Telly Davidson: Anchors Away!
Breaking news! This just in! Katie Couric is likely to leave the CBS Evening News after five years for a probable syndicated talk show (not unlike her CNN colleague, Anderson Cooper.) This follows reports that her 1990s co-pilot Matt Lauer might also be finished with the four-hour Today tour. And we have it from a reliable source that, with Who Wants to be a Millionaire still a huge hit in syndication, Meredith Viera is also rumored to be thinking about giving up Today in a not-so-very-far tomorrow.
Talk about a domino theory. And the casualties are just as grim on the cable news front. Within the last 100 days or so, Larry King left CNN, Glenn Beck bid farewell to Fox, and Keith Olbermann had his final Countdown. But the real story isn't just that there's a game of musical anchor-chairs going on. CBS chief Les Moonves gave it away when he bluntly said that whoever replaces Katie won't be the beneficiary of a $15 million paycheck. The Cronkite-Rather-Brokaw days of "star" anchors are officially at one with Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers. Whoever replaces Katie will have a salary so diminished in comparison to their immediate superstar forerunners, you'd think that Paul Ryan and Rand Paul had written the contract.
It's not exactly breaking news anymore to point out that the old-timey network newscasts were designed in, and came from, an era of authorities and conformity. By the standards of the Twitter and Facebook era, even the most "elite" federal judge or Senator looks positively Gandhi-like when compared to a booming network anchorman, telling us the news, looking down from his temple of truth. The real miracle isn't that the network news shows are in decline; the miracle is that they lasted this long to begin with. Their rotary phone formats can only last so long in an era of iPads and app stores.
According to the latest ratings figures, viewership of the three nightly network newscasts in the 25-54 year old age group is roughly between 2 and 3 million apiece. That's roughly one-fifth of what they were regularly pulling under Nixon, Ford, and Carter, or even Reagan and Bush Sr. And as Lawrence Welk once self-deprecatingly joked, "every time a hearse drives by, I lose another loyal viewer." The commercials say it all -- adult diapers, Hoverounds, Wilford Brimley's diabetes ads, full-size Lexuses and Cadillacs, and all the other impedimenta of Hallmark Channel's last Matlock marathon.
As to cable, David Frum informs me that the median age of Glenn Beck and Bill-O is roughly 65 years old, and Chris Matthews said (with more truth than poetry) that if Medicare were to be sacked, it would kill "half the people who watch this program!" More young people probably DO get their "news" from Jon Stewart and Bill Maher than from Brian, Katie, and Diane (or Maddow and Hannity, for that matter). That’s not even to mention the ones who get informed through Twitter, and Google, and their iPhones, and the innumerable other outlets of the internet media (like FrumForum).
Ironically, it is that longtime journalistic standard of objectivity and one-news-for-all that may be at the heart of the old media's Goldilocks dilemma. As John Gregory Dunne once memorably joked, "One man's Kant is another man's cant." Liberals say the network news is hopelessly right-wing and corporate; conservatives accuse the "lamestream media" of being hopelessly slanted against God and country. But the real problem is that in such a polarized, Red State / Blue State divide as today, even the fairest reporting can come across as anything but.
If I were to report on something like, say, the genocide in Rwanda or the Matthew Shepard murder (let alone 9/11 or slavery or the Holocaust) in a morally neutral tone, that in itself would be vaguely immoral. In the same vein, if I'm a Palin or Gingrich voter, gaping with horror at nearly $15 trillion in debt and a trashy, "anti-Christian" pop culture -- or if I'm a liberal shuddering at the paranoid hate speech of Fred Phelps and Orly Taitz -- and someone deigns to report on such outrages in flat, "neutral" oh-so-objectivity, their very lack of position in itself seems to be taking a position, and an untenable and offensive one at that.
Bottom line: Why should I give a flying fig what some monopoly-media mouthpiece says as s/he smiles into the camera, reading off the day's headlines in robotic rictus, when I could be watching Rachel Maddow -- or Lou Dobbs? When I could be reading Michael Moore, Ezra Klein, and Barbara Ehrenreich -- or Ann, Rush, and Dinesh? When I could be interacting and Tweeting online at Democratic Underground or FireDogLake or the Daily Kos -- or at RedState and Drudge Report? When I could personalize my news the same way that I do my RSS feeds? Heck, even President Obama and Sarah Palin have found Twitter and Facebook to be as effective (or more) a means of communication to their core constituencies than endless auditions for the usual media gatekeepers.
And that's not the only way in which the network news, as we currently know it, has reached its sell-by date. At least (as of today) two of the Big Three anchors are women – but why is it that in 2011, there doesn't even seem to be a Bernard Shaw or a Connie Chung fronting a major weeknight news show anymore? Even on supposedly 'edgier' cable, there's Chris, Lawrence, Rachel, and Dylan; there's Glenn, Neil, Megyn, Ann, and Bill-O; and then there's Piers, Nancy, Joy, and Wolf. Guess who ISN'T coming to our dinner hour? Today's TV news is in dire need of a "color adjustment", and I don't mean just the switch to HDTV, comprende amigo? Why aren't there more 'wise Latinas' or African-American or Asian star anchors in today's supposedly diverse era?
But if one-size-fits-all, droning network newscasts are a relic of the past, then why is it that not long after the venerable Larry King announced his retirement, cable news's two biggest brand names -- Glenn Beck and Keith Olbermann -- were not-so-voluntarily retired by their masters?
Suffice it to say, no birther mystery or 9/11 Truth conspiracy is as delusional as any media personality or author who starts to really think that they really are "bigger" than the multinational media companies that support them and their lifestyles (paging Charlie Sheen). In the end, Beck and Olbermann's fatal mistake was simply drinking their own Kool-Aid. They thought that it was MSNBC and FoxNews who couldn't get along without them; that their networks worked for them, not the other way around. They thought they were still living in the world of Walter Cronkites and David Brinkleys, where anchors were big, even if the news itself was sometimes small. And they paid the all-too-predictable price.
And that's the way it is! Goodnight, and good luck...