ours, an outstanding journalist. Who do you think should emerge as the next anchor, the main anchor of CBS, after Bob Schieffer's interim period?
CRONKITE: Well, I think it's going to be hard to find anybody who is going to be as much liked and appreciated and does such a job as Bob Schieffer. I think he's one of the great television journalists of our time. And he was a good journalist when he came to television from Fort Worth [Texas]. He is, to my mind, the man who, quite frankly -- although Dan did a fine job -- I would like to have seen him there a long time ago. He would have given the others a real run for their money.
So Rather was "...playing a role, more than simply trying to deliver the news..."? What about when Cronkite used his position (at the time, a pretty powerful one) as news anchor to issue an on the air opinion that the war in Vietnam was at a stalemate and that the U.S. should open negotiations with the North Vietnamese?
Cronkite has been involved with news reporting since the 1930s and with the birth and early days of broadcast journalism, so it was no surprise that Blitzer asked him about the current state of news.
BLITZER: Where does Walter Cronkite go when he wants to get the news?Lisa de Moraes of The Washington Post has a different take on Wolf Blitzer's interview of Walter Cronkite. She thought that maybe it was Cronkite taking some last shots at Rather and CBS.
CRONKITE: Well, I go to my newspapers first. They're more complete than broadcast [news] today. The misfortune with broadcasting today is that all -- even including your network, which is dedicated to the news -- do not take enough time to give us all of the facts and the background. ...
I wish that my network of CBS and the other two, I wish they would spend more time with their magazine programs giving us documentaries to back the news and interpret the news for us, or broadcast time in the half-hour evening news report programs. As we all know, with the commercial time taken out ... we've got 17 or 18 minutes. We've got one of the most complicated nations in the world, particularly today. We've got a complicated world in which we presume to be leaders. And my gracious, we're trying to cover all the important news in those two great bailiwicks in 17 or 18 minutes. It's madness. And we simply can't do it.
...
Give news a little more time and don't request that they also, in their news time, entertain. We're not entertainers. We're journalists. And we need more time to do our job well.
But really, let's get to the bare essence of it all. Isn't news another form of entertainment? Why does someone "Like" to watch the news? What's the difference between a news junkie, sports junkie or reality-show junkie?
Cronkite has said many times in the past that he'd like to see the daily news shows expand from a half hour to an hour or more. In fact, his CBS news broadcasts were originally 15 minutes long and under his guidance, grew to 30 minutes.
Now, I wonder what Cronkite has to say about The Fox Report with Shepard Smith that is an hour long.
