CBS Morning News for live coverage. The "CBS Morning News" title was originally used as the name of a conventional morning news program that served as a predecessor to the network's current morning program, "CBS This Morning". For most of the 1960s and 1970s, the program aired as a 60-minute hard news broadcast at 7:00 a.m., preceding "Captain Kangaroo" and airing opposite NBC's "Today". Walter Cronkite and sportscaster Jim McKay both anchored the original "CBS Morning News" at one time. When CBS reformatted the early morning broadcast, the "CBS Morning News" became a pre-dawn 30-minute news broadcast. The program first aired in its
Walter Cronkite "The Tonight Show" hosted by Johnny Carson. The following night, Carson did a comic spoof of his on-air farewell address. As he had promised on his last show as anchor in 1981, Cronkite continued to broadcast occasionally as a special correspondent for CBS, CNN, and NPR into the 21st century; one such occasion was Cronkite anchoring the second space flight by John Glenn in 1998 as he had Glenn's first in 1962. In 1983, he reported on the British General Election for the ITV current affairs series "World In Action", interviewing, among many others, the victorious Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher.