At the Top of the News

The setting was Geneva, early on in Tom Brokaw’s tenure in the anchor chair at NBC News.

As snow fell, turning Brokaw’s brown hair to a silvery white, then-NBC News President Larry Grossman says he had an epiphany, telling the anchor that “when you get gray hair, you’re going to be absolutely the most popular guy in the world.”

Brokaw does have gray hair these days, and his evening newscast has been the most popular, at least in the U.S., for the last three years. Coincidence?

Maybe, maybe not. Still, although few would have predicted it some 17 years ago when he took the anchor chair by himself, Brokaw has become the very model of what we think of as an anchor these days, seemingly the most approachable, most reliable of the three men bringing the half-hour summary of the news each night, and leading viewers--at least those who haven’t jumped to all-news cable--through the unfolding election year.

He had an atypical career path, including local news and a stint anchoring the morning “Today” show, and a reporting resume that included fewer foreign assignments than his rivals, CBS’ Dan Rather and ABC’s Peter Jennings. Even when he got the job in 1983, his role as the “face” of the seriously struggling NBC News led to constant chatter that he was about to be replaced. The show did reach the top of the ratings pile in the mid-1980s but soon lost it. Many in the media intelligentsia had a way of quietly dismissing him. “People thought he was a lightweight,” says Reuven Frank, now retired, who as NBC News president chose Brokaw to be sole anchor. “But it was unfair, because he was pretty well-grounded and deep.”

Today, however, Brokaw is at the top of his game, with a top-rated newscast and two best-selling books. How Brokaw got to this position says a lot about what viewers expect from an anchor these days and about what the evening newscast has become at a time of intense competition for news viewers.

Arriving at a rally for presidential candidate John McCain during the recent New Hampshire primary, Brokaw, in boots, black jeans and a black down jacket, bounds through the sloppy snow to catch up to the Arizona senator and former prisoner of war, who repeatedly refers in speeches to Brokaw’s book “The Greatest Generation,” about World War II veterans. Even dressed inconspicuously, Brokaw is besieged by veterans who want to talk about the book, autograph and picture seekers who know him from TV, and a confused duo from Dutch TV who ask him to take their picture before, embarrassed, they realize who he is and ask for an interview instead. In rapid succession, four foreign broadcasters, a kids TV show, a student documentary maker and the NBC local station from Seattle ask him to expound on the meaning of the primary. At one point--maybe a little quiet playfulness with the incessant picture seekers?--he flusters a woman when he asks her to take a picture of him with a man named Vincent, whose appearance is far removed from that of the well-dressed crowd milling about. “But I don’t even know him,” she protests, but complies, clearly pleasing Vincent, even though he’ll never see the picture.

Later, when Brokaw and some “Nightly News” staffers drop by a Bill Bradley rally--only to turn right around when they find that the candidate is running a half-hour late--campaign workers plead for a little time. “He’ll get through this without me,” Brokaw assures them with his wry smile and trademark mumble.

Myriad factors go into making a newscast No. 1. There’s the strength of the local newscasts that precede it--newscasts that themselves are greatly dependent on whether they are lucky enough to have a hit such as “Oprah” leading into them. There’s the strength of the entire network, which determines how many people see teasers for the nightly news. There’s the strength of the news division producing the newscast--are correspondents deployed where the stories are? how talented are the writers and producers who choose how stories are presented?

And then there’s the anchor. All three evening news anchors are supremely competent: strong reporters, steeped in the issues, who can hold down the half-hour newscast or play traffic cop for hours on end when a plane crashes or an election has an unexpected turnout or a celebrity dies tragically. And each has bonded with viewers, has been No. 1 at some time, and has a core of viewers who are clearly comfortable with his particular style.

In fact, although NBC Nightly News has been on top for three years, in total audience, the show is virtually neck-and-neck with ABC’s “World News Tonight”: NBC drew an average 10.3 million viewers a night in 1999 to ABC’s 10.2 million. (CBS drew 8.9 million.) The week of Feb. 14-18, NBC and ABC tied.

Compared with 1995, however, when ABC was in first place, NBC has almost exactly the same number of viewers, while ABC has lost 18% of its audience and CBS is down 10%. The CBS newscast lost 1 million average daily viewers from 1998 to 1999. (ABC is up marginally.) Brokaw’s coming into his own is important at a time when so many viewers are fleeing evening newscasts, presumably for one of the three all-news cable channels, the no-nonsense, unedited C-SPAN or the Internet.

That gray hair may actually be part of the success formula. It’s often unsaid, admits Grossman, author of “The Electronic Republic: Reshaping Democracy in the Information Age,” but “clearly the amount of gravitas and maturity one develops is important” for an anchor. Some viewers saw Brokaw, who got the top post when co-anchor Roger Mudd was pushed aside (Frank praises Mudd but says Brokaw was “better at ad-libbing, working without a script, which is something you cannot live without in an election year”), as too callow and ambitious, executives recall. Brokaw--who says that of the three, Jennings really has “that anchorman elan, like he was born to do that kind of work”--acknowledges that some viewers didn’t want to get their news from a relative youngster (today, Brokaw just turned 60, while Jennings is 62 and Rather is 68).

Longevity helps: presuming the person in the anchor job is competent to begin with, the more exposure he gets, the more comfortable the audience is.

“A lot of things broke [Tom’s] way, but the most important thing is that people left him alone; when things were bad, nobody replaced him,” says Frank.

“NBC Nightly News” ascended to the top spot under Brokaw for the first time right after the Challenger space shuttle explosion, and then-executive producer Bill Wheatley says he partly credits Brokaw’s smooth handling of the tragedy coverage. “It was so absolutely clear that he had done his homework, knew what he was talking about and empathized with the story.”

Today, particularly since it’s an election year, those viewers with cable often get to see Brokaw use those skills. The night of the New Hampshire primary, Brokaw, standing in a heated, glass-fronted shed on the snowy front lawn of a bucolic inn, anchored five updates of “NBC Nightly News” (for different time zones and air times), over 2 1/2 hours. Just a few minutes later, it was time to interview a cranky George W. Bush, who had conceded the election to McCain, for the newsmagazine “Dateline NBC.” Standing in the overheated shed, with 19 others squeezed in behind the cameras, Brokaw calmly talked to the Texas governor about hunting, something about a mix-up between pheasants and meadow larks. It was little different from the chit-chat about where to buy old barn boards that he had exchanged the day before with an independent voter he was interviewing for the newscast. Then, interview over, Brokaw continued implacably on with a remote interview with the Democrats, seemingly not noticing as the governor and his entourage somewhat noisily made their way out.

When the “Dateline” report was wrapped up, Brokaw held forth for another half-hour on MSNBC.

Brokaw almost didn’t get the chance to prove himself. Grossman, who joined NBC from PBS less than a year after Brokaw got the top job, says he initially wouldn’t have been opposed to replacing Brokaw, if only there had been an obvious successor. “You can’t replace somebody with nothing,” he says. “I was perfectly willing to believe in the conventional wisdom that we needed new people but . . . I couldn’t tell who the new people would be and nobody had a better idea.”

Brokaw admits there was a period in his life when his head was swayed by all the celebrity being heaped upon him. But during the difficult mid-1980s, he says, he tried to ignore the gossip and focus on the job, knowing that he had his reporting credentials as a fallback. “It was a pretty perilous time,” he admits. “I didn’t know what was going to happen.” While NBC was in chaos, with new cost-cutting corporate owners in General Electric, “there was Roone Arledge across the street [at ABC] reinventing television news and doing a great job at it.”

It helped, he said, that “there wasn’t a lot of anxiety in my house about whether Tom would have a job the next day. [Wife] Meredith didn’t live off the vapors of gossip.”

But while he and Meredith ran in high-powered social circles and Brokaw has many friends in the newspaper business--stealing time in New Hampshire for a reunion lunch with many of them--he also made little effort to get himself good press with the workaday journalists covering him. While Rather and Jennings mingled easily with television writers at fancy parties, Brokaw never did. He was friendly with a few select writers, but made little effort with many others, brushing by them, cutting conversations short. It was, he says now, “probably a mistake on my part.”

“There was a kind of resentment,” he says, even though he acknowledges that accessibility can create goodwill, as McCain is proving this election year with his open-bus policy. “I thought there was something inappropriate about one journalist courting another journalist,” and he wanted his work to speak for itself.

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Eventually, it did. In one heady week in 1987, he had an exclusive interview with the Soviet Union’s Mikhail Gorbachev, moderated a presidential candidates’ debate, and drew the opening and closing question slots in a four-anchor interview with President Reagan; later, he was the only anchor at the falling Berlin Wall. (He has also made some later missteps: anchoring a short-lived newsmagazine called “Now” and fronting a day-in-the-White House documentary with the Clintons that some critics found insipid.)

NBC’s affiliates stuck by him. “I think there was a little more archness about me” on the East and West coasts, he says. By contrast, Brokaw, whose office is dominated by a black-and-white photo of an Indian cemetery near his Yankton, S.D., childhood home, always felt “great heartland support.”

Indeed, although hard to quantify, some of Brokaw’s recent success may be due to the fact that as the nightly news has moved away from its East Coast-bias, it plays better to Brokaw’s strengths. “I think that he has a really great Midwest and family sensibility. He believes in those virtues very strongly,” says his executive producer, David Doss. “He’s not above the news.”

The newscasts themselves are very different creatures from what they were in the early 1980s when the three anchors ascended to power. Then, they were weighted toward Washington, D.C., with story upon story about policy and process. The balance was provided by foreign news as the Cold War still raged.

Today, however, a White House conference on Internet safety means a trip to a company that teaches about how to protect against hackers, not a view inside a dreary hearing room. And with the end of the Cold War, foreign news has so faded from immediate consciousness that it was even slightly disorienting to see Rather anchor a recent newsmagazine report about nuclear missiles left over from the U.S.-Soviet arms race. “In the past, the newscasts saw the world through the prism of white, middle-aged men. That’s no longer the case,” Brokaw says.

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Washington stories played well to Rather’s hard-news, no-nonsense image, honed at the Johnson and Nixon White Houses. Foreign stories were seen as a strength of ABC’s Jennings, who spent many years covering the Middle East and Europe. “Jennings had some success there because he was perceived as a person extraordinarily interested in foreign affairs,” says Wheatley, NBC’s executive vice president.

With technology, stocks and women’s health just as important components of what we think of as news these days, however, and with Washington policy stories being told through the lens of the rest of the country, Brokaw, with his similar “Today” show training, seems more in tune with the news. “We report an awful lot more on business and interesting stocks, important health and family issues,” says Doss. “We got knocked hard on that when we began doing it, but those issues are very much on people’s minds.”

“It worked Tom’s way,” says Frank. “After all that period . . . it turned out that it was a good news organization. When you tuned in, you found out what was going on.” Brokaw handled the changing newscast smoothly, Frank says, although “sometimes for my money the stuff is a little soft. But I’m an old crock.”

Brokaw’s big lament in New Hampshire was the fact that he couldn’t find a cup of cappuccino anywhere. But, says Wheatley, “people know that Tom is from middle America, that he goes back there regularly.” And, he adds, “Tom’s interests reflect the times in many ways. Early on, he was interested in new technology and the Internet, and his program has done a lot of good reporting in that area.”

Although on air Brokaw has less of an edge than, say, Rather, off air he sometimes has little patience. When an independent voter he had been interviewing starts lauding the late Chet Huntley for what she recalls was a farewell speech recommending life at a slower pace, Brokaw pointedly notes, “He went out and built a big ski resort, actually.” When an obnoxious questioner begins loudly berating him at a Manhattan reading for his latest book, Brokaw, with the crowd on his side, keeps trying to out-argue his critic, when others would have simply dismissed him and moved on.

The books, conceived after Brokaw went to Normandy to cover the 50th anniversary of D-Day, have helped cement Brokaw’s credibility, Grossman and others say. “The people who are surprised that the Renaissance man became Tom didn’t know him as well as we did,” says MSNBC anchor Brian Williams, Brokaw’s substitute anchor. The “clickety click [that] viewers heard” during NBC’s coverage of John Glenn’s return trip to space, Williams says, was Brokaw, during a pause in his duties, typing away on another chapter.

The fiercely competitive anchors have all written recent books, but it is Brokaw’s that really struck a nerve. Some 3.5 million copies of “The Greatest Generation” are in print, and the December 1998 book is still topping its sequel volume of letters, “The Greatest Generation Speaks,” on the best-seller charts.

The second book has gone into three printings for a total 1.15 million copies. Contrary to what you’d expect from books profiling the World War II generation, the tomes have attracted a multigenerational crowd; a recent reading and book-signing event at a Manhattan bookstore drew 200 people of all ages, including a Gen-Xer who wanted to know how her generation could acquire the same values as its predecessors.

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How much longer Brokaw will stay in his job past his 2002 contract expiration is a question. Many colleagues see him giving it all up for a job doing occasional reports for “Dateline” or whatever else he wants. Although Brokaw has said at least since 1993 that he was ready to move on, this contract cycle “really has the feel of a victory lap,” says one colleague who knows him well.

Brokaw does nothing to dismiss the speculation, noting that the books have been satisfying in ways he didn’t expect. His office is filled with pictures of family and friends from climbing and fishing expeditions, and there are relatively few of him with famous people he’s interviewed. Many of his friends from that world, he notes, “don’t have television sets.”

“I don’t know how much longer I’ll stay,” he says. “When the snow is falling in the mountains or a friend calls and says the sea trout are running in Patagonia, I think, ‘Oh my God, get me out of the harness.’ ” Then a big story hits, he says, and he’s raring to go again.