Columnist
The multimillion-dollar, TV chair-switching between Katie Frick and Meredith Frack raises one key question: Will it improve network TV news?
It has been difficult to avoid the drumbeat of Katie Couric’s imminent takeover of Dan Rather’s old anchor chair at CBS News. Her NBC co-host seat on the “Today” show will be filled by ABC’s Meredith Vieira. After the music dies down, the question remains: Should we care?
First off, let’s stipulate that the move is good for white women. Heretofore, except for the pairing in medieval times of Barbara Walters with Harry Reasoner, and the likewise abortive coupling of Connie Chung and Rather, and before the recent appointment of Elizabeth Vargas as ABC co-anchor, the white boys who run network news have reserved the anchor for their kind. (ABC News broke the color spell with Max Robinson once upon a time, as did CNN with Bernard Shaw, but CNN is cable.)
As long as Generation Y can remember, the three network anchors were men promoted as the best and the brightest. Closer inspection, however, revealed a troika of hollow men. One of these superstars, for example, never attended college. Another whose job it was to enunciate English prose fluently to millions of TV viewers each evening was hampered by a speech impediment. The third frat anchor, although a nice man, was more reporter than anchor, and toward the end this emperor was too powerful to be moved toward the exit save by stretcher.
This last star, of course would be Rather, whose chair Couric is set to occupy in September. Watching Dan Rather deliver the news was like gazing upon a tree hive night after night. One never knew exactly when, but it was certain that the bumblebees would swarm. Nightly his shoulders would jerk, the neck oscillate and, without warning, those saloon eyes would roll like a gambler counting the house. With the turning of his leaves, Rather’s on-air delivery had listeners fixing on his lips that annoyingly whistled as they worked.
So the beloved, macho network troika has passed from the scene at the crest of a credibility tidal wave that has breached the levee of network news. TV news ratings are down, viewers are confused and online competitors are licking their chops. The network anchors took the handoff from the Cronkites, the Huntleys and the Brinkleys, but they have never quite measured up to these formidable predecessors. They were as easily hoodwinked by a war as by a scheming Karl Rove. Indeed, ill-served by the media, the republic stumbles about now uncertain as to how to respond to a staggering deficit, a senseless war and a know-nothing president.
With his own credibility in the mud, President George W. Bush recently encountered a surprisingly stouthearted concern among the friendly, hand-picked audience the GOP arranged for him on the road. A few weeks ago, after a Cleveland man pressed Bush about his damagingly false claims about the Iraq war, a younger one asked: “Mr. President, with the war in Iraq costing $19,600 per U.S. household, how do you expect a generation of young people such as ourselves to afford college?”
Again, risking exposure Thursday in a friendly town hall meeting in Charlotte, N.C., Bush ran into a concerned, commercial real estate broker — Harry Taylor, 61, who questioned the president’s opposition to abortion and his erosion of civil liberties by wire-tapping citizens’ phones. “In my lifetime, I have never felt more ashamed of, or more frightened by, my leadership in Washington, including the presidency, or the Senate.”
The president, of course, had no good answers for these citizens’ questions that the media have not effectively enough pursued. Yet such questions indicate a rising awareness of, and possible discontent with, the performance of this woeful president and perhaps even the performance of the news media. This, then, is the problem that network TV news must face.
It is not so much a personality question of Rather, Couric or Bob Schieffer as CBS anchor. The key challenge the media face today is how to more effectively inform the citizenry so it can make timely decisions about the performance of government on matters of taxes and spending, security and war and peace.