Has this particular play had a long enough Broadway run?

 

Kaitlan Collins and David Muir

There may have been a day when the news broadcasters in television were reporters who found a lucrative niche in a new medium. People like Murrow and Cronkite and Brinkley didn’t become icons based on their looks. They were more like talking incarnations of Time and Newsweek and The Atlantic Monthly, news and culture journalists with a certain distinctive style and manner of speech.

Since CBS veteran Bernard Goldberg first blew the whistle on bias in mainstream network news organizations in 2001, millions (and millions) of words have been lavished on this controversial subject of how television journalism has become a partisan powerhouse in national politics rather than the ‘just the facts, ma’am’ diggers of truth they purport to be.

Funny how in all those millions of words, hardly any are devoted to the great divide between the mediums of print and television, which is much larger than the seeming uniformity of their political propaganda.

NYT, WAPO, WSJ, and whatever else remains of the old print shapers of national opinion are staffed with advanced degree holders from Columbia, Northwestern, and NYU. The CVs of television news anchors, on the other hand, represent a remarkably different kind of credential set. Despite some over-publicized exceptions, TV news hosts are not journalists at all. They are in a different business altogether. They are in show business.

It was always lurking there in the background from the moment newsmen met the prop of a television set. No, not just the device people out there were watching. The plasterboard and lights and staging designed to make a film studio look like an office. Murrow became the Bogart of early news broadcasting by smoking like a fiend on camera. This was all after World War II, mind, the era of explosive growth in American power, wealth, and confidence. Bigger was better, and the steady news organizations who had covered the war on radio or in documentary releases to theaters, then on Sunday television. I remember Cronkite’s stentorian narration of “The Twentieth Century” (1957-1966), which featured the Rock of Gibraltar as its signature image.

(This is tricky to get back here from.save it for the end of your  reading.)

Transitions were underway, gradual at the beginning but gathering steam. Many years after I’d watched the Cronkite documentary series, I discovered, on late night UHF station in Philly another series called “Victory at Sea.” The show ran from 1952 to 1953 and then here and there in syndication for decades. It was a masterpiece of film editing, musical scoring, and narration. Real footage, not re-enactments. Richard Rodgers, not Lalo Schiffren (no offense intended, just you know). And Leonard Graves. Even in my twenties when I found it on my 12-inch TV, he sounded to me like the voice of God, stern and resolute but ineffably moved by the courage and suffering of young men confronting death in war.

I never once laid eyes on Leonard Graves. Didn’t need to.

Eventuallly, NBC released a summary version of Victory at Sea, condensed to movie length and narrated by Alexander Scourby. I was crushed. Scourby’s an outstanding narrator, but…

Anyhow, this was what the emerging technology of television had to bring to the news business. The tools of the movie studios brought into the once ramshackle environment of a big city newsroom. Clunky typer-writers and gumshoe reporters in cheap suits replaced by a classier, better equipped ambiance. Transformational. Not all movie production is John Ford and Irving Thalberg though. It’s also Bob Hope and Betty Hutton, with a lipstick boost by Diana Lynn, and even Jonathan Winters. Comedy, often slapstick, in addition to sober dramas. 

The same year that gave us “Victory at Sea” was also the year in which the most importwnt event in the history of television news occurred.

It was two years after this that the NBC Tonight Show began, with a 

similar mission for a late night audience, barring news per sē. Incest?

Dave Garroway was a product of local radio news station. He made a name for himself by seeking out spectacle. According to Wikipedia:

“Garroway began his broadcasting career at NBC as a page in 1938; he graduated 23rd in a class of 24 from NBC's school for announcers. Following graduation, he landed a job at Pittsburgh radio station KDKA in 1939. As a station reporter, he filed reports from a hot-air balloon, a U.S. Navy submarine in the Ohio River, and deep inside a coal mine. His early reporting efforts earned Garroway a reputation for finding a good story, even in unusual places. The "Roving Announcer", as he was known, worked his way up to become the station's special-events director, while still attending to his on-air work. After two years with KDKA, Garroway left for Chicago.”

He brought exactly that kind of derringer-do to the Today Show.

Which paved the way for Katie Couric, Willard Scott, and Bryant Gumbel

All pretty harmless, right? Not quite right. There were always dangers in the show biz charms of folksiness. Another movie from this formative period, based loosely on a real life model, was A Face in the Crowd, starring ‘Andy of Mayberry,’ aka Andy Griffith in his first screen role. The fictional protagonist was an unlikely radio talk show superstar, of which there happened to be one at the time, name of Arthur Godfrey. His show, on the air for hours every day, made him what some labeled “The Most Famous Man in the World.”

A big deal of a film, in 1953, directed by Elia Kazan from a story by Budd 

Shulberg and co-starring Patricia Neal, Lee Remick, and Walter Matthau. 

Reviews were mixed because there were some belovèd men with similar careers and massive followings. The problem in this production was that the Griffith character was a pure sonofabitch eventually done in by his own narcissism, lusts, lies, and hypocrisies.

In short, a lot of money was involved in the personal reputations of saturation-level media stars. As happens, life soon imitated art (if that’s what it’s doing), and Arthur Godfrey had his own spectacular fall from grace after years of idolatry by an intensely loyal radio audience. If anyone was aware that what could happen in radio might also happen in the TV universe of morning shows and marquee news programs, there’s no evidence from the time that people were worried about the dangers of a similar downfall occurring with the new breed of unscripted five-day-a-week TV hosts or self-scripted newsreader hosts.

Life often takes longer than art to wreak its havoc on reputations. I recall being a so-so fan of the Today Show during its heyday in the Seventies. An easy way to get the headlines and impending water cooler topics while getting dressed for work. My favorite was the guy who did the five minute straight news report every half hour. Frank Blair. Some leftover newsman from the old days. He always sounded like he had just gotten out of bed, maybe hungover from the night before, and I’m sure a lot of people in the Today audience related to him more than the tailored, professionally made up hosts and hostesses. 

I was not a big fan of the nightly network news guys. Cronkite, Severaid, Huntley-Brinkley, John Chancellor, Tom Brokaw, Howard K. Smith, Mike Wallace,  and company always seemed to be talking down somehow, not antagonistically but a mite too avuncularly, like a mature well-to-do relative putting in an appearance at a less affluent household in the family for a holiday dinner. Friendly enough but aloof and not to be criticized by poor relations.

Thanks to the Party Conventions, I got to see what they could be like outside the network studio. It became suddenly obvious at the 1864 Republican Convention when Tom Brokaw and John Chancellor were careening around the convention floor (crowned with Martian-antennaed headgear) seeming to provoke delegates with gotcha questions about Barry Goldwater. John Chancellor was actually ejected from that convention by the RNC.

Oh yes he was…

People talk about media “derangement syndromes” these days as if they began with George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump. There’s a good reason for that. The pattern is so engrained and predictable and repeated that it demonstrated the irrational bias of the television news media long before Bernard Goldberg ever wrote his book about it in 2001. Before the Goldwater Derangement Syndrome on display at the 1964 GOP Convention, there was Phase 1 of Nixon Derangement Syndrome after his razor-thin loss to JFK in 1960, when there was reason for a recount in Cook County IL. Nixon finally let it go, but the press didn’t let him go. They hounded him all the way back to California and delighted openly when he lost a bid for Governor, blaming the press for a tide of bad publicity during the campaign. He famously told them they “wouldn’t have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore.” Only he came back and really got destroyed the second time around during NDS phase 2 with obsessive media coverage of the Watergate burglary and the achievement of his resignation on the eve of a Senate trial.

Goldwater never had a chance, but his failure marked the birth of a spectacular political career by Ronald Reagan, who served two successful terms as California Governor before narrowly losing the 1976 nomination to Gerald Ford, the sitting (and sitting Duck) President who inherited unelected office from the  Nixon resignation. Reagan came so close to beating out Ford that the media were lying in wait for him in 1980, when he finally claimed the nomination. The coverage of his campaign and the published polling made the “actor” candidate look like a huge underdog in the contest with Carter, even though the peanut farmer had been a lame duck himself since delivering his famous “malaise” speech in a cardigan sweater.

Interestingly, it was the professional news media who were most surprised by Reagan’s landslide win. I will never forget exactly where I was when at the end of a long workday I sat down with a friend to check in on the early returns on election night. By the time we turned it on, it was already over. The network anchors were calling the race for Reagan with only a tiny percentage of the vote in. We flipped from station to station, confronting the same long faces and tragic sighs on every channel. The news pros had all missed it and they were shellshocked. It was comical to see their deeply felt sorrow.

Then followed their 8-year attempt at revenge. Reagan was depicted as dumb, insensitive, blundering, and just plain not up to the job. It was in 1982 that the two biggest media stars of RDS emerged. Dan Rather on CBS News and Bryant Gumbel on NBC’s Today Show. Rather could have played the Andy Griffith role from Face in the Crowd. His folksiness was constant, an endless stream of cornpone Texas metaphors by the anchorman of America’s most powerful news network. Constant and nauseating. He had some of his own roots in Texas radio, as well as local newspaper experience, but no sign of academic attainments he scorned Reagan for lacking. Gumbel was a different case, but just as relentless. His ‘common touch’ came from sports, not down home geography, but he too prospered without the benefit of graduate level education in politics or journalism. This did not stop him from jeering at Reagan for every misstep and managing to twist every political interview on Today into an investigation of the malfeasance of the President and his associates no matter what the subject was. He got away with it. As did Rather. They weren’t alone in their scorn, just the most jaw-droppingly obvious about their antipathy.

This was the mindset that had made the Watergate nullification of a landslide Presidential election possible and also turned a handful of lucky news anchors into celebrities with all the trappings. There are probably still people out there who think Robert Redford is Bob Woodward and Dustin Hoffman is Carl Bernstein. Why they’re still able to write and sell slanderous books based on “anonymous” sources. They made it the new mission of journalism not to tell the truth but to “make a difference,” and the best way to do that is on TV with millions and millions watching. Suddenly journalism wasn’t about scruffy people drinking too much coffee in stinky newsrooms but becoming a star and a multimillion dollar brand to boot. “Journalists” getting paid like movie stars. Cool.

By this time, the essential profile of the news establishment in this country was well established in pretty much the same state it maintained until the advent of the Nemesis Trump. With a few interesting additional trends.

Despite (and arguably because of) Watergate, the print press papers of record have been on a long slow decline since even battered standards of journalism have been replaced by derangement syndromes as the foundations of “the narrative.” NYT, WAPO, WSJ, and their brethren are no longer the kings of anything but the narrative. Circulations have fallen, prestige has ebbed, and salaries of all the J-School valedictorians have become a joke compared to what can be earned by the stars of the TV network news organizations, who have rarely seen the inside of prestigious eastern universities. The new path to journalistic wealth is vastly different from that followed by the Murrows and Cronkites. 

Thanks to the Today Show and its derivatives, local news stations across the country were taken over by “happy talk” formats featuring pretty girls and tolerable male faces, all boasting degrees in something called broadcast journalism, which appears to have been mostly about wardrobe, teeth whitening, and generically homogenized American accents. The apotheosis of this was the unexpected rise of Fox News and its dozens (if not hundreds now) of blonde smiling heads attached to nice legs. What Google shows you when you search for “the blondes of Fox News”:

I’d say something about them, but I can’t even read the captions with my glasses on.

Yes, the female invasion of the news business was a consummation that had been devoutly wished for by feminism since the mid 20th Century. It was a perfect arena for rapid conquest by ambitious women. You had to look good, you didn’t have to know much, but you definitely needed the gift of gab that comes with the XX chromosome set. Like dermatology and social work and HR managers, TV journalism was a perfect match with aggressive career builders of the female persuasion. DEI was nothing really new when it came along, just a formalization of what had been going on under the table and an adorable new category of highly paid make-work administrivia for women to climb the corporate with.

Of course, it’s not just the women who are hired for their pretty faces now. David Muir, the superstar anchor of ABC News, has very unexceptional academic background and has recently come a cropper trying to fact-check Trump in a debate he had promised not to fact-check. Which would have been wise. Since he knows no facts.

All of the above leads to the reason for being of this post, which was a brief news item published the National Pulse. I started to write a FB post, then all the other flotsam’s and jetsam nobody talks about came bumping into my brain and here we are. Blame it on this:

One of the MAGA conservative hosts (can’t think which one) says this Kaitlan Collins is 

far and away the best looking news anchor on television. I have reason to doubt him. He 

trashes her anyway. I’m pretty sure she’ll land safely somewhere. Megyn Kelly’s done fine.

We’ve been watching the same dumb show for a long time now. Maybe it’s time to come up with a new act, a new show, with new music and new faces. Waddya think?