CBS's top newsmen, including Walter Cronkite, Mike Wallace, and John Daly, reported historical events to the American people, using the same techniques that the division was concurrently developing for its "real" news broadcasts. In fact, some of the practices later adopted by network news producers originated on You Are There. During the first years of televised CBS news, the division reported historical as well as current events. This was part of a broader movement at the time that sought to integrate the past, and historical thinking, into contemporary discourse. You Are There was a program that could have worked only in the decade that followed the end of World War II, when, for reasons related to the Cold War, contentious domestic issues, and recent economic and political history, historical allegory became an appealing method of airing ideological discussion and dissent.
You Are There also offered a forum for a part of American society—blacklisted Hollywood writers—whose political ideas had been otherwise effectively erased from popular media. The writers behind almost all of the episodes produced by CBS News were former communists whose careers had been cut short by McCarthyism's hold over the entertainment industry. Once at CBS, they took advantage of the opportunity to fight back, using real historical events to argue their side to the viewing public. If they could not debate the anticommunists openly, they could at least make Socrates speak against the persecution of dissent, or show Nathan Hale standing for loyalty to a cause no matter what the penalty.
Popular perceptions of history as well as the style and substance of American television were powerfully shaped by the series. The facts of its existence and its short-term critical and popular success indicate (along with other examples I discuss elsewhere, including Du Pont's ideologically competing program, Cavalcade of America) that many postwar Americans looked to the past for some guidance in a world that suddenly threatened to become overwhelming. The groups and individuals that offered to direct their gaze, including those behind You Are There, used the opportunity to present versions of history that they believed advanced their political and economic agendas. The moment did not last, and soon Americans would be inundated with so much information, and have so many choices for entertainment and popular education, that elites behind projects such as these had no hope of so narrowly focusing public attention on their carefully selected lessons of history.