Pulling Up Anchors
FRANK, REUVEN
On Television Pulling Up Anchors By Reuven Frank IN 1965, a consumer research survey found that Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, coanchors of NBC's nightly TV newscast, were, to quote the...
...Television came after the War, and the first two network newscasters, Douglas Edwards at CBS and John Cameron Swayze at NBC, followed the radio patterns...
...Encroaching on the entertainment hours was clearly beyond consideration...
...The same promise was made by CBS when Walter Cronkite was forced out, a quarter century ago, to make room for Rather, who was being wooedby ABC News...
...Undaunted, the American networks stuck to the formula for their principal daily news presentations...
...the Right, which has long lain in wait for Rather, had a field day, forcing CBS and Rather into a humiliating set of apologies...
...That austere London newspaper the Financial Times recently asked, "Why do news presenters matter to Americans so much...
...Williams is self-assured to the point of glibness...
...Brian Williams has replaced Tom Brokaw...
...First from the Right, a decade later from the Left, ad hoc groups tried to hold television news organizations to account for what they left out as much as for what they said...
...As of 1952, the station owned by the San Francisco Chronicle, one of the country's major newspapers, had no news service at all...
...Swayze in particular larded his copy with the idiosyncratic phrases so dear to the radio newscasters, like "glad we could get together," and "hopscotching the world for headlines...
...Undoubtedly...
...The Chinese dissidents, like the antiwar protesters at the 1968 Democratic Convention, went where the cameras were...
...Hewitt took the name from the game called tug of war, where two teams pull against each other on a rope, and each team uses its heaviest member to "anchor" it at the end of the rope...
...nor to the logistics, as each of the networks efficiently moved correspondents around the globe to strange and mysterious places...
...That is the American system, but no one knows why...
...Huntley and Brinkley were especially popular during President Dwight D. Eisenhower's years, when Brinkley's quizzical approach to government played well against official blandness and Huntley's measured tones were a steady guide through foreign complexities...
...Once the number of Americans living on farms plummeted, though, and much of heavy industry moved to Japan and Southeast Asia and finally China, the networks seemed not to notice...
...Brokaw left his NBC anchor post this past December 1, after 23 years...
...The term itself, "anchor" or "anchorman,'- seems to have been coined by Don Hewitt, later the creator of 60 Minutes, for Walter Cronkite when he "anchored" CBS' coverage of the 1952 national political conventions...
...Had the networks moved their news into that 11 p.m...
...At almost the same time the late president of ABC News, Roone Arledge, was wooing Brokaw, so John Chancellor was moved aside at NBC...
...NBC's news program proclaimed itself "Today's News Today," but it was today's news with yesterday's pictures...
...It made Kaltenborn famous, a lecturer in demand in the bigger cities of the United States and Canada...
...The writing was more adult...
...And television executives then were mostly radio executives who had not done very well...
...Nevertheless, some people now work at home and others work staggered hours...
...But it does not really explain the American anchor phenomenon...
...Later Spiro T. Agnew was ejected from office for taking bribes...
...In 1983, it was expanded from 15 minutes to a half hour...
...The anchors became figures of authority...
...Except for their conventional napery they are not alike...
...What is surer is that network news will be built around anchor figures who carry the news to the viewer...
...These shifts occurred in the days of the Cold War, a period of strong feelings and nervousness...
...The PRACTICE of wartime radio to deliver news at the supper hour was continued in network television, leaving the more sensible time of 11 P.M., afterthe TV entertainment schedules, to the local stations, who in those early days offered little or no news service...
...They were working in a network news division at various jobs when the anchor role in the evening newscast fell vacant, and they rolled into it like the metal ball on a roulette wheel...
...figures, we might not need multimillion dollar network TV news anchors...
...From the very beginning of radio, it was the BBC itself, the institution, that provided the news...
...The three anchors had come to Beijing to cover Soviet Party Chief Mikhail S. Gorbachev's visit...
...Youngpeople lost interest in news while their elders viewed its presentation with skepticism if not hostility...
...His hope, and his company's, is that the audiences for the other two anchors will turn to him in the search for a familiar face...
...It was my painful observation at the time that some of the worst local TV news was produced by stations belonging to newspapers...
...In their defense, it should also be noted that until World War II and for a few decades thereafter, most Americans worked in industry or on farms...
...It may happen...
...Suddenly there were surveys of reporters to find out how many were liberal and how many not, what biases were being displayed in story selection or the choice of those to speak for causes, groups andmilitancies...
...It is at least a span of history, longer than the time elapsed between the Armistice that ended World War I and the Nazi invasion of Poland that inaugurated World War II...
...With the public clinging nervously to its radio sets as war came nearer and nearer, there were other famous names—Gabriel Heatter, Morgan Beatty, Robert St...
...Until some reliable academics do a serious study of this not insignificant social phenomenon—and I am told there is no grant money for such activities these days—the only useful explanation must be that Americans prefer it that way...
...After the '60s all that ended...
...Of course, despite its apparent impermeableness, the network newscast has undergone some evolutionary alterations...
...Afternoon newspapers became victims of television's competition and practically all have disappeared...
...The old radio formulas were cast aside...
...In Britain, the person presiding over a newscast is called a "presenter...
...Are they reliable brains in a crowded age of media pundits...
...If someone's ideal time to consider the day's events is 10 P.M., he or she must turn to cable, or to stations not affiliated with networks, which tend to present their basic news program at that hour...
...This may be unique to him...
...Even as independent stations found news ever easier to cover with the advance of technology, and cable and allnews cable channels were added to the mix, there were still many who looked to the networks for the validation of news they already knew, for further detail, for reassurance...
...Rather also was subject to the castigation of an investigation and formal report by two almost well-known authority figures...
...John...
...The anchorman's functions are duplicated by television news services everywhere, but nowhere else is his social role equaled...
...If there is a new generation rising, he is our only clue to it...
...If we, like the British, had a monarchy to supply us with father (as well as mother...
...But network anchors were shamans in those days, to be attended to for wisdom and taken on trust...
...In the waning days of 2004, a professional research firm called Insight Express found that the most important factor in viewers' choices of which network newscast to watch (40 per cent) was the anchor...
...Rather and Jennings and Brokaw brought to their presentations a sense of energy, and along with it a certain aplomb...
...The documents were poorly sourced...
...But habits die hard...
...Suppertime, in short, was when everyone was around...
...The workday was usually done by five in the afternoon...
...That is a long time...
...They showed middleclass America what it did not want to see—not only in reporting the fighting in Vietnam but in recording the revolt of the young, the long hair and beards, the Free Speech movement, Woodstock, torn jeans, antiwar demonstrations that were sometimes violent, and above all the turmoil in the Chicago streets during the Democratic National Convention of 1968...
...The two held the ground while their support staffs learned by trial and error how to make news out of images, how to move film rapidly, how to use a map...
...On such matters rests the success of television executives...
...His strident, Wagnerian tenor—the V stood for Von— elevated him to network newscaster, and he was soon lured away by NBC...
...It is an intriguing thought...
...Families have to make a big effort to eat together around the same table...
...Nor could the instinctive impulse to be seen doing something different...
...Experience on this side of the Atlantic has been different...
...If there is still a general audience for news it is in what the networks have come to call prime time—expensive time, time for cool cops and nervous surgeons and people eating bugs—entertainment time ! When British commercial television decided to have its own news program to go against the vaunted BBC, an institution hardly less revered than the Church of England, it created News At Ten, and the BBC was vanquished...
...A new world opened up, the world of TV news, just in time for the war in Korea...
...That is why American network news cameras were there when one man defied a tank in Tiananmen Square...
...This may have started in the tense years leading up to World War II, when foreign news, most particularly the rise of Nazism, thrust itself on the country's consciousness...
...For reasons no one has yet established, in the United States the person giving the news has come to embody the news...
...Also, Brokaw is only the second of the star anchors to leave of his own volition...
...The need for speed and the need for pictures kept fighting each other...
...Who are these people, these highest paid journalists in the whole world...
...This was before Edward R. Murrow and before television, but it may have set a pattern for the star newscaster...
...Moreover, the exclusive access the networks used to have to national and international news has long been erased...
...They are not better known than movie stars or prime ministers, and the vicissitudes of their personal and professional lives are pretty much ignored...
...I once asked such a person how he would describe himself...
...More significantly, long before that the anchors changed...
...How could it be news if Dan and Peter and Brian were not there...
...When Hitler spoke to his Reichstag or his people about breaking the Saar Treaty, annexing the Ruhr, or the Anschluss with Austria, the hissy shortwave radio signal was rebroadcast in America by CBS, with simultaneous translation by a former Brooklyn Eagle editorial writer named H.V Kaltenbom...
...The other was Chet Huntley...
...When last year ended with the Biblical horrors and tragedies of the Great Asian Tsunami, several newspaper television critics, including those of the Philadelphia Inquirer and USA Today, took the networks severely to task...
...it may not...
...We are now entering a new era...
...On Television Pulling Up Anchors By Reuven Frank IN 1965, a consumer research survey found that Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, coanchors of NBC's nightly TV newscast, were, to quote the New York Times, "recognized by more adult Americans than Cary Grant, James Stewart, the Beatles, and John Wayne " In 1972, the pollster Oliver Quayle established that Walter Cronkite, anchor of CBS's nightly TV newscast, was the "most trusted" public figure in the United States...
...The needs and criteria of news coverage were all there—except that the anchors had not arrived yet...
...in France, the last time I looked—some years ago—they were mostly women, known as "speakerines...
...Don't mess with anything that continues to make so much money, the networks seemed to be saying, including the star anchors...
...they would go anywhere, taking the program with them...
...In part...
...slot, as they easily could have, some of the questions they are facing a half century later—for example, Is there a need for network newscasts in an era of multiple news sources?—would be less pressing...
...The shamans were shamans no more...
...But he was damaged when he took part—not on the Evening News but on 60 Minutes—in the presentation of documents purporting to prove sloppiness and favoritism shown to President George W. Bush when he was in the Air National Guard...
...Then they established some kind of rapport with the TV audience, or they should not have survived...
...Brokaw and NBC have announced that he will take on other projects for the network, documentaries and the like...
...That does not mean the next two will be...
...But if Dan (CBS) or Peter (ABC) or Tom (NBC) were not there in person, it did not seem to be much of a news story...
...At what used to be suppertime, only the kids are home, and not always—the kids, and, oh yes, the old folks, the grandparents...
...The avuncular Cronkite was the more reassuring when the country split apart over the war in Vietnam...
...Is it because these anchormen are the father figures the Presidents have failed to be...
...He has a penchant for the sentimental...
...As for Peter Jennings, he intends to remain in place a while...
...Bigfooting" it was called, and the resident correspondent, who knew the background and might even speak the language, chafed at being a supporter and cupbearer...
...Some barely accomplish this once or twice a week...
...However much it involves work, travel, skill, even danger in gathering and arranging information, television news apparently boils down to one person talking to one person...
...And it is insufficient...
...Factory gates opened at 8 a.m., farm chores began around 6 a.m...
...I am a news activist," he replied...
...Analysts charged that television news was dominated by East Coast, big city, liberal cabals, and President Richard M. Nixon's Vice President thrust himself at the head ofthat parade...
...They did not object to the coverage, which was swift, dramatic and comprehensive...
...Shopping malls are open late and on Sundays...
...The replacements for Edwards and Swayze were, respectively, Cronkite and Huntley-Brinkley...
...Of America's tens of thousands of journalists, they are not the most experienced, most traveled, most eloquent, most knowledgeable, bravest, strongest, or even handsomest...
...They rose early and retired early...
...Rather leaves in the spring...
...A majority of cities, even smallish ones, had morning and evening newspapers...
...The shamans were replaced by the superheroes, anchors who insisted on functioning as reporters when the story was big enough...
...It is time, is the official attitude...
...Any station news director can get such material, featuring the most recent pictures, from a dozen sources...
...All the discussion about social movement and population dynamics, about the aging of their audiences and its palpable impact on income, could not shake the established patterns...
...For those stations that did offer local (and some world) news, the common format was five minutes of news, five minutes of sports, five minutes of weather, including commercials of course...
Vol. 88 • February 2005 • No. 1
