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TAILORED
suit, tasteful hair, good posture, all business, only
rare hints of perkiness.
I’ve
been checking out Katie Couric, really putting the evil
eye on her. You know, Couric, the former NBC Today
superstar and subsequent $15-million-a-year Jeanne d’Arc
who fell hard from her CBS high horse when delivering no
miracles to lift that network’s evening newscast from
third in the ratings.
Media
wonks are now wondering who will leave office first,
George W. Bush or Couric.
It
matters because even though their popularity has
steadily fallen since their glory years, and more and
more Americans turn to the Internet for news, the
flagship newscasts of NBC, ABC and CBS together still
attract more than 21 million viewers on weeknights,
according to Nielsen Media Research. That’s nearly seven
times the combined prime-time audience of cable’s Barnum
& Bailey gang of Fox News, CNN and MSNBC.
The
dubious common wisdom is that Couric has lacked the
gravitas, poor kid, to challenge the twin towers of
NBC’s Brian Williams and ABC’s Charles (formerly known
as Charlie) Gibson. True or not, her newscast’s failure
has earned her full blame, for if she’d passed these
front-runners, wouldn’t she have received all the
credit? Not the troops she fronted, just her.
Which is
why this whole sainthood thing, this persisting TV news
cult of personality, is so...so...what’s the word I’m
searching for?
Oh, yes:
absurd.
Now,
Couric herself is not absurd. She’s every bit as good as
Williams and Gibson at reading a TelePrompTer, and the
world she describes each night is as depressing as
theirs. Plus she sounds just fine in election chats with
Jeff Greenfield (still among the media’s smartest
politics watchers after being marginalized into
obscurity at CNN, perhaps because he rejected joining
its swami multitudes in predicting the future).
Look, 22
minutes of network news still tells you little beyond
how to stop coughing, wheezing, decaying and leaking—the
advertised pharmaceuticals indicating just how many
viewers are watching from behind oxygen tents. But from
what I can tell, the newscast that Couric heads is as
credible as NBC’s and ABC’s.
It’s no
mystery to many of us why Bush derailed. Less apparent
is what undermined CBS Corp. chief Leslie Moonves’s
grand scheme to remake Evening News in Couric’s
image while paying her obscenely high money at a time
when the news industry was reeling from budget cuts.
Perhaps the mistake was pushing that scheme in the first
place. Did CBS wise men make the newscast too gee-whiz
neighborly when she made her debut nearly two years ago
as Dan Rather’s permanent successor? Or was Couric
herself the turnoff? Her looks? Her wardrobe? Her voice?
Her manner? Her high-wattage grin? Her...whatever?
You
won’t find an answer here. As Nancy Franklin wrote in
the New Yorker recently, “No one knows exactly
why anchors are or aren’t popular or why they do or
don’t last.” Or why anyone but bean-counting news
insiders should care.
Newspapers have their stars, but relatively modest ones
who shine less brightly than those in TV’s
constellation. In contrast to personality-driven
newscasts, a newspaper’s credibility, or lack of it,
centers not on a single person or even a few. The entire
paper, not one or two individuals, gets the glory, as
well as the blame, the reverse of TV.
News
media hero worship was mild prior to 1950 BC (Before
Cronkite), when Walter surfaced on TV en route to
getting picked to famously anchor the CBS Evening
News a dozen years later. Though he’d worked on CBS,
relatively few knew of his earlier record as a combat
correspondent during World War II. So the Katie
questions apply here, too, in reverse: What gave
Cronkite his transcendent cred? What made CBS viewers
and others believe in him so totally, made them mentally
sit in his lap and coo when he read the headlines?
Whatever
the answer, it’s foolish to invest such trust in one
person—news anchor or presidential candidate—because of
something intangible that one can’t define. Yes, CBS
News was blessed with a handful of talented
holdovers from Edward R. Murrow’s radio days, but
Cronkite was The Man, at one point punctuating Vietnam
War doomsday reports with such moral authority, for
instance, that embattled LBJ was said to have remarked:
“If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.”
And now,
these many years later, cults of personality endure.
Take
CNN, whose quest to overtake cable-news ratings leader
Fox features a determined attempt to nail the chatty
star of Anderson Cooper 360 to a pedestal. More
than just its anchor, Cooper is the weeknight newscast’s
illuminated epicenter. Nearly everything he does is
accompanied by CNN-generated buzz, and a personal
spotlight accompanies him on his CNN travels. That
happened most notably during his on-site chronicling of
Katrina’s aftermath in 2005 when, with CNN’s blessing,
he lashed himself to the catastrophe and assured flood
victims he felt their pain. As if Katrina could be
validated only by his presence, just as CNN used the
disaster to validate him.
“You
like it when someone becomes a pop-culture icon and
deserves it,” Jonathan Klein, president of CNN/US, told
the Boston Globe at the time.
Another
opinion: Enough of newscaster larger-than-lifeness.
Flashback to June 13. As downtown Des Moines, sections
of Cedar Rapids and other parts of Iowa were being
evacuated because of raging flood waters that would
become a major catastrophe for much of the Midwest, CNN,
Fox and MSNBC ignored that development for hours and
spent the afternoon talking about that day’s death of
Tim Russert. In addition, Russert was the evening’s lead
story on the newscasts of ABC, CBS and NBC. On NBC’s
Nightly News, in fact, he was the only story, the
rest of the world disappearing much as chunks of Iowa
had vanished beneath the water.
Add to
that the evening’s NBC prime-time special on Russert
plus a weekend-long slab of MSNBC eulogies, along with
two hours of live coverage it gave a Russert memorial
several days later, and you had the most lavish tribute
for a news figure ever, rivaling even the misplaced
orgies of attention paid to the funerals of Princess
Diana and John F. Kennedy Jr. in the late 1990s.
In no
way do I make light of Russert’s death. As host and
impresario of NBC’s Meet the Press and chief of
its Washington bureau, he was an important journalist.
And I accept at face value voluminous testimony from his
colleagues and others that he was a swell guy with many
admirable qualities. However, part of being a journalist
is having the discipline to put events in perspective
and understand that what moves you personally may not
merit a banner headline.
Somehow
in death, Diana became “our princess,” JFK Jr. became
“our crown prince,” and Russert, according to some of
the extravagant hyperbole, “changed the face of
journalism.” Given much of media’s current preference
for personality cults, he didn’t change it enough. |
