(3 of 10)
It can also gather its audience into a cohesive whole with a sureness that is unmatched in any other area of communications. By its coverage of the assassination of President Kennedy and the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald, TV news demonstrated its tireless capability and versatility. For millions upon millions, the President's funeral became a heart-moving personal experience. "Television held the country together over the transition period in a unique way and helped preserve the whole democratic process," says onetime FCC Chairman Newton Minow, who exempts TV news from his charge that the medium is a "vast wasteland."
Space from All Angles. Aware that they now have on their hands a commodity of indefinable power and, inevitably, incalculable value, the networks are putting more time, money and ingenuity than ever into their news programs. Both CBS and NBC now allot about one-quarter of their programming to news and public affairs, ABC somewhat less. The Cronkite and Huntley-Brinkley reports, which used to run for only 15 minutes, were increased to a half-hour in 1963; and ABC's Peter Jennings with the News will go to a half-hour this January. Together, the three networks will spend $148 million on news this year—their budgets have been boosted 200% from five years before.
For the coverage of astronautics alone, the networks will shell out a combined $20 million this year to handle all angles of the story—from anxious wives awaiting the return of the astronauts to the various manufacturers who have contributed to the space capsule. With 30-to 40-man staffs in Viet Nam, CBS and NBC spent over $500,000 apiece on war coverage last year. With the help of the Early Bird communications satellite, TV managed live coverage of the Gemini 6 splashdown.
Out of Context. The range is virtually unlimited, the impact almost awesome, the promise increasingly impressive. Yet there is general agreement that TV news still falls short of its potential. "It is hard for television newscasting to serve the more mature purposes of journalism," says Harold Fleming, director of the Potomac Institute. "It is hard for TV to give perspective, to put things in context."
Cronkite, for one, agrees. TV, he feels, is shortchanging the vital, reportorial aspect of journalism. "The networks," he says, "including my own, do a first-rate job of disseminating the news, but all of them have third-rate news-gathering organizations. We are still basically dependent on the wire services. We have barely dipped our toe into investigative reporting."
For one thing, even though the networks are steadily building up their reportorial staffs, they still have too few men in the field. In Washington, a correspondent may cover Capitol Hill one day, the Labor Department the next; on the following day a story may take him out of town. He has little time to develop expertise in any one area.
Once a story is assigned, the reporter goes to work and a kind of "tyranny of time" sets in. Interviews are filmed, the