Television: The Most Intimate Medium

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much to overall in experience as they are to individual overinvolvement. The networks are learning fast; the quality of their coverage is improving steadily. It had better. By next year, if the Viet Nam conflict continues, a new communications satellite high over the Pacific may make live coverage available. Then TV's first war will become the first war brought home to the American living room even as it is fought.

News Sense. Apart from its troubles with the "raw" news of immediate events, television has demonstrated that it is perfectly possible to unite film with text in a news program that is both balanced and provocative. Taking one of the most abstruse and complex of current topics—the Common Market—John Chancellor made it understandable as well as entertaining in a special that few critics thought would come off. By examining some of the blatant misuses of federal highway funds, Brinkley showed what a cutting edge investigative TV work can have. Many people have ridden the fabled Orient Express, but NBC's Edwin Newman was the first to take a television camera along, and he exposed the ride for the grueling, unglamorous trip it is. "Why do we have to wait for the Fulbright committee to examine our China policy?" asks Edward P. Morgan. "Television should have gotten the idea well beforehand."

To meet such criticism, says Cronkite, the television industry will have to train its own journalists. It will have to build a corps of correspondents with well-developed news sense and a disciplined news judgment. Until that happens, however, TV will continue to raid the other media—as it did in the case of Walter Cronkite, who has worked for both radio and television and brought to them a pervasive background of news experience.

Born in St. Joseph, Mo., brought up in Kansas City, Cronkite found reporting far more exciting than his studies and dropped out of the University of Texas in his junior year. For a short while he found his niche as a radio sportscaster, and he achieved a measure of local renown with his talent for the then-popular practice of replaying football games with nothing but wire-service copy, a sound-effects man and his own fertile imagination to give the listener the effect of an on-the-spot description. He improvised elaborate descriptions of players and cheerleaders, even pretended to recognize friends in the stands. Once, when the wire broke down, he kept a game going for 20 minutes on imagination alone. "I marched them up and down the field—with frequent and protracted time outs. When the wire finally came back, I discovered that Notre Dame had scored. I had them on their own 20-yd. line. I had to get them all the way back downfield to score in a hurry."

Success with Chalk. The sportscaster soon grew restless in radio; it involved too much show business to suit him. Besides, he had met a girl named Mary Elizabeth Maxwell, and he had the distinct impression that she would not marry him until he became a bona fide reporter. Cronkite joined United Press in Kansas City, Mo., and Betsy married him. They have three children: Nancy Elizabeth, 18, Mary Kathleen, 16, Walter Leland III, 9.

In 1942, Cronkite became a U.P. war correspondent. He covered the North African landings, then the air war out of London. Put in charge of U.P.'s operations in the Low Countries after