The read
For nineteen years Cronkite ended the evening news with “that’s the way it is,” and America largely believed him. Twelve years after leaving the desk, at seventy-six, the anchorman settings are still locked in: a register below the band’s floor, a melody held to under seven semitones of range, one hundred and twelve words a minute — and four pauses in eighty-five seconds, because on live television silence is dead air. The reading that lands optimal is spectral balance: energy spread evenly across the voice, nothing bright, nothing pushed. Trust, it turns out, has a frequency distribution — flat, in the best sense.