The network news anchor isn’t ready for past tense

Like everyone who knows him personally and -- I hope -- everyone who only knows him as a television presence, I was deeply saddened to learn that Peter Jennings, the ABC News anchor, had been diagnosed with lung cancer.

Not surprisingly, however, expressions of sorrow and sympathy were quickly followed, almost everywhere, by statements about how his diagnosis will ultimately mean the end of the evening network news, at least as we’ve come to know it since Walter Cronkite first intoned “That’s the way it is” in 1962.

With NBC’s Tom Brokaw having retired last year and Dan Rather of CBS having been pushed into departing last month, Jennings remains the last of the Mt. Rushmore-like figures who have presided over the evening news for the past 20-plus years.

I’m no doctor, so I have no idea how long Jennings will be able to continue as the anchor of “World News Tonight,” but it does seem reasonable to suggest that a continued long run does not, alas, appear likely. So, sooner rather than later, all three networks will have lost their star newsmen.

There’s a tendency -- one among many in such circumstances -- to mistakenly see the three men as being far more alike than they actually are, to lump them together as the “elite triumvirate,” as one recent Houston newspaper story did, “the venerable troika,” in the words of a Times op-ed page column.

Although all three are superb journalists -- Rather’s shameful screw-up on the George W. Bush National Guard story notwithstanding -- they are very different kinds of journalists and very different kinds of men.

Brokaw, in particular, was anything but an elitist. A smalltown boy from South Dakota, he never lost that down-to-earth, Upper Midwest sensibility.

At a time when the journalist -- the television journalist, anyway -- was increasingly as much a celebrity as the luminaries he interviewed, Brokaw remained the earnest, mild-mannered interrogator-as-surrogate for Mr. and Mrs. Jones sitting at home in their living room.

I didn’t think that the first time I met Brokaw, in 1971. He was then a reporter for Channel 4, the local NBC affiliate here, and we found ourselves seated next to each other at a dinner party in the Malibu home of Norton Simon, the wealthy industrialist and art collector. Except for me -- there on assignment, writing a profile of Simon for The Times -- it was a pretty elite gathering, and Brokaw certainly seemed to fit right in.

But I subsequently interviewed him many times over the years, after he moved to New York and became an anchor, and it didn’t take long for me to realize that a millionaire’s beachhouse was not at all his natural milieu.

He was a simple (but far from simpleminded) fellow, happier talking about family, mutual friends and sports than about high finance or the latest symphony performance, museum opening or fancy restaurant. He was Everyman. Viewers could identify with him. I think that’s why his “NBC Nightly News” dominated the ratings wars for most of the last decade of his tenure.

The Canadian-born Jennings is, in many ways, quite the opposite of Brokaw. He has always seemed the most urbane and cerebral of the three anchors, the one most likely to refer to European travel or to a good restaurant or to bring up a new book or quote some obscure philosopher in the course of an interview.

This has carried over, of course, into his journalism. There’s a reason his program is called “World News Tonight.” It has always seemed to have a more international flavor than the others.

That general impression is confirmed by statistics compiled by Andrew Tyndall of the Tyndall Report, a New York-based service that measures the evening news content minute by minute. From 1988 through 2004, “World News Tonight” gave international news 13% more airtime than did CBS and 23% more time than NBC. In many years the gap was even greater. In 1992, for example, “World News Tonight” devoted 37% more time than CBS and 30% more than NBC to international news.

Jennings does not flaunt his global credentials -- or anything else -- though. He is not pretentious, on screen or off. Whatever he says and however he says it, he sounds natural. Very smart, very reflective and very sophisticated, but very natural.

I have to admit that some of my fondness and respect for him -- and for Brokaw and Rather -- both professionally and personally is attributable to his (and their) accessibility. I don’t ever recall any of them failing to return my phone call or declining to comment or to be interviewed, no matter how sensitive the issue. They were journalists, and they understood the journalist’s job -- and the journalist’s responsibility to his colleagues.

Rather was the most prickly of the three anchors to deal with, just as he was the most aggressive of the three journalistically. He was the anchor most likely to be on the scene of a big story and, as a reporter, the most likely to press reluctant sources the hardest.

I think it was his aggressiveness -- his competitiveness, his desire to be first, no matter what -- that ultimately proved Rather’s undoing when he raced on air with the Bush National Guard story, rather than risk being beaten if he waited until he had authenticated the documents on which he based the story.

That was bad journalism, and in that, it was demonstrably atypical of Rather. But the competitive zeal was very typical -- indeed emblematic -- of the man.

I can still remember the look of gleeful triumph on his face when I interviewed him in 1998 and he spoke of a scoop he’d gotten 25 years earlier. That story -- that President Nixon would name Henry Kissinger as secretary of state -- was “a world beat ... a clean kill,” he said, beaming. He likened it to “catching a touchdown pass when I was in high school.”

Many thought the Rather personality too “hot” for the essentially “cool” medium of television, and while I disagreed, there’s no disputing that ratings for the “CBS Evening News” did fall behind Brokaw’s ratings under Rather’s watch.

But the evening network news ratings have been declining, collectively, for more than 30 years, a decline that began before Rather, Brokaw or Jennings took the anchor chair.

Only 36% of American households now watch the nightly network news, one-third fewer than tuned in as recently as 1991. And the average age of those viewers is almost 60.

Amid current speculation that the departure of the three longtime anchors will usher in a new era in TV news, talk is widespread that the day of the anchor as the single “God-like” voice is over.

That may be true. Whatever their individual popularity, none of these three ever achieved Cronkite’s lofty stature as “the most trusted man in America,” as one public opinion poll found him to be.

Indeed, in a December 2004 Gallup Poll, only 23% of the respondents rated TV reporters overall as “very high” or “high” on honesty and ethical standards.

Clearly, we live in a much more fragmented and skeptical society than in Cronkite’s heyday. The media universe is especially fragmented. There was no Internet when Cronkite was the CBS anchor; CNN, then known widely as the “Chicken Noodle Network,” was less than a year old, with neither stature nor cable competitors, when Cronkite retired in 1981.

Still, it’s worth noting that the ratings slide of the network news programs notwithstanding, they still draw 30 million viewers a night. The highest-rated regular news program on cable, “The O’Reilly Factor,” is generally seen by about 3 million viewers.

So I think it might be a bit premature to write off either the evening network news programs or the single-anchor format. Perhaps it’s just another manifestation of my fuddy-duddyness, but I’ve always liked the idea of an authoritative, knowledgeable, companionable guide to walk and talk me through the highlights of the news of the day, and I think many other Americans feel the same way.

That doesn’t mean the news has to be broadcast in the early evening, at a time when many Americans are still at work, en route home or eating dinner. Perhaps a shift to a later time would help rebuild the network news audience -- and have the collateral benefit of displacing at least 30 minutes a night of the current prime-time nonsense.

David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com.