You'll Laugh! You'll Cry! You'll Watch Them Die! It's Today's News Spectacular!

Les Midgley, who is the executive producer of the CBS Evening News and therefore the man operably responsible for what 20,000,000 Americans watch as news each evening, six days a week, 52 weeks a year, is seated at the desk in his office, which is on the ground floor of the CBS News Building on West 57th Street in New York. The CBS News Building, one should say, is not much of a building as buildings go these days, certainly nothing like the CBS setup in Los Angeles nor the austere and meticulous, plant- and Brancusi-filled CBS Building that Frank Stanton has erected on Sixth Avenue. From the outside, it is a nondescript three-story rectangle of red brick -- a warehouse, perhaps, or an Eisenhower post office. Inside -- well, it's clearly not a post office. Guards. Endless narrow corridors. Small offices. Large rooms full of teletypes, desks, typewriters, men in shirt sleeves. A room full of tape machines. Banks of tape machines. Television screens. The CBS News people take pleasure in that they are not in Mr. Stanton's building, in that they are over here on the wrong side of Ninth Avenue, in a warehouse of a building, in their shirt sleeves, putting out an electronic evening newspaper.

On the other side of the glass in Midgley's office is the newsroom where the Cronkite show is done--a real newsroom, real desks, real people working at the desks. "We don't use a studio like NBC," says one of the CBS people. The time is four o'clock in the afternoon. A November day; 1971. There are six desks in the room, ordinary gray metal desks, bunched together into three rows. In the far row, two men sit typing. The man in the red shirt is the chief national-news writer. The man in the beard writes the foreign news. On the near side, one man, who seems to be in his early 20s, is holding a phone to his ear and typing at the same time. The man behind him is also typing. At the front desk in the middle row sits Walter Cronkite. He has a pile of copy in front of him. His lips move as he intones the copy in a low voice. He holds a stop watch in his hand. He pauses in his reading, scribbles corrections. Men in shirt sleeves pass in and out of the room. Girls with clipboards. Engineers. Inside Midgley's office, the Boston tape is over, although Gomer Pyle is still running silently on the top two screens.

"You can take out Henagan," says Midgley. "He doesn't make any sense."

Stan Gould, associate producer, is writing on his clipboard. "I can use the priest," he says.

"The priest doesn't make any sense, either," says Sandy Socolow, who is Midgley's assistant, a youngish, plump man in glasses and a suit.

"It may be understandable in Boston, but not here," says Midgley. "What do you have down for it?"

"A couple of minutes," says Gould.

A man runs into the office. "No audio from Atlanta."

A phone rings. Socolow picks it up. "Have you seen your film? Well, was it good, bad or indifferent?"

Midgley is listening in on the other phone. "Are you positive he was there?" he asks.

Socolow says, "OK, what kind of production problems are you going to give us? It's a self-contained run of track." "No Shakne fore and aft," says Midgley.

"No Shakne," says Socolow.

Gould is on his way out of the office. "It's an R-three," says Socolow to Gould.

A girl in a black pants suit comes in, leaves the latest revised line-up for the evening: 1. Open; 2. Cronkite ... live; 3. Ft. McPherson/Medina/Morton ... VTR ... 3.00 Atlanta; 4. Cronkite ... live; 5. First commercial (Absorbine and Pontiac) ... VTR 8 ... 1.05; 6. Cronkite ... live; 7. Washington/Living costs/Benton ... Washington ... 1.45--

In the newsroom, some kind of flurry is going on. Cronkite is standing. The man in the red shirt and one of the other writers are standing at his desk. "Goddamn it, get on the phone and find out," Cronkite is saying.

Ron Vonn, another associate producer, steps into Midgley's office. Midgley is sipping a milk shake from a paper cup. He looks up. "I talked to Bruce Morton. He'll give us voice-over at the end of the trial." Vonn leaves.

Socolow says, "Threlkeld's on two-forty-six." Then, "Let me caution you, Mr. Midgley. Ron is going to run over."

Midgley picks up the phone. "Ron, is there anything that's going to raise a question of taste with us? Is there any problem with the mother or the children?" He nods and puts the phone down. "Two-thirty?" he says to Socolow.

"We have him down for three o'clock," says Socolow.

"OK, two-forty-five. We'll split the difference."

Vonn comes back in. "It doesn't look like the logistics are against us on jurors." Midgley reaches for a switch on his desk. The lower TV screen lights up.

Bruce Morton is leaning against a railing, looking at the ground. He looks up. "I'm ready whenever you are," he says with some impatience. "Well, what's the matter?" he says. "Bullshit," he says.

One of the writers comes in from the newsroom. "When are we going to hear from Kalb?" he asks.

"Kalb is supposed to call in by six," says Midgley. Out in the newsroom, Cronkite is standing talking, or apparently arguing, with Socolow.

Socolow comes back to Midgley. "It's the 'secret meeting' on Kalb's file. He says we have to have more on it or we ought to skip it until we do."

"I don't blame him," says Midgley. He picks up a phone. "Try to get me Marvin Kalb in Washington," he says.

To get to the taping room, you walk out of Midgley's office, past the newsroom, down a corridor, through a door marked No Admittance, past a secretary, past another No Admittance door and into a large room filled with banks of machines. They are very much the new machines, our new 20th Century machines--no rows of seamstresses and sewing machines, no looms, no great clanking wheels, iron, pistons, ugly things. These are trim, spare, rectilinear. Taller than a man. Gray and white. Now and then, a small red or green light. Dials. Oscilloscope screens. It is a large room, maybe 80' x 80'. There are about 20 of these machines. In rows. At each of them, on a small swivel stool, sits an operator. Above his head, on the machine, a large roll of tape is unwinding. The dials read, Color Hold ... green gain ... Blue Gain ... V Hold ... V Size ... Red ... Playback Control ... Blue. The operator throws a switch. The tape roll moves in the opposite direction. On a TV screen in the machine, the face of F. Lee Bailey appears, talking into a microphone.

"More," says Vonn. Bailey is making a speech, although it's hard to hear his voice on the machine because of all the other machines. Behind Vonn, Gould is standing beside another machine, watching Henagan in Boston. "OK," says Vonn. The operator stops the tape. Bailey is still there on the screen in midsentence. Another man is beside him at the microphone. "I want to use the Morton audio bridge to get to where this guy starts to talk," Vonn says. "I want to take it from where Bailey goes over to this man and then cut to this close-up." The tape operator throws a switch, the tape spins backward, the voices making a kind of speeded-up Disney-cartoon sound. Then forward: Bailey walking to the microphone, speaking, arm extended. Stop, backward. Forward. Backward. Vonn stands behind the operator.

Somebody comes by. "Are we going with the San Francisco stuff?"

"I don't know," says Vonn. "We're going to see it at six."

A phone rings. Gould picks it up. Listens. Puts it down. "San Francisco won't be ready until six-fifteen," he says.

"What about Boston?" says Vonn.

"How do I know?" says Gould. "I don't see how they have time for it, but I'm going to get it ready until they tell me to dump it."

The operator at Vonn's machine has the tape positioned at the point where Bailey is extending his arm toward the man on the left. "There?"

Vonn looks. "Back it off twelve seconds and we'll lay video only for that."

Bailey's voice comes up: "I've never gotten an acquittal for a nicer guy...."

"OK," Vonn says. "Now I want the cut to the head to come in right. OK?"

On Gould's machine, Boston school children are running down a street. On the machine next to him, Chinese soldiers are marching in a parade.

On another bank, Muhammad Ali is speaking at a press conference. "I've never felt better," he says against the sound of the Chinese military band.

"I don't care if we don't hear Bailey talking," says Vonn.

At six o'clock, the face of Jim Jensen, the local CBS newsman, appears on the top screen; an NBC man appears on the second screen--both without audio. On the lower screen, Midgley and Socolow are watching Bob Shakne interview a convict recently released from Attica.

"What bothers me," says Socolow, "is the guy coming out so strong, saying he was in the uprising."

Vonn sticks his head in the door. "What about San Francisco?"

Midgley says to Socolow, "You're in great shape. Relax." To Vonn, "They're putting in the last San Francisco splices."

"Jesus," says Vonn.

Midgley says to Socolow, "Cammerbandge has the guy in his apartment, doesn't he? He says he has no doubt about his being in cell block D."

Gould comes into the office. "Is your piece ready?" asks Midgley.

"Attica? Or Boston?" says Gould.

"Boston."

Gould shrugs. "I was just given a good night on Boston."

A phone rings. Socolow says to Midgley, "San Francisco is coming on." A picture of a woman and two children appears on the lower screen. The voice of Dick Threlkeld of the San Francisco CBS station. The two kids are apparently victims of a mysterious killing disease. A third kid has already died. These two are now becoming sick. It's a sad story. The woman talks about her belief in God and about how she knows the kids won't die. Threlkeld's voice tells us there is no chance that they will live. Close.

"Two-twenty," says Socolow.

"Damn good piece," says Midgley.

"Any problems with San Francisco?" asks Vonn.

"None," says Midgley. "It's good. Two-twenty."

Outside in the newsroom, there is a good deal of activity. Two cameras are being wheeled in. One directly in front of Cronkite's desk, the other off to his right, just in front of Midgley's office. Cronkite is still working at his desk, (continued on page 239)You'll Laugh! You'll Cry(continued from page 102) editing copy. The writers are still on the telephone or typing. A bank of lights is suddenly turned on overhead. The two writers in the far row of desks get up. A woman comes over and tidies up the surface of their desks. Another woman is taking the sheets of copy from in front of Cronkite and feeding them into the prompting machine, an ingenious device that has also been moved onto the floor, beside one of the cameras, and which consists of a TV camera that transmits each page of copy onto a TV screen attached to the large camera that's now facing Cronkite, where, by an arrangement of mirrors, is displayed the typewritten copy, complete with last-minute corrections, directly on the lens of the camera that Cronkite looks into. A third woman comes in with a tray of make-up, which she puts down on the desk behind Cronkite, which has been entirely cleared of papers. Somebody calls, "Three minutes to air."

Cronkite gets up and goes into Midgley's office. "What about Kalb?" he says.

"Kalb is standing by," says Midgley.

"Let's forget Kalb," says Socolow.

Midgley looks at Cronkite. "Well, we don't need it," he says. "Let's dump it."

"Two minutes," someone calls. Cronkite goes back to his desk. He puts on his jacket, opens a drawer of his desk, takes out a pair of glasses, puts them on. The woman is dabbing his face slightly with make-up. The last two writers have gotten up and are standing out of the way. Cronkite is sitting down now. Socolow goes over, puts a piece of paper on his desk. Cronkite is working on it. On Midgley's screen, there is the familiar clatter of the wire-services machines. A voice says, "And now, from our newsroom in New York, the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite." Cronkite is still working at his desk. On the screen, he appears behind the lettering, still working on something. Midgley gets up, closes the door to his office. Socolow sits in a chair by the telephone. A girl sits on the couch with a clipboard. The newsroom is bright with lights. On the screen, Cronkite looks up and, without missing a beat, moves into the opening rhythms of the evening news.

• • •

News. Right now in America, there are morning newspapers. There is news radio. Afternoon newspapers. Evening newspapers. The 11 O'clock News. The Noon News. Eyewitness News. Action News. Newsmagazines. Newsletters. Five minutes of news. Two minutes of news. Round-the-clock news. Cronkite. Brinkley. The News of the Week in Review. Harry Dalrymple wrapping things up at the news desk at station KPGT. "And so this was Wednesday, November third...."

One thing is clear: Americans are getting an awful lot of news beamed at them, printed for them, yelled into their ears, tossed into the mailbox. Another thing also seems clear: Generally speaking, news is supposed to be a good thing. Television stations announce pridefully that they are expanding their 30-minute news show to a full hour. Networks take expensive ads in newspapers in order to proclaim their total number of news hours. People talk of hard news and soft news. Radio in many cases has expanded its news coverage to a full 24 hours: the all-news station. News is a meliorative word these days. A meliorative concept. Many print ads are now presented in the form of news reports. Sports Illustrated has been taking ads in newspapers to promote itself as the "third newsmagazine." Opposed to news, which is good, there is presumably opinion, which is biased and unreliable; and analysis, which is intellectual; and criticism, which is self-serving and unconstructive; or fiction, which is irrelevant.

If it's true, though, that Americans are on the receiving end of an unparalleled amount and velocity of news communication, then it must also be true that something is seriously wrong with our news-communication services, because, as a nation (and also as states, as townships, as individuals), we keep getting ourselves into such serious messes--messes that result in good part, anyway, from our having been told the wrong thing or from our having an evidently complex situation communicated to us in a simplistic way, which in effect amounted to our being told the wrong thing.

Consider the classic communication debacle: Vietnam. Today, of course, everybody has the message about Vietnam. It's a lousy war, right? We had no business going in there, right? Or, if we did, it certainly all went wrong and we should have pulled out. Right? But what, one asks, was the news in 1964? Or 1965? Or 1966? Or 1967? Or even much of 1968? That is a long, long time, and there was a lot of news. To be sure, one understands what happened. The Government said certain things were true that were not always true. Americans have generally been brought up to have faith in their Government. Besides, for a generation we have been exhorted to fight communism there, and there, and there ... so why not there? One understands. Last year, I think, Cronkite declared in a magazine article that he had come round from being a moderate hawk on the war to wishing us out of it, to being a dove. Recantations over the Vietnam war somehow have a curious ring -- as if the process of learning were more important than the thing learned, which is sometimes true and sometimes not. Walter Cronkite recants; Pete McCloskey recants; 203,000,000 Americans recant. But from what to what? And what is it they were told all those years by all that news?

Consider some of the other matters that have resulted in the country's experiencing the real and severe malaise that it is surely now experiencing--and will obviously have to live with and suffer with for some time to come. Consider the most important and troubling of all our problems: race. Black and white. Black versus white. Segregation. Integration. Whatever you call it. What was the news on that? Until Dr. King and James Meredith and Little Rock and the integration of the University of Georgia and Medgar Evers and Selma and all the other far-off, seemingly long-ago events, what was the news telling us? Joe Louis, the Brown Bomber? Race riots in Detroit? Harry Truman integrating the Armed Forces? When the news-absorbing public woke up one morning to find the National Guard rumbling into some village square, or Watts aflame, or some frightened school kids being turned away from, or thrust into, some school--where had all that news communication left us the night before? At what spot on the map? How good was the map?

Pollution. Ecology. Did nobody look at Lake Erie until 1967? I read in the paper that a large metals smelter on the West Coast had filed suit with the Government, protesting that, if forced to comply with a certain pollution ruling by a certain date, it would be driven perilously close to bankruptcy. The executives of the company doubtless have a point. So, doubtless, do the citizens of the nearby town who have been choking on smelter gases for the past--well--how many years? What did the news tell them about that? Where were these citizens on the map?

Do I seem to be saying that our news systems--our network news, our newspapers, etc.--have served us badly? In fact, I think that is only incidentally so. I think it is indeed true that, as in the case of Vietnam, a highly complex political situation was treated for many years by television news as a largely military operation--the dramatic battle for Hill 937, and so forth. Not only that, but the whole war was presented to us in isolated, disconnected bits of detail--a 30-sec-ond bombing raid here, a two-minute film clip of Khe Sanh there, another minute of President Johnson at the Manila Conference, 30 seconds of a helicopter assault--with the result that, even if we had been given the real information we needed to try to come to terms with the war, the way we were given it made it doubly difficult. I think it's true that television news is usually superficial. I think it's true that most news is superficial. I think there are a lot of things wrong with all the news systems. Radio news is often nothing more than chopped-up wire-service copy (already chopped up) and then burbled onto the airwaves by a recommissioned disc jockey. Television news is also usually chopped up. And superficial. And tends to get its big ideas from newspapers. Newspapers, with a couple of exceptions, are often mind-blowingly parochial. Newsmagazines are less parochial, but only one 50th of the people in this country buy them and, even so, they mostly follow certified events, like everyone else.

Yet, having said all this, I'd like to say what I believe is more to the point: I think the people of this country, in a way, get better than they deserve from their news systems. Network news may be superficial, and it may have a slight Eastern bias, but--considering that it has to have some kind of businesslike relationship with its audience--the TV people put out a basically high level of afternoon newspaper. Better, anyway, than most afternoon newspapers. Morning newspapers vary hugely, and some are little more than paste-ups of the A. P. and the U. P. I. and a couple of syndicated columnists; but the A. P. and the U. P. I., despite their haste and superficiality, manage to move an awful lot of stuff in a given day, manage to tell this country more detail about itself than is true of most other countries.

The problem is, I think, that our concept of news is increasingly false, and that is what is serving us badly. This news, of which network X is going to give us 45 minutes more this year than last, may not be as useful a thing as we consider it to be. This news, which our newspapers take such pride in bringing us, and propose, in fact, to bring us more of, perhaps isn't as good a thing as we say, as we think it to be. Consider, for example, the thrust of change that has swept through virtually every aspect of modern life. Religion. Sex. Clothes. Consider the change that has swept through art forms. Look at the novel, which has always been a form of news, and observe its inner changes. How in the 18th Century it was a news of adventure, of the great migrations from the country to the city, the churning of urban and rural classes, Clarissa, Smollett, Defoe. How in the 19th Century it changed to provide the news of the new middle class, the manufacturing class, the new world of Dickens, George Eliot, Arnold Bennett, William Dean Howells. It told readers about the new people, how they lived, what they wore, how vicars had tea, what lawyers did at the office, all that furniture. And the 20th Century novel-- while admittedly struggling with the furniture-describing heritage of the 19th, not quite sure where it's going, finding narrative shot away by movies and TV--still moves toward telling us what we intuitively need to know about our world, about the inside of people's heads (no longer furniture), about how men and women are in bed together, how they really are, how, at any rate, they think they are.

But news--newspapers, TV news, wire-service news--is still telling us of plane crashes. Hotel fires. The minister from such and such said this and that to so-and-so. A strike. A flood. "hub man kills three." "socialite nabs bandit." And it does that because we seem to think we want that: fires, strikes, plane crashes, Hub man kills three. And the reason we think we want that, I think, is that we aren't nearly so serious about news as we allege. Or look at it this way: We say we're serious about news, so right away CBS and ABC and NBC and The New York Times and Time and Newsweek and all the rest of them rush to provide us with news--but time after time, it turns out to be the wrong news. It doesn't--apparently--much help us. It rarely tells us where we really are, because history is constantly appearing on our doorstep and telling us we're nowhere near where our map said we were. Admittedly, there is no news system one can conceive of that would provide us all with perfect maps; but our maps are so inaccurate, and require so much trouble, and tears, and often bloodshed to correct.

Clearly, the news we say we want is the old news. It somehow makes us feel good to read about a plane crash off Japan. It connects us to some ancient folk need, and maybe that is very strong, loo strong, and maybe Armageddon will come mysteriously one afternoon, having been foretold by no less than four associate professors in Denver, a Swiss observatory and the Berkeley Barb, while the people of the most advanced nation in the world are still reading about a bus accident in Rangoon. Or Rome. Or Rochester, New York. It's perfectly likely--or so it seems to me--that we're never going to get a useful news system. In fact, in my darker moods, I can well imagine a situation developing in which the people of this country get so out of touch with what is actually going on beneath the surface that real trouble erupts, real trouble, and repression results, real repression (it certainly wouldn't be the first such cycle in history), and then, when the tanks are in place, and the guards are at their posts, and the trains are on time, and loudspeakers, or perhaps TV sets, are at the street corners--then we will have, or be given, a news system that finally will be properly attuned to the situation. Relevant.

But now, in the meantime, I think it might at least be worth while saying this much aloud: The news we congratulate ourselves on receiving, the news that our news systems congratulate themselves on transmitting, while allowing that in a more perfect world they would transmit more of it for us if only they could, if only they had a half hour instead of 15 minutes, 50 minutes instead of a half hour, a whole hour, a whole day, maybe, a whole week of--what? Folk entertainment. What? you say. Police-bribe scandal, rape, drowning--entertainment? I guess so. Two minutes of combat film from Vietnam--entertainment? I guess so--although maybe describing it as providing a kind of release, while giving the illusion of involvement, would be closer to it. The news we get, I think, is mostly this release, this kind of entertainment, no matter how grisly the subject, how much we even may weep at the result. We don't get it that way because they give it to us, nor because they are bad. We get it that way because we want it so. We call, they respond. Good luck, I say, to all of us.

• • •

The clock on Midgley's wall ticks toward seven. Seven is when the CBS Evening News goes on the air. Cronkite is still on the screen. He is winding up the taping. A commercial. During the commercial, Socolow steps into the newsroom, whispers something to Cronkite. Steps out again. The commercial is over. Cronkite is shuffling his papers. "And that's the way it is," he says. The familiar voice. The familiar inflection. "Wednesday, November third." End. People stream back into the newsroom. A writer sits back down at his desk. Cronkite walks into Midgley's office. Sits down in a chair. "I wish we could have done more with Kalb," he says.

"We couldn't reach Kalb in time," says Midgley. The Cronkite show is now on the air. Cronkite is on the third screen. Chancellor on the second. Reasoner on the top. Cronkite and Midgley watch the three screens. NBC comes on with something about China. Midgley turns up the NBC audio.

Cronkite says. "We're still one day ahead of them." The three networks carry the same report about Treasury Secretary Connally. Commercials. NBC and CBS have something on the dock strike. ABC is covering Lindsay.

Chancellor sits on his studio chair, detached, helpful. He runs through four quick items. Cronkite's face oncamera is backed by what seems to be a map of Vietnam. He tells us again about the DMZ. Then Dan Rather. Washington. The monetary crisis. Reasoner speaks about a copper crisis in Chile. Midgley sips another milk shake. Cronkite sits in his chair, swiveling it a bit from time to time. Then NBC comes on with its finale, a thing about the departure of the Washington Senators. Long. Weird. Arty camera shots of the empty stadium. "Jesus Christ," says Midgley. Then Cronkite is saying good night. Chancellor. Howard K. Smith. Good night, good night. The script girl closes her log sheet. The screens are dark. Midgley stands. He has a dinner to get to. Cronkite seems in no hurry to leave. He stretches his legs. His brow furrows. Midgley looks at him, on his way out. "I have to be uptown by seven-thirty," he says.

Cronkite looks at him. "You know," he says, "the thing that really breaks my heart is we never have enough time." Cronkite waves his hand. Midgley heads out the door.