John Chancellor: The Quiet Man

Mention the good old days of television news and you risk sounding as musty as a gnarled old man who sits on a park bench muttering to passersby that no one could hit a baseball quite like Ty Cobb. But here goes.

No one could earn your respect quite like John Chancellor.

Last week, Chancellor retired from NBC News, where he had been since 1950, except for a stint as Voice of America director in the Johnson Administration. That amounts to 43 years in the news business.

“Nowadays a lot of them don’t last 43 weeks,” Larry King said Thursday night when introducing Chancellor as a guest on his CNN talk show.

Nowadays a lot of things are different.

For a decade, Chancellor has been commentator for “NBC Nightly News With Tom Brokaw.” Before that, he anchored or co-anchored the evening news for a dozen years, and before that was a reporter whose beats ranged from the nation’s heartland to the White House. Joining NBC News after working for the Chicago Sun-Times, Chancellor was present as television news sprouted from upstart to 800-pound gorilla.

In his new book, “The Fifties,” David Halberstam includes a section on the 1957 school integration turmoil in Little Rock, Ark., that Chancellor covered as a young reporter. Halberstam mentions that it was while watching Chancellor being jostled and jeered by a white racist mob on NBC one day that a local civil rights leader had an epiphany about the power of the media:

“What John Chancellor might as well have been doing . . . was letting the film roll and repeating again and again, ‘This is a sin . . . this is a sin . . . this is a sin.’ ”

It was as a floor reporter at the 1964 Republican Convention in San Francisco, however, that Chancellor became famous. The incident occurred during an election year in which television itself for the first time became a campaign issue, as Barry Goldwater supporters, in particular, were openly hostile toward the electronic medium.

With the movement of reporters on the convention floor being severely restricted by Goldwaterites, Chancellor was arrested on camera and escorted from the hall, signing off: “This is John Chancellor, somewhere in custody.”

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The truth is that Chancellor was a better reporter and anchor than commentator. Although always thoughtful and intelligent, his commentaries were too rarely incisive. He did once anger many Jews with strong words concerning Israelis and Palestinians, and perhaps he pushed some other buttons as well. Too often, though, he genially softened edges that were better left jagged, and his three-times-a-week appearances on “Nightly News” generally were less a forum for his opinion than for his analysis of topical events.

In an era when 22 minutes of network news are so strikingly insufficient to inform the United States about the world, even Aristotle would be expendable as a “Nightly News” commentator. With so little time available for reporting, commentary is a luxury that network newscasts can’t afford. Besides, in one of the darker trends in TV news, reporters in the field increasingly provide their own unlabeled commentary.

It’s less as a commentator than as a still-on-the-job symbol of reason and stability in a sometimes irrational and erratic NBC News division that Chancellor will be missed. It was assuring just knowing he was still on the scene.

The very measured, conversational quality that seemed to temper his effectiveness as a commentator helped make him a superior anchor. Although the name Chancellor projected regality, his style was quietly professorial, not pretentious. He never preached or lectured. He never pretended to be divinely anointed with answers. He was a messenger who never posed as a messiah.

We observe these people from afar, knowing them only from their public persona on the screen. Perhaps Chancellor was merely a brilliant actor, a closet ego all these many seasons who sought to hog the camera in a business that, after all, is predicated on using the gleaming charisma of anchors to seduce viewers. But he gave the opposite impression.

You had the feeling that, unlike some of his colleagues, Chancellor recognized the curse of his own celebrity as an anchor as well as the fruits, knowing that his fame could potentially obscure what he was reporting. Thus, he always appeared comfortable in the background of a story.

Inevitably, the good old days turn out to be never quite as good as you remember them. Nonetheless, you think of Chancellor and others of his time as human metaphors for a line that has been crossed irreversibly.

“A new culture has come in television news,” Chancellor told King. He defined the old one as “journalism done by professionals.”

Yet as he noted uncritically, the man he was speaking to--King--is himself part of the new culture, one in which the role of journalist is increasingly spread among nonprofessionals, at times for the better, other times for the worse.

Part of that culture also relates to a realignment of profit. This will sound almost quaintly Victorian, but there was once a time when networks regarded news as their contribution to society, something good they did for the public in exchange for the privilege of using the public airwaves to make pots of money.

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But the country has changed, the economy has changed, the business has changed, priorities have changed. And today, Chancellor noted, “every part of a network is supposed to make money.” As a result, he added, news aimed at “the head and the heart” has given way to news aimed at “the stomach and the bowels, and what I call pelvic news.”

You can’t fault his knowledge of anatomy. “I hope it’s just a passing fancy,” he said. It probably isn’t, and his absence is another chip off the medium’s credibility. Meanwhile, the memory of John Chancellor--as he leaves NBC for a life of writing books and doing other things at age 65--is the memory of something good.