Did you know that the late, great CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite, one of the most important news icons of all kind, once worked as a “church editor” for a mainstream newspaper in Houston (apparently the old Houston Press)?
That was a detail from his life that I missed. I had read, long ago, that he was a “cub reporter” after his college years, yet before he broke into broadcasting. But time as a “church editor”? That’s a journalism title from the old, old days, one that is even more condescending than the more common and inaccurate label “religious editor (as opposed to “religion” editor.
Anyway, a religion-beat friend recently send me a photocopy of a 1994 interview with Cronkite that ran in The Christian Century, the influential mainline Protestant journal. I can’t find it online, although it was quoted by Religion News Service in an a short obit — “And that’s the way he was” — in 2009.
Encountering that “church editor” label reminded me of the old “Lou Grant” show episode that I used as the opening for my graduate project at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, which ran — in a much condensed form — on the cover of The Quill in 1983. The headline on that journal essay was: “The religion beat: Out of the ghetto, into the mainsheets.”
The “ghetto”? That was the “church page.” The overture of that Quill piece is long, but it will provide some context for the Cronkite remarks that I will share here:
As was often the case, Lou Grant was working on two problems at once. At first the problems seemed unrelated.
The Los Angeles Tribune had lost its religion editor. City editor Grant had searched far and wide and, of course, no one was interested in the position. After all, what self-respecting journalist would want to be stuck with the religion beat?
Problem number two was how to get rid of lazy, often-drunk, no-good reporter Mal Cavanaugh. All through this episode of Lou Grant the management of the Trib had been trying to find a way to get Cavanaugh to resign.
Then, a spark of inspiration. The script is simple:
LOU: Congratulations, Mal. You're the Trib's new religion editor.
