Lifting Anchor
The last chronicle of Dan Rather.
BY DANIEL HENNINGER
Friday, March 18, 2005 12:01 a.m.
Dan Rather deserves more than a kick in the pants on his way out the door to a fly-fishing stream in West Texas. With Tom Brokaw's retirement just ahead of Rather's, this is the official end of an era, not just in television but in the cultural life of the nation. There was a time when what happened in the United States got defined by three men: Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings. If they said an event was big, it became big. If they ignored it, it hardly mattered. With two of the three retiring within months of each other, it's worth a look at what happened over the years to them, to the news--and to us.
The golden era of the network anchorman ended about 10 years ago, when FOX and MSNBC joined CNN with constant news programming. With that, the news dominance of CBS, NBC and ABC washed out to sea. Still, the glory days of the network news anchors was really something to behold.
I beheld it off and on, in print, for this newspaper for most of the 1980s in an occasional series of articles called The Anchorman Chronicles. Rather, Brokaw and Jennings all ascended to the top anchorman spot at their networks in the 1980s, but they weren't the only subjects of The Anchorman Chronicles. The columns were also populated with such faces-known-everywhere as David Brinkley, Barbara Walters, Ted Koppel, Mike Wallace, Lesley Stahl, Sam Donaldson, and two of the best--David Hartman and Frank Reynolds. With Rather and Brokaw gone, it's time for an epilogue to The Anchorman Chronicles.
Today, the daily wash of televised news, with so many competing personalities on the air all the time, makes it hard to recall just how much presence and power these network figures had. Today no one writes about a network anchorman unless he has screwed up (Rather) or writes a nostalgic best-seller (Brokaw). But when Dan Rather succeeded Walter Cronkite, it was news from Olympus.
The world of TV news back then had been divided into three kingdoms--CBS, NBC and ABC. And the titular sovereign in each kingdom was the "Anchorman," who sat at a desk in the middle of the television screen--summoning the news, heads of state, outer space. Thus, Dan Rather muscling Walter Cronkite out of that anchor chair was like the scene in "Gladiator" when young Maximus smothers his father Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor, to force the succession. Brokaw's accession to the chair held by the venerable David Brinkley appeared peaceful, until some years later Brinkley defected to ABC, a galactic event whose only possible comparison would be George W. Bush defecting to the Democrats.
Their coverage of the news was similarly imperial. When in January 1985 Secretary of State George Shultz and his Soviet counterpart Andrei Gromyko met in Geneva just to talk about nuclear-arms reduction, all three Anchormen and vast network support armies also went to Geneva. It was a spectacle to be able to watch this from one's living room.
The event was reported as Armageddon for Dummies. Dan Rather debriefing George Shultz: "When you were sitting in the room with Mr. Gromyko, as a person, as a human being, did you sense that you were sitting across the table from a friend and fellow inhabitant of the planet." All the anchors and all in their retinue said stuff like that--Brokaw, Jennings, John Chancellor, Marvin Kalb, Bryant Gumbel, Pierre Salinger, Bill Moyers. It was antic and inane. I filled a whole column with quotable anchor inanities. But it was also a big deal. Everyone watched, because the Anchormen made it seem important. Back then, they commandeered events in a way that is no longer possible.
Later that year, Dan, Tom and Peter returned to Geneva for the Reagan-Gorbachev summit. This time, deprived of leaks by the Reagan team, they were forced to produce real news, and did. TV's cameras caught the now-sainted Gorbachev saying: "The problem of the Jews in the Soviet Union does not exist."
The grandiosity of network news coverage was undeniable and irresistible. As a viewer, one looked forward to the next mega-event. Three months later it came, with the collapse of Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos. Rather covered the fall itself while standing in a field in the Midwest; Jennings anchored from Moscow. Most bizarre of all, Marcos himself decided before the fall to take his case live to the American people, appearing constantly on U.S. TV, often from his living room, surrounded by his family. I wrote: "This is the future: We are in our living rooms and Ferdinand Marcos is in his. Can we talk?" And it was the future.
Until Ted Turner ruined it. The networks' business model never had room in its schedule for long-form news coverage. By the time Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw retired, they were Lears in a dying kingdom, overrun by barbarian talk-show hosts and Internet bloggers.
Are we better off? The political diversity the networks ludicrously refused to admit as a problem is now everywhere. Cable, notably FOX, has democratized and leveled the opinion field. For all the pious right-mindedness that gushed out of the three networks, Barbara Walters and Lesley Stahl never had a snowball's chance of sitting in those anchor chairs, while now most of cable's anchors seem to be women.
In the golden age of the network Anchorman, TV news was often pompous, wrong and yes, waaay too liberal. But for all this, it brought--it forced--the world's most liberal standard of free speech and discussion into some rather dark and closed places. It was about this time that the United Nations--chockablock with dictators--started holding conferences on America's "cultural imperialism." In no small part, they meant Dan, Peter and Tom and their probing camera armies.
This week, when grand images poured out of Lebanon of a million people massed against an occupier, it was reported by whichever cable anchor was on shift that hour. News itself rules the kingdom now, so there's no longer much call for an Anchorman Chronicles. Goodnight, Peter. Goodnight, Tom. Goodnight, Dan.
Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com. |
