I watched Fred Graham’s reports when watching CBS News was an ingrained ritual: I would not consider any other network as valid.
The son of a Tennessee preacher, Mr. Graham, a lawyer with a soft drawl, a habitual cheroot and the steady gaze of a Mississippi riverboat gambler, was a Yale, Vanderbilt and Oxford University scholar who went to Washington in 1963 as chief counsel to Senator Estes Kefauver’s subcommittee on constitutional amendments, then served two years as a special assistant to Labor Secretary W. Willard Wirtz.
After getting laid off by CBS in 1987, he wrote “Happy Talk: Confessions of a TV Newsman,” first published in 1990, on his two decades in broadcast journalism, in which he argued that network news programs had become “infotainment,” the equivalent of “a well-produced video version of a tabloid.” As Michael C. Janeway, then the dean of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, noted in a review for The Times Book Review, the title, “Happy Talk,” referred to “that mindless banter with which television anchors fill air time.”
It has only gotten worse. Anchors laugh and banter and comment, coo and smirk. News leads off with disasters or tragedies, aiming for ratings, and switches to actual news when there are no more plane crashes or murders left.