Back in 1968, the unskeptical tone reporters used to bridge the sound bites from a State Department briefing or a Nixon transition team news conference would have seemed like uncontroversial straight reporting. The same technologies applied today would look like stenography, even flackery, for government officialsSome fascinating stuff on CBS News‘ excellent Public Eye site exploring the differences between the age of Cronkite and Couric. From the era of Dan Rather, Brian Montopoli dug up Andrew Tyndall‘s offline essay on the Evening News in 1968 and 1998.

[Tyndall] uses as an example a November 1968 story on the prospects for the Paris peace talks. “Five days before Election Day, Marvin Kalb’s lead story was a series of sound bites from Secretary of State Dean Rusk’s press briefing,” writes Tyndall. “Kalb repeated, without comment, Rusk’s verbose denials that Johnson’s decision to halt the bombing of North Vietnam was influenced by the pending vote. It is unimaginable that David Martin, the contemporary CBS News national correspondent, would file a report in which an official’s sound bites would so stand alone: They would be edited for length, put in a political context, integrated with conflicting comments by partisan experts, juxtaposed with archive clips showing previous contradictory comments and illuminated by Martin’s own editorial gloss.”