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However the story is handled, its impact is predictable. Together, the Cronkite and Huntley-Brinkley reports are watched by an estimated aggregate of 30 million people, and it is claimed that 70% of that audience is made up of adults. One particularly popular news special, such as Pope Paul's visit to the U.S. last year, can easily focus the attention of 150 million viewers. Even at the dullest point of the Fulbright hearings on Viet Nam, several million people were tuned in.
"Newspapers try to transmit facts," says Voice of America Director and onetime NBC Correspondent John Chancellor, "but television is the transmission of experience in its rawest form." Putting the pageantry of a Kennedy or a Churchill funeral into countless living rooms, is an achievement that the most moving newspaper description cannot duplicate; the sight of a young Dominican being shot in the back by a U.S. paratrooper can jolt the home viewer far more than any account of the same tragedy in print.
No Back Pages. "Television," says ABC's Howard "K. Smith by way of explanation, "is not just a picture medium. It is pictures, plus words, plus personality." When the words and the personality belong to a Walter Cronkite, they generate what CBS Vice President Gordon Manning calls "believability." Talking to the camera as if it were an attentive stranger, Cronkite projects an air of friendly formality, of slightly distant courtliness. His millions of viewers at the other end of the tube respond with consistent warmth.
No matter how ordinary the event, no matter how stirring the picture, the news that Cronkite and his colleagues bring into the American home always carries a kind of subliminal authority. The effect can be traced, says Cronkite, to the almost embarrassing intimacy of the camera. Even more important, he says, everything the viewer sees and hears comes to him on what amounts to an electronic front page. What the managing editor chooses for him, he cannot avoid. He cannot skip from headline to headline and browse among stories. They are all read aloud, right to the end. "There are no back pages in our kind of journalism," says Cronkite. Everything is up front where it cannot be overlooked.
Amplifying Prejudices. As a result of its extraordinary impact, TV news has become a powerful force encouraging social ferment. Early in the civil rights revolution, Negro activists made it perfectly clear that wittingly or unwittingly, the TV cameraman was their ally. Marches were staged and demonstrations timed to get full coverage. By reporting the whole movement, TV added to its momentum. The sight of Bull Connor's dogs attacking Birmingham Negroes served as a catalyst for the conscience of most of the nation.
To be sure, as TV news cameras moved north with the civil rights riots, their films had another effect. Ironically, television, which had given such a boost to the civil rights movement, began to obstruct it and contribute mightily to the white blacklash. "Take the case of some recent footage on the Atlanta riots," says M.I.T. Political Scientist Harold Isaacs. "What you saw was a black blur of a face, two