On Television
FRANK, REUVEN
On Television Cogs in the News Machine By Reuven Frank WHEN A TELEVISION network changes its news anchor, newspapers invariably declare that an era has ended. The person who delivers...
...Who would assume the anchor chairs at CBS and ABC...
...At ABC, Jennings' duties have been divided between Elizabeth Vargas, a 20/20 correspondent, and reporter Bob Woodruff...
...Dan Rather, CBS' anchor, was eased out in March following a clumsy mistake...
...CBS advised Cronkite it was time he retired...
...Although Walter Cronkite—in his late 80s the poster boy of the breed—recently adjured his successors to fight their employers' devotion to profit over responsibility, he is whistling in the wind...
...That is why there is a Nielsen rating...
...NBC wanted a change from Bill Henry, who had been competent enough and more in 1952 but was a part-timer with a day job as a columnist for the Los Angeles Times...
...Programs and everyone participating in them—including news anchors—are cogs in the machine that makes the product...
...It became routine for the anchor to travel to the sites of major news events, taking the whole program with him...
...They do not ask, What is this factory's product...
...They were never seen out of doors...
...For a fleeting moment, television journalism regained the trust of its audience...
...Fortified by an adequate budget, ABC lured Barbara Walters away from NBC with the trade's first seven-figure salary to host the nightly news with Harry Reasoner...
...As Swayze's ratings began to recede and Camel gradually reduced its full sponsorship, NBC started a search for someone else to fill his slot...
...From Berlin, from Moscow, from Oklahoma City, the anchor would describe what was happening where he stood and supervise the entire show, introducing unrelated news reports from elsewhere around the globe...
...They were a hit, and were swept into the anchor chairs of NBC's supper-time newscast...
...A news division had always been responsible for observing a budget, but now it is also responsible for maintaining profitability...
...As harried executives consider ever more fantastic schemes to maximize audiences and prof its, they may be undermining the news anchor's role...
...Arledge had picked every network's anchor except his own...
...Each of the old networks was subsumed into a conglomerate, making their journalism a smaller part of a larger corporate whole...
...Another survey during the '60s named Cronkite the "most trusted" man in America...
...The other two networks, ABC and DuMont, felt less need—and felt less competent— to undertake the effort and expense...
...The first anchors assigned to the nightly broadcasts were the reporters who filled the slots during the conventions, Douglas Edwards for CBS and John Cameron Swayze for NBC...
...Most people would say programs...
...First, they were Chet Huntley and David Brinkley...
...Its ratings fell short of expectations...
...In the 1960s, newspapers reported that Chet Huntley and David Brinkley each received more than 5200,000 a year...
...Eventually it turned the anchor chair over to lohn Chancellor, whose academic mien may have precluded his achieving his predecessors' level ofpopularity...
...Why the drop...
...Anchors past and present tend to have little sense of how the business works...
...Yet it seems that so long as people turn to TV for news, the role of the anchor will be secure...
...Only Brokaw truly pickedhis day of departure...
...During the summer of 1957, before the program had finished its first year, it was broadcast without one paid commercial...
...and David Brinkley from the Washington bureau, 10 years Huntley's junior, with a clipped speaking style, a dry wit and a delivery to match...
...Westinghouse, feuding with RCA on other matters, would not carry it on the NBC affiliates it owned in Boston and Cleveland...
...They told America about dehumanization, ineptitude and failure...
...Perhaps its different style gradually became more acceptable...
...Television is like that...
...In no other country are the journalists who front daily network TV newscasts so celebrated, or so munificently paid...
...The Huntley-Brinkley Report is remembered mostly for its successes, but its first year was dismal...
...After their small beginnings in 1948, the early evening anchors played little part in covering major events—political conventions, election nights, the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, the sinking of the Italian luxury liner Andrea Doria...
...In whispers he was compared to Stalin's foreign minister, Vyacheslav M. Molotov, who was called "iron-ass" for his ability to negotiate for hours without relief...
...When something more professional seemed warranted, the two leading networks, NBC and CBS, offered essentially radio newscasts with pictures...
...This despite the news programs available now on cable channels with their own anchors—although most cable programs spend more time talking about news than they do reporting it...
...It went without saying that Huntley and Brinkley would front, besides the evening news, coverage of historic political events...
...There was much talk of multiple anchors, perhaps replicating the success of the Huntley-Brinkley Report...
...But Huntley and Brinkley's popularity was due to more than the presence of two anchors instead of one...
...Every evening he wore a fresh flower in his buttonhole...
...Initiallythey were compilations of newsreel clips, sometimes provided by independent contractors...
...A 1965 survey found Chet Huntley and David Brinkley more popular among Americans than James Stewart, Cary Grant or the Beatles...
...when you saw Huntley, you knew it was not...
...There was a new sheriff in town—three, in fact, all roughly of an age: Rather the eldest, Jennings the youngest...
...It all began in 1948, when coverageof the national political conventions, dramatic and news-heavy in the way only old-timers remember, validated television as a medium of information and encouraged the networks to attempt daily news broadcasts...
...There were names since forgotten, like Ron Cochran and Frank Reynolds...
...On NBC's 15-minute program, sponsored by Camel cigarettes, Swayze, sitting behind a desk, read news items and introductions to film reports...
...Perhaps it was NBC President Robert Kintner's coaxing the Texaco gasoline company to sponsor the program outright, leading errant affiliates to climb aboard and share in the bonanza...
...Meanwhile, a different drama was unfolding at the poorest of the networks, ABC...
...A network employee who analyzed Nielsen numbers once told me they were popular because they talked to each other, and people liked that...
...There have been meetings, confabulations and leaked plans about changes from corporate executives...
...Five weeks after the CBS anchor returned from Vietnam and declared the war unwinnable, President Lyndon B. Johnson announced he would not seek re-election...
...Several stations in the South refused to carry it because the pair—Huntley in particular—were thought to be sympathetic to the nascent civil rights movement...
...As with professional athletes, their employers believe they attract enough business to justify their high salaries...
...When Huntley said, "David," or Brinkley said, "Chet," it was a signal for AT&T technicians along the network to reverse the switches...
...The past 12 months have seen the mother of all TV era endings: Last December Tom Brokaw retired from NBC as planned and was succeeded by a long-designated heir, Brian Williams...
...Cronkite sat for hours during the broadcast of missions into space...
...adventure in space...
...Both spoke in the style of radio news, with its telltale verbal tricks...
...Whatever the reason, the program started to rise in popularity until it reached heights never before or since achieved by a daily network news program—a nightly average of 20 million viewers...
...Why the NBC executives fixed on two anchors is too complicated to explain here...
...After Huntley's departure, NBC tried various combinations...
...Thus, not only did the anchors front the news, but if they were not there, it was not news...
...After Rather and Brokaw were comfortably ensconced, Arledge turned again to Peter Jennings, now older and suaver than during his first attempt, and the new era was officially at hand...
...The person who delivers the evening news has become the face of the network, and his role is totemic as well as journalistic...
...A young Canadian named Peter Jennings was tried from 1965 to'67...
...Jennings left behind an estate of more than S50 million...
...But under the pressure of competition—or, to be honest, simply for the fun of using the latest technology—the anchor dashing off to the scene of a major event, taking the program with him, could too easily become more and more frequent and less and less relevant...
...During a slow time in the news business, or when the ratings need a boost, or when the competition is getting the good publicity, how much authority and reassurance will there be if the anchor's opening line is: "I am in the Galapagos Islands where an international bird-rustling ring has just accomplished a major theft of blue-footed boobies...
...Nevertheless, he maintained people liked them because they talked to each other...
...When last year's scandal dethroned him, Rather was 73—10 years older than Cronkite when he was told he had reached the age of mandatory retirement...
...Interestingly, audience figures have budged only slightly...
...ABC's Peter Jennings died of lung cancer in August...
...The anchor chair has in the meantime been occupied by the venerable Bob Schieffer, host of Face the Nation, CBS' Sunday morning political talk show...
...He had been narrating Sunday archival series like Twentieth Century, and participating in one of CBS' failed attempts to develop a morning show to compete with NBC's Today...
...In the early 1950s it was rumored that NBC paid John Cameron Swayze $ 1,000 a week, then considered a lot of money...
...Their successors would not only front the evening newscasts but were the networks' faces on all such occasions, including the U.S...
...The network TV news anchor has become a fixture of American society to the extent that the role is not questioned and its persistent evolution is barely noticed...
...he was deemed not yet ready...
...His chosen successor is an experienced reporter, but some complained that Williams lacked distinguishing characteristics...
...Bigfooting" it was called, stepping over the network's resident correspondent, the one who knew the background and perhaps even spoke the language...
...Like most of the laity, they fail to think of broadcasting as a factory...
...But audiences are broadcasting's product, and its customers are the advertisers who buy audiences...
...Wealthy new proprietors bought ABC and appointed its brilliant sports director, Roone Arledge, to redo the news...
...To everyone's surprise, the public, the press and especially the New York Times saw in the combination more than the sum of two competent reporters...
...NBC once hired a consultant to bring some life to a newscast that by consensus was getting musty...
...Yet an anchor's job has changed steadily and markedly over the years, in large part because of technological developments...
...Second, their functions were clearly delineated: When you saw Brinkley, you knew it was a Washington story...
...Surveys and experience dictate that how an anchor is accepted depends on an ability to radiate authority and reassurance...
...At NBC, Kintner insisted Huntley and Brinkley do the same, although their interest in the subject was minimal and it meant displacing Frank McGee, a distinguished reporter who had covered the exploration from its first days—before Cronkite knew to call the astronauts by their first names...
...The anchor's role has mutated with that business model...
...it must be made over...
...Then the guessing game resumed...
...The personalities were different, and the technology was more flexible...
...With newspaper members of the Associated Press preventing it from servicing the competition—i.e., radio—many stations arranged to put a microphone in the city room of a local paper, where a staff reporter would read bulletins several times a day...
...Give ortakeayear, they started together, and after more than two decades that included the end of the Cold War and 9/11, they finished together...
...Most people would say the audience...
...In the runup to 1956 NBC and CBS also grappled with the question of anchors for the Presidential political conventions...
...As the '70s moved into the '80s, the parade ended...
...But they never talked to each other, I told him...
...Like children watching their parents fight, the audience was chilled and confused, and the decline set in...
...Edwards, an Oklahoman, was a journeyman on the CBS staff, having served for a while as the desk man in Edward R. Murrow's famous World War II London bureau...
...CBS went into a great tizzy—where it remains—looking for a formula to attract the younger audience advertisers desire...
...running to the scene of a major event could too easily become looking for any event to rush to...
...Each had been an undistinguished member of his network's radio news staff—radio was by far the higher priority—and could be spared to work at that new thing called television...
...The best of several doubtful explanations is that during the 1969 strike of the broadcasting performers' union, in which neither had a personal stake, Brinkley observed the picket line, while Huntley, the presumed liberal, appeared on television every evening, claiming he did not belong in a union with clowns and ballet dancers...
...But Cronkite's arrival on the scene changed things for them as well...
...Or, Who is the factory's customer...
...It was not adopted...
...I hough too little noticed, during M the 1980s and '90s another era ended...
...John Charles Daly, who started as a journalist but was best known as MC of the quiz show What's My Line?, served a short time...
...When government regulation made "community service" a condition for being allowed to broadcast news—"a license to print money," as the late Lord Thomson of Fleet discovered— anchors became more "responsible," more attuned to the tastes of middle-class professionals...
...One evening during the 1964 conventions, Huntley and Brinkley's viewership was more than four times CBS' and ABC's combined...
...Swayze always began, "Ladies and gentlemen, a good evening to you," and ended, "Glad we could get together...
...On CBS' 15-minute program, sponsored by the Oldsmobile division of General Motors, Edwards, sitting behind a desk, read news items and introductions tofilmreports...
...In 1952, Walter Cronkite had done well in that role for CBS, so he was invited back...
...They had so little faith in their decision that an official announcement was delayed for more than a month, an eternity in a press release-happy industry...
...After some years doingthis for station KMBC, Swayze was hired by NBC's Los Angeles bureau and ultimately made his way to New York...
...After much palaver, the choice fell on two men: Chet Huntley, an experienced 45year-old West Coast news broadcaster with a strongbaritone and a leonine head...
...Swayze and Edwards had been glued to their anchor chairs...
...What turned it around is beyond knowing...
...His principal recommendation was that Swayze should stand up...
...In television there is always a reductio ad absurdum...
...In April 1962, therefore, CBS unseated Douglas Edwards and replaced him with Cronkite...
...In 1969, according to The Republic of Mass Culture by James Baughman, the Huntley-Brinkley Report was NBC's most profitable program...
...By the time Huntley retired in 1970, the Huntley-Brinkley Report's ratings had slipped from their unimaginable heights...
...When the then host of NBC's Today, former White House correspondent Tom Brokaw, became the subject of similar rumors, Chancellor was told he would henceforth do commentary twice a week...
...They were transformed into figures of authority, shamans...
...When at summer's end the present network anchors appeared in the hurricane-soaked streets of the Gulf Coast— no press officers, no embedding—they debated, contradicted and shamed the public officials they interviewed...
...Unlike cop shows, variety programs and other forms of TV entertainment, a newscast cannot simply be canceled...
...What had been a novelty in the previous era became routine procedure...
...Arledge was rumored to be romancing well-known CBS reporter Dan Rather, a sometime White House correspondent and sometime featured editor on 60 Minutes...
...In Newsday, Marvin Kitman called) him "generic...
...Unable to mount a worldwide picture-gathering organization, it stumbled from anchor to anchor...
...Like many journalists in those days, Swayze came to broadcasting after a stint as a print reporter, covering City Hall for the now defunct Kansas City Journal-Post...
Vol. 88 • November 2005 • No. 6
