Saturday, July 18, 2009

Cronkite's "That's they way it is" almost wasn't

I remember thinking as a child in 1981 as I watched Walter Cronkite's last "CBS Evening News" broadcast that he must be leaving the show because he had only months to live, but didn't want to admit that on national television. (Good for him: I was way off. And he lived almost 30 years more, long enough to see that no other television news anchorman ever approached his stature.)

But did you know that his bosses at CBS News initially hated his signature "that's the way it is" sign-off? He discusses how he came up with that, and why, and how he was almost forced to stop using it during this 2 and a half minute clip from 1998 embedded below.

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