How TV Transformed the News in 1968

Think we’re living in troubled times? Americans who can remember might counter that 1968, now marking its golden anniversary, was an even more turbulent year than 2018.

Historian David Culbert notes that the angst of that year—political assassinations, riots, and a seemingly endless war in Vietnam—was chronicled via television news, creating an impact that magnified events.

That year, the U.S. had slightly over 200 million people and 78 million television sets. The networks had just switched to near total color programming. An estimated 20 million viewers got their news each night from the Huntley-Brinkley Report on NBC. CBS’s Walter Cronkite was right behind them.