News anchors you trusted more than your own family

There was a time when the evening news was a national appointment. You sat down at six-thirty, the set warmed up, and Walter Cronkite looked you in the eye and told you what happened today. And you believed every word.

Cronkite anchored the CBS Evening News for nineteen years. He told you Kennedy was dead, he showed you the moon landing, and when he came back from Vietnam and said the war was unwinnable, Lyndon Johnson reportedly said “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.” That was the kind of authority a newsman had.

After Cronkite there was Rather and Brokaw and Jennings, and each household picked their man and stuck with him like a family doctor. The idea that you could get your news from a thousand different sources on a phone in your pocket would have sounded like science fiction. In those days, the news came from one face on one screen, and the whole country watched the same version of the truth.