John F. Kennedy became the primary source by which people were kept informed of events surrounding John F. Kennedy's assassination. In fact, television started to come of age before the assassination. On September 2, 1963, Kennedy helped inaugurate network television's first half-hour nightly evening newscast according to an interview with "CBS Evening News" anchor Walter Cronkite. Newspapers were kept as souvenirs rather than sources of updated information. In this sense his assassination was the first major TV news event of its kind. TV coverage united the nation, interpreting what went on, and creating memories of this space in time. All three major U.S.
CBS Evening News officials complained to CBS founder William S. Paley. The second half of the report was aired the following Monday, but only for eight minutes. Cronkite was replaced as anchor of the program the Monday after his retirement, March 9, 1981, by then 49-year-old Dan Rather, who had been with CBS News as a correspondent since the early 1960s and later became a correspondent for the network's newsmagazine "60 Minutes". Concerns about excessive liberalism in the media were frequently leveled at Rather, the "CBS Evening News", CBS News and CBS in general. Some of these concerns dated from Rather's position as