Eric Severalsides Signs Off
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television ERIC SEVERAL SIDES SIGNS OFF BY MARVIN KITMAN On the night of November 30, after 38 years on CBS News radio and television broadcasts, Eric Seva-reid was given three minutes and 11...
...The space had not yet been occupied because someone discovered that the McLeish hired a couple of years back to understudy Sevareid was not Archibald, but a guy named Rod...
...Walter Cronkite, host of the old-age home called the CBS Evening News (when he is not off sailing or running foreign policy), called upon Sevareid to deliver his "parting thoughts" as if he were Martin Buber on his death bed...
...In any case, years of hearing both sides of every issue can have an unbalancing effect on a person...
...I think the nub of Sevareid's real contribution was that he catered to television's need for giving merely a semblance of change by his retreat into incoherence...
...Of course, that's nothing to be ashamed of...
...Ultimately, Eric was a decent, earnest—if dull—man...
...That goes to show how thin an art form the essay has become...
...Bill Moyers, Edwin Newman, Hughes Rudd, David Brinkley, Charles Osgood, Gene Shalit, Lloyd Dobins, Charles Ku-ralt—all are much better video essayists than Sevareid, whose work was on a par with Leslie Stahl's...
...it frees the time for news...
...Yet where are the women commentators of a comparable age...
...The Mobil Oil Company is scrutably Oriental in this respect, having assigned Sevareid to do commentaries for its new so-called actuality series, When Havoc Struck (scheduled to strike in 40 major markets beginning this week...
...Michael Perloff of the philosophy department at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee has astutely noted, "Eric Sevareid could say less with more words than any man I know...
...The situation will probably not improve in the near future either, since most of the current female TV journalists are pretty, sexy, relatively brainless young things, whose heads are set in concrete (from excess hair spray...
...On Television ERIC SEVERAL SIDES SIGNS OFF BY MARVIN KITMAN On the night of November 30, after 38 years on CBS News radio and television broadcasts, Eric Seva-reid was given three minutes and 11 seconds to sign off—permanently...
...Listeners a shade more intelligent than myself have reported hearing Sevareid's voice as a kind of blur...
...On her NBC special last month, for example, she said, pointing to her breasts, "Talk about your Big Events...
...Excitement hawking Haley's M-O, Geritol and Polident on TV...
...Now that's a bright idea, if 1 must say so myself...
...On the other hand, if TV is going to pursue the young audience that everybody says is the future of electronic journalism (and now doesn't watch the news because the superstars have been Sevareid and his ilk), the answer is Bette Midler...
...Professor Davidson has observed that those we claim to love and honor are also useful in discussing the celebrated irregularities...
...in Bartlett's...
...The company had no qualms about putting him behind the anchorman's desk to read his sales message as if it were a spot on the NBC Nightly News...
...The truth is that writing for the ear requires a special flair for images that Sevareid never mastered...
...His television debut on September 2, 1963, was the last major development in TV news analysis...
...Retirement age is completely arbitrary anyway...
...His friends at CBS and elsewhere in the TV establishment proposed his courage, mentioning his past wars and crusades...
...Professor W. Phillips Davidson of Columbia University, at a recent conference on "Images of Old Age in the American Media," noted that 65 as a cut-off point is a fairly recent invention, originating with Otto von Bismarck and adopted by the United States during the Depression...
...Clearly, Sevareid operated on many levels and reached many segments of the American public...
...The network should give the slot to a full-blown, mature older woman...
...He could take a complicated subject and quickly make it incomprehensible...
...Having to summarize his 14 years on the CBS News with Walter Cronkite, Roger Mudd or whoever was minding the store while Walter was away reading 20th-century essayists leads one to make generalizations...
...Chet Huntley in his truly gelden years jumped or fell from power at NBC to become a spokesman for American Airlines...
...That was about 45 seconds more than his usual time...
...Walter would appreciate her, or so the rumor goes...
...His old friend Cronkite called him one of the "finest essayists of the century...
...But the real American way is to give old newsmen the plums of Western civilization—commercials...
...He thereby influenced not only the next generation of TV news analysts but top government officials as well...
...The chanteuse tells it like it is...
...Excitement's remarks simply floated into the ozone...
...But the vacuum, so to speak, left by Sevareid yearns to be filled and CBS abhors it...
...In the few moments I have left, I will go into some of the other issues raised by Sevareid's departure...
...Others have pointed to his voice, always lowered an octave when he delivered his lectures...
...As Dr...
...If you're a professional football player, you're washed up at 32...
...Can you picture Mr...
...The Washington Redskins had a team dominated by men in their early 30s and they became known as "the Over the Hill Gang...
...But his youthful com-bativeness has been sorely missing in the past decade...
...Excitement...
...Perhaps CBS News President Richard Salant will go for it...
...Every time he was on he said something different but the same...
...That probably will displace Mae West's "Come up and...
...After all, newspapers have many commentators who do not fit the image of blonde beauties: Mary McGrory, Sylvia Porter, Harriet Van Home, even Dear Abby and Ann Landers...
...In the latter's case, though, I am willing to make an exception to my aversion to rules...
...The general impression is that the world will miss old Eric, Mr...
...From the start, he dominated the field physically, the sole commentator whose shoulders did not fit on the screen, no matter how far the cameras pulled back...
...Some issues, however, have four sides...
...If anybody makes Sevareid look irreplaceable it is Rod McLeish, and as a way of amortizing the blunder of signing him to a contract, CBS has relegated him to the weekend news and early-morning radio...
...Then there is the matter of discrimination against older women...
...Although all generalizations tend to be false, including this one (as Eric himself might put it), 1 don't think it would be wrong to say that no one on the air ever repeated himself like Sevareid...
...Before the Gray Panthers throw prune-juice cocktails at me, I want to stress that I favor the employment of older people to analyze the news...
...One particular case of sexism comes to mind: Pauline Fredericks never got a shot at donning the mantle at NBC...
...And that's the way it is...
...Martin Solow, specialist in advertising writing and other strange delivery systems, explained this to me: "Words left his mouth like normal communication, but before they reached our ears, they were gone...
...He was not known as Eric Sev-eralsides for nothing...
...Frank Stanton had to quit at 65...
...Crusader Rabbit is more feared...
...You'd be surprised at how much is up there these days: Episodes of Busting Loose and Szysznyk, piled on top of Eric's insights into the Third World and the radicalism of the '60s—insights that sometimes came to him while lying on the beach at William S. Paley's Bahama cabana...
...TV has always been kind to males middle-aged and beyond...
...There are many other concerns Sevareid could work for, too...
...It says that everybody has to leave at age 65, except William S. Paley, the chairman of the board, who is apparently ageless...
...This is good...
...So -did Eric...
...Sevareid's basic approach was to courageously wade into every issue and present both sides of the argument...
...In fact, it occurs to me that in listening to Sevareid for the last 10 years or so, I haven't heard a single word he has uttered, his farewell address to the nation included...
...To them, his nightly arrival on the screen meant an interlude, a calming two minutes of what could be called "white sound," or monotone...
...Knowing how the television executive's mind works, 1 guess William Small, the CBS honcho responsible for McLeish, won't consider hiring Golda Meir...
...History does it all the time...
...First, I am against the mandatory retirement rule at CBS...
...he made Cronkite seem the giddy kid brother in a roadster...
...Still, one wonders how many essays Walt has read lately, what with his broadcast diplomacy and sailing schedules...
...Howard K. Smith, Harry Reasoner, John Chancellor, and David Brinkley have had plenty of time to say it all...
...That's why you never heard what he said...
...In parts of Korea, I learned at the "Images of Old Age" conference, you can look forward to being old...
...Over at CBS no woman was ever given a chance to substitute for Sevareid, and ABC's Barbara Walters is too valuable a property to stick in a mere commentator's slot...
...His 38 years in broadcasting is nothing to sneeze at in terms of longevity, a selling point of yogurt these days...
...I'm sure that his early career in print, radio and television was admirable, and worthy of emulation by the young...
...the young take care of you, and come to you for wisdom...
...Bite your tongue...
...Some viewers claim the secret of his success was his looks (very reassuring and grandfatherly...
...As for Sevareid, I think he would make and excellent pitchman for yogurt...
...Sevareid's leavetaking raises a more immediate problem for CBS: At present, the network has no commentator-philosopher-king...
...Finally, there is the question of what television should do with its toothless old lions if it insists on making them leave once they hit 65...
...Those at the highest level of intellectual achievement, though, like Walter Cronkite, not only could hear Eric but found him "thought-provoking...
...My own impression is that he didn't say anything at all...
...According to my watch, it should have taken you roughly three minutes and 11 seconds to read my own thoughts on Sevareid's parting...
...And he was talented, too...
...others only one...
Vol. 61 • January 1978 • No. 2
