Page 41 - Historical Dictionary of Political Communication in the United States

30
St.
a
son
The
that he was once voted "the most trusted man in America." CROUSE, TIMOTHY
of
Joseph, Missouri, dentist whose family moved to Houston while he was still in
school, Cronkite enrolled in the University of Texas in 1933 to study economics
and political science but soon began working for the Houston Post and Scripps
Howard. In 1936, Cronkite went to work for a Kansas City radio station for a
year. He then joined the staff of United Press, for which he would report for
more than a decade. When World War II broke out, Cronkite went to Europe
as a correspondent. He parachuted into Holland with the 101st Airborne Division
and joined the Third Army at the Battle of the Bulge. After the war, he was
United Press' chief reporter at the Nuremberg war crimes trials, then moved to
Moscow for two years as a bureau chief. Cronkite returned to the United States
in 1948 as a radio reporter and joined CBS in 1950. He virtually created the
post of "anchorman," sitting at a news desk with his television coverage of the
1952 national political conventions from Chicago. He began hosting CBS Eve-
ning News as managing editor in 1962 and became known for his reassuring,
unflappable manner. His replacement by CBS as anchor at the 1964 Republican
Convention with a team of reporters prompted a reassessment of the nature of
television news. After a Life magazine article questioned the scramble for ratings
behind that move, Cronkite was returned to the anchor desk for election night.
In 1968, he went to Vietnam and is credited by some historians with turning
majority opinion against the war by reporting during the Tet offensive that
America was losing. Since his retirement in 1981, Cronkite has been a special
correspondent for CBS.

SOURCES: Contemporary Authors (CD-ROM), 1993; John Jakes, Great War Corre-
spondents, 1968.
Marc Edge

CROUSE, TIMOTHY (1947- ) is the reporter who coined the phrase "pack
journalism" to describe the reporters who follow political candidates during an
election. Crouse, a Harvard graduate, covered the rock music scene for many
East Coast newspapers, including the Boston Herald, before joining Rolling
Stone as a contributing editor in 1971.
There Crouse had an unlikely opportunity—to fill in for the regular political
reporters during the 1972 presidential election. At first he refused but resigned
himself to the task, deciding to report on only what he saw because he lacked
the political background for analysis.
His observations led to the widely accepted book The Boys on the Bus, which
takes a refreshing look at the workings of political reporters. Among the points
Crouse made in his book is that the process of trailing candidates around for
months leads to the phenomenon he called "pack journalism." Journalists in a
pack were likely to think and behave similarly because all of them are exposed
to the same information (created by a press agent on behalf of the political
candidate). This common thinking led to the same rehash of facts throughout