The Buzz June 6th 2026: Eighty-two years after D-Day

Welcome to the weekend and welcome to The Buzz.

As our little newsletter hits your inbox this morning, it marks exactly eighty-two years since those brave Canadian boys hit the beaches of Normandy as part of the massive D-Day invasion of June 6, 1944. The greatest seaborne landing ever attempted, the battle that was the beginning of the end of Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler.

Three of the Canadian journalists who made names for themselves by their accounts that day were Charles Lynch, Ross Munro, and Matthew Halton. They landed, hauling their typewriters, on Juno Beach. British and American journalists wrote equally compelling stories that day and throughout the war: the BBC, of course, and at CBS in the States, where correspondents like Charles Collingwood and Edward R. Murrow were heard reporting from London, France, Italy, and beyond. One of their younger colleagues, the soon-to-be-famous Walter Cronkite, was positioned on D-Day with hopes of having a very different vantage point – flying above Omaha Beach and recording the carnage that took place on those sands, but cloudy weather kept him from seeing anything.

However, Cronkite was to have a spectacular career that witnessed many famous moments in the years ahead, space launches, moon landings, Vietnam, and of course, presidential assassinations and resignations. He would become the ‘most trusted man in America’ and the revered voice that made CBS the leading broadcast institution, perhaps in the world (only the BBC was a serious rival).

I was thinking of Cronkite this week for two reasons. First, YouTube dug up and aired his 20th anniversary, 1964 D-Day special, which was a walkabout of key D-Day locations with Dwight Eisenhower, the man who had led Allied forces that day and would later become President. The show itself is a wonderful slice of history, black and white, with two guys just recounting their memories of twenty-four hours that changed the world. It was a great television moment for CBS, just one of many Cronkite helped make.

The second reason I was thinking of Cronkite was witnessing CBS's continuing, pathetic fall from grace. It's been awful to watch. CBS has always been close to my heart, even though I never worked there. They’d offered me jobs as a correspondent in 1978 and 1979, and then in 1988 as a network anchor in New York. Some of my close friends did go, Mark Phillips and John Blackstone to name two, but the CBC always countered with better jobs (a lot less money though!), and I stayed, but remained friends and in touch with players at CBS for years after.

So, what’s happened? It's not been pretty. There have been many stories about the collapse of the broadcast icon this week; this is the one I liked the best. Written by a former CBS anchor himself, a journalist who first came to prominence the day JFK was shot, and would later confront Richard Nixon during Watergate. Dan Rather saw his own tough moments during what was still a distinguished CBS career, and still today, even in his 90s, writes a regular Substack you might want to add to your list:

Welcome to the weekend and welcome to The Buzz.

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That’s going to do it for this week, but The Buzz will be back again in seven days. Stay safe.

Less Doomscroll. More Mansbridge.

Less Doomscroll.
More Mansbridge.