Cronkite wasn't the only 'anchor'

Bill Slatter

Published Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Just a few thoughts about Democrat Publisher Kevin Cooper’s column about Walter Cronkite, CBS’s great anchorman who died last week.

But a confession first: nearly all my working life was spent at NBC stations and for 14 years NBC itself.

But I have no quarrel with Kevin’s glowing tribute to Cronkite. I do, however, question his statement that Cronkite was “the first TV news personality to be dubbed as the news anchor.”

Maybe so, maybe not.

The term “anchor” is now part of the language, meaning not only that which holds a boat or ship in place but also describes the main news reader on a TV newscast.

Until the last half of the 1950s or early ’60s, the main man (not a single woman anchor in those years) who read the news was known simply as the news announcer or news reader.

It is my recollection that, contrary to what Kevin and others are now saying, the term “anchor” was coined by a man named Reuven Frank, a top news executive with NBC in the period we’re talking about. It was Frank who first teamed a couple of guys named Chet Huntley and David Brinkley and made them household names in the late 1950s and the entire decade of the 1960s. And it was Frank who invented their famous signoff: “Good night David. Good night Chet.” The two were in separate cities — Brinkley in Washington, Huntley  broadcasting from New York. And it was Frank, as best I can remember, who first came up with the term “anchor” to describe what Huntley and Brinkley were — the principle news readers of a newscast.

Kevin also left a clear impression that Walter Cronkite dominated the national news scene during his years at CBS.

For part of that period, he did, but for much of his tenure he did not. Huntley and Brinkley became the principal anchors at NBC in 1956 after they were successfully teamed during the 1956 convention.

They quickly caught on and captured the lead from CBS (at that time Douglas Edwards was CBS anchor)

Cronkite  took over from Edwards in 1962 and remained principal anchor at CBS until he retired in 1981.

But Huntley-Brinkley led the news ratings for the entire decade of the 1960s which saw some of the biggest stories in American history: the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the tumultuous racial integration period, the Vietnam war and the moon landing. Cronkite was great but Huntley and Brinkley had the most viewers.

Huntley retired in 1970 and it was the decade of the 1970s when Cronkite took the lead and became, as Kevin Cooper said, “TV news anchor for a generation.”

Well, half a generation certainly. Sad to say, all three anchors are now dead.

Bill Slatter

Natchez resident