And that's the way it is.

A nightly epistemological claim - that the last thirty minutes were the definitive truth of the day.

And that’s the way it is. Followed by the date. Walter Cronkite closed the CBS Evening News with this line from 1962 to 1981. It is the most ambitious sentence in broadcast history. Not “that’s our report.” Not “thanks for watching.” A flat, declarative claim that the half hour the viewer just consumed was reality itself, processed and complete.

The claim worked because Cronkite was, by 1972, polled by Oliver Quayle as the most trusted man in America - ranking above the President, Vice President, Senate, House, and every other public figure tested. A network news reader carried more political capital than the elected leadership of the country. The era ran on that math.

In February 1968, after Tet, Cronkite broke his own rule. He went to Vietnam, came back, and told the camera the war was a bloody stalemate and that the only honorable exit was negotiation. Lyndon Johnson reportedly said: If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America. Whether or not LBJ actually watched it live is debated by historians. The line survived anyway because it described what everyone already understood. A month later Johnson refused to run for reelection. One journalist’s brand was, briefly, worth a presidency - which is also the size of the wound left when that brand retired in 1981 and Dan Rather had to inherit a chair that nobody else fit.

Sources: www.pbs.org ↗www.smithsonianmag.com ↗ufdcimages.uflib.ufl.edu ↗