Adrift in a World Without Anchors
Anchorman: The very word suggests security and gravitas. Serious but sympathetic, the timbre of his voice is a firm tenor or a stentorian baritone, perhaps a bit tense in dire straits, but never panicky. Closing out the night watch, his signature sign- off sounds like a benediction. “Good night and good luck,” said Edward R. Murrow. “And that’s the way it is,” asserted the decisive Walter Cronkite.
The future of the iconic American anchorman was on the minds of many this week as the news that Peter Jennings had been diagnosed with lung cancer raised immediate concerns that he wouldn’t be able to continue as anchor at ABC News.
After the long goodbye of NBC’s Tom Brokaw (who served from 1983 until December), and the forced retirement of CBS’ besieged Dan Rather (in harness from 1981 until March), the departure of the 66-year-old Jennings (sole anchor since 1978) would complete a clean sweep of the venerable troika from the erstwhile Big Three. Even more significant, it would mark the end of a special kind of personality-driven news experience -- the last unique legacy (reruns not included) of the classic age of broadcast television.
The anchor’s roots reach back to the birth of modern broadcast journalism in 1938, when CBS Radio launched its “World News Roundup” just in time to track Hitler marauding across Europe. The declamatory style of the town-crier announcer (familiar as the so-called Voice of God in the Hollywood newsreels) soon gave way to a new reportorial model in which the journalist became a commentator as well, guiding the listener through strange doings and complex geopolitics.
Murrow, of course, was the prototype for this new breed of broadcast journalist. When he moved from radio to TV, his visible presence only intensified the emotional link: the movie star looks, the patrician manner, the cigarette smoke swirling around his head like incense. On March 9, 1954, when Murrow delivered a slashing broadside at Sen. Joseph McCarthy, he was cashing in a lifetime of moral capital accrued from Munich to Panmunjom.
As an anchor, Murrow was a bit of a bust, but another candidate was waiting in the wings. During the TV coverage of the 1952 presidential conventions, CBS News President Sig Mickelson coined the term “anchorman” for his primary on-air reporter. The man Mickelson picked was Walter Cronkite.
Cronkite had to wait until 1962 before taking the reins of “The CBS Evening News” away from Douglas Edwards, but 1963 was his breakout year. That September, first CBS and then NBC expanded their news broadcasts from 15 minutes to 30. Then, over a vertiginous four days that November, the Kennedy assassination sent millions of Americans to the anchor to calm their nerves and soothe their souls.
Cronkite’s iconic bearing of the bad news (“From Dallas, Texas, a flash, apparently official.... “) has long since become audiovisual shorthand for the moment of impact: pulling off his glasses, choking up, stoically going forward.
Like Murrow, Cronkite spent his capital carefully, trading on his cheerleading for NASA to cover his flanks when he turned against the Vietnam War after the 1968 Tet offensive. The anchor was always careful not to run too far ahead of his Nielsen demographic -- maybe a few feet ahead of the fashion curve, but never out on the cutting edge.
It was around this time that Cronkite earned his sobriquet as “the most trusted man in America,” not as impressive as it sounds given the competition.
In 1981, the same year that Rather edged out the eminence gris, a more significant milestone in the annals of anchordom appeared on screen: CNN, the beginning of 24-hour news and the end of the networks’ monopoly.
By the 1990s, from the Gulf War through O.J.-TV to the massacre at Columbine High School, a multiplicity of news options and a dizzying cast of faces were available to bear the bad tidings.
The dinnertime newscast -- once de rigueur from coast to coast -- became a missable feast for Americans who had been munching all day on cable and the Internet. (From their high-water mark in the late 1960s, ratings for the network newscasts have plummeted by 60%.)
Tellingly, the most traumatic day in U.S. broadcasting history -- 9/11 -- bequeathed no equivalent to Cronkite’s JFK moment: The images of disaster are indelible, but no face, gesture or remark from a single newscaster stands out.
Over the years, American anchormen derived their authoritative profile less from anything they did than from the simple fact of prolonged exposure, repeated ceremonially for years, in a hegemonic media environment. In this sense, it is hard to lament the transfer of power from the great and powerful men in front of the curtain to every munchkin with a modem. Yet it also is hard not to get a little sentimental over the end of a tradition that well-served the news, and, on occasion, the nation.