Cronkite, at His Apex

Do you think that the press should have held the story?

No. I don’t think that the press should have held the story. Once a story is abroad in the land, once more than one person outside of the intelligence community or the military or whoever knows about the story, you can be pretty sure so, too, do the intelligence sources of foreign nations in Washington. They are not stupid. I think it is perfectly possible for one newsman to really have a story unto himself. Maybe he stumbled on something that is still secret and is of vital national security and hold onto it for a while, maybe forever. But if two newsmen know it, and each of them knows that the other knows it, you might as well print it. If two newsmen know it, so does the Russian spy network and the Transylvanian spy network and everybody else in Washington.

It can’t be contained?

There are not many secrets in Washington that are not abroad in the drawing rooms of the foreign embassies and if there are any secrets abroad in Washington, then it ought to be abroad in the land throughout the United States. All the American public ought to share it. I don’t want any American knowing less the Russians know about us.

What do you think is the most dangerous effect television has on people?

It is people depending on it too completely. The polls that show most of the American people getting most of their news from television are somewhat disturbing. I think they should be getting most of their news from multimedia. They ought to be reading the newspapers more thoroughly than ever before, listening to the radio, reading opinion journals.

What do you think of the future of the printed word?

It has got to be good. Television and audio-visual communications generally have tremendous impact and they haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of the use of them for education. But it is an evanescent form. It is here at the moment that you receive and then it is gone. You have got to have the printed page to study and go back and review, to absorb more deeply than you possibly can audio-visually. There is so much that needs to be communicated that we can’t do it in the time we have. You’ve read the figures elsewhere that all the words spoken on an evening newscast of a half hour are equivalent to about two-thirds of the words in a standard newspaper page. Well. We still are best at introducing people to their word, to where the news is made and who makes it. We can give them the headlines—and for a lot of people, that’s all they’re going to read anyway. Our educational system needs to teach them that they have got to go deeper than that; they’ve got to read more, not less. I think the printed medium is here to stay.

How should newspapers be changing to stay with television?

More news and less entertainment. The newspaper, when television first became a threat 15 or 20 years ago, went exactly the wrong direction, most of them. They met television in television’s own backyard, where television could do the best job and that’s entertainment. They shortened the news and tried to put in more features and that was wrong to my mind. What the newspaper can do better than anybody else is cover news in depth. I don’t mean analytical pieces necessarily or first-person pieces, or subjective journalism. I mean just get out and get the facts. Tell people what’s happening in their communities and too many newspapers aren’t doing that.