Anchorman: A Dumb Job
Frank Rich
How Is It Possible That the Inane Institution of the Anchorman Has Endured for More Than 60 Years?
ome two months into Brian Williams’s six-month banishment from NBC for making stuff up, it’s not known whether he will ever return to the anchor chair at Nightly News. It’s also not known whether anyone cares. The understudy who stepped in, Lester Holt, is leading in evening-news viewership as Williams did. No one is complaining that Holt’s résumé includes three years co-hosting the Westminster Dog Show but lacks those narrow Indiana Jones escapes from danger, whether in Iraq or New Orleans, that his predecessor conjured up to prove his gravitas. No one is fretting about whether Holt sullied the dignity of an anchor’s higher calling when he did a cameo on 30 Rock. No one seems to notice that Holt is continuing as anchor at NBC’s Dateline, the trashy newsmagazine whose signature feature is “To Catch a Predator.”
The interchangeable blandness of the two Nightly News anchors and the continuity of their viewership confirm the reality that lurked just beneath the moral outrage, torrential social-media ridicule, and Comcast executive-suite chaos of the Williams implosion: For all the histrionics, this incident of media blood sport was much ado about not so much. The network-news anchor as an omnipotent national authority figure is such a hollow anachronism in 21st-century America that almost nothing was at stake. NBC’s train wreck played out as corporate and celebrity farce rather than as a human or cultural tragedy because it doesn’t actually matter who puts on the bespoke suit and reads the news from behind a desk.
Yet the institution of the network anchor persists even as such perennial eulogies are written for it, even as the broadcast networks give way to the individualized narrowcasting of social networks. As Andrew Heyward, the former president of CBS News, describes the atavistic absurdity of the franchise, the very concept that an anchor could “organize the world in a coherent way,” putting the world “literally” in a box for half an hour, is now a non sequitur. But like the cockroach, the anchorman has outlasted countless changes in the ecosystem around him. And he has done so despite being a ridiculous, if ingenious, American invention since his birth.
The network anchor’s roots are not in journalism but in the native cultural tradition apotheosized by L. Frank Baum. Like the Wizard of Oz (as executive-produced by Professor Marvel), anchors have often been fronts for those pulling the strings behind the curtain: governments and sponsors, not to mention those who actually do the work of reporting the news. With their larger-than-life heads looming into our living rooms, the anchors have been brilliant at selling the conceit that a resonant voice, an avuncular temperament, a glitzy, thronelike set, and the illusion of omniscience could augment the audience’s brains, hearts, and “courage” (at one point, a Dan Rather sign-off) as it tries to navigate a treacherous world. Just don’t look behind the curtain. Many of the charges leveled against Williams for conduct unbecoming an anchorman could be made against his predecessors too.
The strain of all-American humbug baked into television anchoring from the start has often been obscured by the industry’s penchant for self-mythologizing. Even the provenance of the term anchorman itself has been retouched for public consumption. For years it was said to have first gained currency in 1952, when it turned up in a CBS press release to characterize Walter Cronkite’s role in the network’s coverage of the political conventions. Also for years, Don Hewitt, the CBS News producer who ran the newscast, and Sig Mickelson, the first CBS News president, engaged in a friendly back-and-forth as to which of them deserved credit. (Cronkite attributed the term to a third CBS News executive, Paul Levitan.) But in 2009, Mike Conway, an Indiana University journalism professor, unearthed the far more humble origins of “anchor man.” It turns out that the term’s first use on television was in 1948 at NBC to describe the permanent member of a rotating panel of celebrities on a quiz show titled Who Said That?
This footnote would seem to have no bearing on the subsequent history of television news except for the fact that Who Said That? pioneered the networks’ blurring of news and entertainment. The show was the brainchild of the producer Fred Friendly, who would soon be revered for his partnership with the patron saint of broadcast journalism, Edward R. Murrow, at CBS, where among other feats they would famously excoriate Joe McCarthy in their prime-time show, See It Now, in 1954. Friendly’s autobiography glides by Who Said That?, Conway noted, because “he wanted to be known for working with Murrow” rather than vulgar forays into infotainment. But the proto-anchorman of Who Said That?, John Cameron Swayze, didn’t share Friendly’s highfalutin sensitivities. Even as he appeared on the NBC quiz show, he was the newscaster (not yet called an “anchor”) at NBC’s evening news — The Camel News Caravan, the progenitor of Nightly News. Swayze’s double duty of more than 60 years ago is the template for Williams’s juggling of his Nightly chores with slow-jamming the news with Jimmy Fallon.
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