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 2006. Cronkite's voiceover was notably not used on introducing the broadcast reporting his funeral – no voiceover was used on this occasion. Cronkite made a cameo appearance on a 1974 episode of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show", in which he met with Lou Grant in his office. Ted Baxter, who at first tried to convince Cronkite that he (Baxter) was as good a newsman as Eric Sevareid, pleaded with Cronkite to hire him for the network news, at least to give sport scores, and gave an example: "The North Stars 3, the Kings Oh!" Cronkite turned to Grant and said,