Articles
Smith v. Cronkite: A War of Words
By Harry A. Jessell
The CBS News half-hour primetime special of Feb. 28, 1968, is among the network’s most memorable and impacful.
After returning from a fact-finding trip to Vietnam, top anchor Walter Cronkite presented a clear-eyed report on the war. He concluded with his opinion that it had devolved into a bloody “stalemate” that could not be won without a massive U.S. escalation that would bring the world “closer to the brink of cosmic diaster.”
Stations Must Save Their Archives
By Mary Collins
In the early 2000s, a college student working in a library at the University of Maryland pulled on headphones and carefully slipped an acetate transcription record from its protective sleeve. Despite its designation, the record was made of glass with a lacquer coating; it was typical for radio station pre-recordings from the 1930s through the 1940s.
The student marveled again that the disc remained unbroken and relatively well preserved despite having been retrieved from a dumpster by a radio station engineer and then stored in his home until after his death in 1998.