Print

Email story

Comment

Letter to the editor

And that's the way it was

Long before Tom Brokaw announced that he was leaving as NBC's news anchor, much of the prominence and relevance of network news was already gone.

By CHASE SQUIRES
Published November 30, 2004

	[Getty Images]
	Before there was the Internet, Fox News or CNN, there was Tom Brokaw, the face of NBC News since becoming an anchor in 1982.

People should be talking. Shouldn't they?

Tom Brokaw, NBC Nightly News anchor since 1983, broadcasts his last report from the anchor chair Wednesday. It will be the first time in more than 20 years that any of the big three network news operations has lost its star anchorman.

The phrase "end of an era" has been kicked around plenty.

But the buzz on Main Street doesn't seem to be what one might expect. It's not the kind of buzz heard over the last episode of Friends.

Maybe because huge audiences actually watched Friends, the way they used to watch the evening national news.

That era - when a network news anchor could be labeled "the most trusted man in America" - may have ended while Brokaw was in the chair, not as he and CBS's Dan Rather, who will depart early next year, prepare to leave it.

Brokaw, Rather and ABC's Peter Jennings (who has given no hint of retiring) have presided over the networks' downward slide. In 1980, about 72 percent of the households watching television while the news was on were tuned in to one of the big three, the Chicago Tribune recently reported. Today, only about a third are.

As Brokaw himself noted last week, the television world has changed entirely.

When he started in the news business, the only national news on television came from the big three networks, Brokaw said in a conference call with reporters.

"The news was seen through the prism of white, middle-aged men who all lived on the eastern seaboard," he said. "Now there are so many more choices out there. The Internet has changed everything; all-news cable has changed a lot."

Brokaw, 64, joined NBC in 1966. He toiled as a correspondent and hosted the Today show before he landed a co-anchor position in 1982 with Roger Mudd, replacing John Chancellor. A year later, Mudd was gone, and Brokaw was the man.

At that time, CNN was less than 3 years old. The Internet boom was more than 10 years away. Talk radio was local or sports-oriented before Rush Limbaugh energized the national format. The Fox News network didn't exist.

"The big three are not as big as they used to be," said Vernon Stone, a University of Missouri School of Journalism professor emeritus.

Replacing Brokaw with carefully groomed Brian Williams, familiar to cable news viewers from his years on MSNBC, probably won't shake the world.

"If any one of (the anchors) left, the replacement would take over, and there would be little change in ratings. . . . If they put a real loser on, that might make a difference."

Network broadcasts are still important to many older viewers, and they still get more viewers than cable. But network anchors no longer reign over American journalism. They don't even reign supreme at their networks, said Gary Hanson, an assistant professor at Kent State University.

The anchor's power has been diluted, said Hanson, a former TV news director and past chairman of the Radio-Television News Directors Association. Some of the clout goes to the news department's moneymakers: popular magazine shows such as Dateline, 60 Minutes and 20/20. And late-night entertainers Jay Leno and David Letterman hold considerable sway with their employers.

"It's a different kind of mountain," at the networks, Hanson said. "In the news landscape, it's not a single mountain anymore."

NBC boasts that by the end of the 1960s, its anchor team of Chet Huntley and David Brinkley was more recognizeable in America than pop culture superstars John Wayne and the Beatles.

That was then.

Last year, cable channel VH1's list of the 200 Greatest Pop Culture Icons didn't include any of the network anchors. Oprah Winfrey was at the top. The cast of Friends made No. 11.

A Brinkley was on the list, but it was Christie Brinkley, the supermodel known for her Sports Illustrated swimsuit covers.

Last week on NBC's White House drama The West Wing, when aides rushed to the president with news of a global development, they told him they had just seen it on CNN. Nobody mentioned the big three.

In times of crisis or upheaval, the country still turns to the traditional outlets, Brokaw said. He referred to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and his recent all-night vigil over the presidential election results. There is still a need for common, comfortable ground, an outlet that everyone can watch at the same time, he said.

But he acknowledged that even regular Nightly News viewers know much of what has happened by the time they tune in. They've seen it first on cable or the Internet; they turn to the network to put the day's developments in perspective, to help them order the events in terms of importance and relevance, he said.

"There will always be a place where the audience will want to have a single source of news and information, a trusted source," said Nightly News executive producer Steve Capus. "Our responsibility is to look for the areas, look for smart ways of telling stories, the kind of stories the country is interested in and recognize that we're not alone. This is a 24-hour news environment."

University of Virginia professor Paul Cantor, author of Gilligan Unbound: Pop Culture in the Age of Globalization, wonders if the network anchors will be relevant as that kind of "trusted source" for much longer.

Media pundits and network executives who are declaring Brokaw's retirement a major milestone in journalism are too self-absorbed to realize what most Americans - particularly young Americans - already know.

"This reflects the incredible narcissism of the world of the media. There's a tremendous sense of self-importance," Cantor said. "I don't think my students have a sense of the pre-eminence of ABC, NBC, CBS. I have to explain to them how it was."

Those students have never known a world in which there wasn't cable TV, talk radio and the Internet to get the news they want, when they want it. They know when they're getting liberal or conservative spin. They want to make their own decisions about getting the news, Cantor said.

And they don't need a father figure to tell them what's happening and what to make of it, as their grandparents turned to Walter Cronkite, once deemed "the most trusted man in America," he said.

"The Internet doesn't have anchors. There are no longer filters. That's what the three networks served as: They were filters that told us what was and what wasn't important," Cantor said. "That's too much power for anyone to have."

The next generation of network anchors?

"I can't imagine that they will last," Cantor said.

That may be true for college students and their older brothers and sisters, but plenty of viewers out there still form attachments to their favorite anchors.

Al Tompkins, a journalist at the Poynter Institute, which owns the St. Petersburg Times, spent decades in television news and maintains an office plastered with photographs of admired anchors. He notes that viewers not only bond with an anchor for his personality and delivery, they also respond to the kind of stamp he places on his network's operation. The network anchors aren't just talking heads; they have a lot to say about coverage choices and direction.

Brokaw, with roots in South Dakota, brings a middle America viewpoint to a New York City operation, Tompkins said.

Rather, by contrast, is known for folksy sayings that sound deeply rooted in his Texas upbringing. And Jennings, a Canadian who anchored ABC's foreign desk in the 1970s, comes across as more cosmopolitan, with a more global focus.

Tompkins is skeptical that mainstream America will give up seeing familiar faces for the faceless void of the Internet or the revolving wheel of unknowns on cable.

Name a CNN or Fox News anchor, he challenged - not one of the celebrity heads, such as Larry King, but an actual anchor. Off the top of his head, Tompkins struggled to come up with one.

On the local level, that viewers are drawn to particular news personalities is abundantly clear. It's no accident that local anchors and weather and sports reporters crop up on billboards and TV ads all over America.

Viewers are routinely invited into WTSP-Ch. 10 anchor Reginald Roundtree's home in advertising spots, like they were neighbors.

Tampa's NBC affiliate, WFLA-Ch. 8, is watching the Brokaw transition with trepidation. But, as news director Forrest Carr notes, in large part the local broadcasts drive the network ratings simply because they air first.

Carr, who presides over the Tampa Bay area's top-rated news operation, doesn't even want to think about the retirement of his longtime anchor, Bob Hite.

"Bob's been threatening to retire for years," Carr said. "Every time we think he's serious about it, we bite our nails."

No matter the place in history that Brokaw's retirement has, there should be room to celebrate his career and honor him, said Robert Thompson, director of Syracuse University's Center for the Study of Popular Television.

"It's not on the scale of other stories, a "big deal,' but it's worth remarking upon and recognizing," he said.

The end of an era?

"It's the end of the Brokaw era," Thompson said.

But does it symbolize something bigger? The end of a simpler time, when Americans agreed that there were three news choices?

Is Brokaw's retirement a milestone?

Perhaps news organizations think so because it's a tangible event, Kent State's Hanson said. But the reality is, no one celebrated the revolution when it happened. The shift took place quietly. In hindsight, Brokaw's retirement just puts a face on what has transpired.

"It's important to society, certainly," Hanson said. "But when you start taking yourself that seriously, that's some of the stuff the viewers react to in a negative way.

"Nobody's going to die. It's just television. As important as we think this is, it's just television."

[Last modified November 29, 2004, 16:27:05]