AN APPRECIATION : Eric Sevareid: TV’s Trusted Eminence Set the Standard

He was the rock of Gibraltar, a ruggedly handsome and incomparably authoritative TV image who set the standard for taking the most complicated issues of the day and analyzing them with exquisite fairness and grace.

Eric Sevareid, who died at 79 Thursday in Washington, inspired a kind of instinctive trust with his touch of solemnity, his disregard for TV glitz and his refusal to talk down to viewers. He practiced the highest form of journalism--educating, explaining and respecting his audience.

Sevareid was widely regarded as the almost Olympian eminence of a small but vital area of TV--those voices, now far too few, who gave texture, depth and distinction to the nightly network news. They also included Howard K. Smith, David Brinkley, John Chancellor and Sevareid’s analyst heir at CBS, Bill Moyers, who finally left commercial television to employ his rare gifts at PBS.

We spoke to Sevareid by phone at his Washington home less than two months ago shortly after it was disclosed that Chancellor was planning to retire from NBC next year. When we asked Sevareid about the state of network news commentary, he said:

“It’s sad they don’t have much of it now. There’s very little of a reflective nature going on, especially since Bill Moyers left (CBS).”

He added: “I always thought there should be more than one commentator on a given network. It’s sort of a monopoly position, you know. If there were a couple changing off, it would be better, but I was stuck with it, so I did the best I could.”

Sevareid’s best was television’s best. Although he had a long and distinguished career in radio and television covering some of the biggest stories in the world, and often seeming to be at the center of history-in-the-making, he rose even higher in public esteem by bringing to the home screen the kind of believable and sensible commentary that it all too often lacks.

His commentaries and analyses were part of Walter Cronkite’s “CBS Evening News.” And with the avuncular Cronkite regarded by many as the most trusted person in America, Sevareid’s added contributions to the program helped make it probably the most trusted nightly news show ever seen on television.

In our conversation, Sevareid said frankly that he was not well. He sounded frail and weak from the cancer that would take his life on Thursday, but he answered questions nonetheless, and one could not help swallowing hard at hearing his powerful voice reduced by illness so that it only faintly reminded one of what used to be.

William S. Paley, the late chairman and guiding force who helped make CBS the premier TV network for decades, said in his 1979 book, “As It Happened”:

“CBS has strictly forbidden editorializing by our regular newscasters.”

On the phone, Sevareid said: “Yes, I tried analysis. There’s a difference between objectivity and neutrality. If you approach things objectively, people put up with it. They think you’re being honest, rather than one man blabbing out his personal opinions night after night. That’s easy, you know. Opinions are a dime a dozen.

“What’s important are ideas, ideas that have a chance of working. You have to think hard. It takes a lot of hard writing and scholarship, and there’s not much of that around.”

It is sobering and yet enlightening to consider that Sevareid probably would not be able to find a place comparable to the one he had if he were practicing his profession--his art--in today’s TV news environment, even at the network level. Thoughtfulness and adult reasoning have given way to pizazz and anything-for-a-rating gimmickry, even at the network level.

And how sad a reminder it is that Sevareid no longer is with us just as the Democratic National Convention prepares to begin on Monday--precisely the kind of event where voices and reasoning such as his now are rarely, and barely, heard. At a time when America is trying to figure out just what has gone wrong in so many areas, the voices--these heirs to the Sevareid tradition--are needed more than ever.

Sevareid joined CBS in 1939. Paley recalled the hiring in his book: “Ed Murrow persuaded a 26-year-old, hard-working newsman, Eric Sevareid, to join CBS. Sevareid at the time was holding down two jobs: city editor of the Paris edition of the Herald Tribune and night editor of the United Press in Paris.”

Later in his book, Paley says simply: “Eric Sevareid before his retirement in 1977 had become the most respected analyst of the news in the (broadcasting) industry. Like Walter, he earned that respect and credibility over the 38 years he was with CBS News because people found they could trust his commentaries and analyses to be fair, honest and well-founded.”

It could not always have been easy for Sevareid, especially with a boss like Paley who has been criticized for being sensitive to some news reports and commentaries by his staff that riled either him or the government or his other powerful friends and acquaintances.

Elaborating on his belief in forbidding editorializing, Paley wrote:

“This has caused persistent problems over the years about interpreting what is editorializing, commentary, or analysis, even though it is clearly separated from hard news. Editorializing, or something very close to it, has crept into commentaries of even our most punctilious newscasters.

“Reporters who live and breathe news every day come to feel very strongly about some issues and cannot at times recognize their own biases. I have had heated arguments on the subject with Ed Murrow, Elmer Davis, Eric Sevareid and Howard K. Smith.”

Nonetheless, Sevareid persevered and, in the long view of TV news, not only triumphed but carved out a special niche that set the networks apart in their glory days. It is safe to say of Sevareid, without any doubts: There goes a giant.