Re: CBS News

[Shawn Mamros <mamros@MIT.EDU>]

>[...]  No history
>of CBS television news, no pictures of what the first "CBS Evening News"
>set looked like, no montage of anchors from 1948 to present.

Let's be realistic here...  Odds are good that none of the networks made
a regular practice of recording the daily newscasts, certainly not before
the days of videotape (late 50's), and probably not for quite a few years
after that.  I'd be a bit surprised if there's *any* footage of Douglas
Edwards doing the CBS Evening News - certainly I've never seen any.

The first CBS news set probably looked very crude by modern standards.
Even if a picture of it does still exist, would anyone but us be all that
interested?

And the montage of anchors of the weekday evening newscast would be an
awfully brief one, since there have been only three in all those 50 years
- - Douglas Edwards, Walter Cronkite, and Dan Rather.

As for any other history of the broadcast itself...  Edwards is dead, and
no doubt most of the early reporters are as well.  Cronkite is still alive,
but he's been a sharp critic of the network news departments in recent
years - he might not have been interested, or CBS might not have wanted
to give him much airtime.  Without them, you're not going to have much
coverage of the "early" years - which is indeed what happened with the show
that CBS aired.  And Charles Osgood said it best at the beginning of the
show - to paraphrase, you can't do justice to 50 years with only one hour.

You'd do better to pick up a copy of Cronkite's autobiography, titled
"A Reporter's Life", for a more thorough account (obviously centered
around Cronkite rather than CBS as a whole, but still a worthwhile read).

- -Shawn Mamros
E-mail to: mamros@mit.edu

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