A changed world for anchors

Dan Rather, the public face of the newsroom scandal at CBS’ “60 Minutes,” was a big draw. So was Tom Brokaw, on his way out after 21 years at the helm of “NBC Nightly News.” And the presence of ABC’s Peter Jennings at a weekend roundtable as part of the New Yorker Festival here made it a hat trick -- or perhaps something of a Mt. Rushmore moment for followers of American broadcast news.

While the three broadcast network anchors have appeared together often over the more than two decades that they have been the standard-bearers for their network news divisions, the proceedings Saturday at the New York Public Library carried the unmistakable feeling that an era that once seemed carved in granite now is caught up in swift and turbulent change.

While a friendly and mutually supportive air prevailed -- the anchors joked about Rather’s penchant for folksy sayings, and Brokaw and Jennings vigorously defended their CBS colleague against his critics -- there was a sobering subtext underpinning the conversation about broadcast news:

Audiences for the network evening newscasts are aging, and cable news is stealing viewers. The Internet is changing the nature of the political debate. Brokaw is stepping down Dec. 1 to spend more time on documentaries and books. And Rather’s remaining time in the anchor chair is something of an unknown, as an investigation into what went wrong with the “60 Minutes” story about President Bush’s National Guard service plays out.

When the anchormen were asked by moderator Ken Auletta and questioners from the audience of 500 to talk about various issues of campaign coverage, there was a whiff of nostalgia in the room.

The anchors spoke of a bygone era when conventions were more than giant party fundraisers and infomercials and presidential debates were still debates and not a “carefully scripted, carefully confined joint appearance,” as Rather put it.

Inevitably, the men referred back to cable and the Internet, the elephants in the room. Asked about the networks’ decisions to scale back prime-time coverage of the conventions this summer, Jennings said: “We paid for it ... nobody watched us.” Instead, viewers turned to CNN and PBS during the Democratic convention and to cable’s Fox News Channel for Republican convention coverage. Fox’s RNC audiences bested the networks for the first time ever during a convention.

While the audience for the first presidential debate last week turned overwhelmingly to the networks, Fox also made a strong showing that night.

As for the Internet, it has been a central player in the woes of Rather -- who is embroiled in a political and journalistic controversy over the use of unverified, photocopied documents in the National Guard report.

(While Rather declined to comment on the situation Saturday, Jennings said it was unfair to judge a career by one story and Brokaw decried the “kind of political jihad” that is claiming CBS was politically motivated in reporting the story. As independent investigators prepare to continue their questioning of CBS news employees this week, Rather did say that he has no time frame for stepping down, noting he wants to remain as “long as I like doing it.”)

Jennings called the influence of bloggers -- who were among the first to raise questions about CBS’ documents -- a “fact of our lives now,” one that is both “healthy and challenging.”

Ironically, the anchormen found themselves called on to defend some journalistic practices that are more prevalent on cable. Asked how they could justify the amount of time they had spent covering the charges made by the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth critical of Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry’s Vietnam war record, Brokaw and Rather both noted that their programs had spent almost no time on the issue.

And in answer to a critic who asked the anchors to justify sensational news stories at a time when the country is in a heated election and at war in Iraq, Jennings said that “World News Tonight” didn’t cover the Laci Peterson murder and carried only two pieces on the case against basketball star Kobe Bryant.

With the media under attack by political partisans on both sides, Brokaw said he took comfort that the three network newscasts still draw a combined audience of 25 million a night. He called it “testimony that people still do believe us, even though they may be skeptical” about individual stories.

But Brokaw, 64, also joked about the aging of the network news audience. And as was apparent from the questions, the distinctions between cable and network news aren’t readily made by viewers anymore.

So the networks have been seeking to harness the alternative audiences. Brokaw is as likely to appear on NBC’s own cable news outlet, MSNBC, as he is on the broadcast network and noted some of his post-”Nightly News” work will be for the cable network. ABC News has been trying an experimental digital cable and broadband news network. It is scheduled to end after the election, but ABC News executives are hoping to make it a permanent fixture on the media landscape.

With Brokaw soon to be replaced by Brian Williams, attention is inevitably turning to how much longer Jennings, 66, and Rather, 72, will remain in their posts, which Jennings called “wonderful, wonderful jobs for journalists,” even though “we’re also reviled by a lot of people.”