White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

All the News That’s Fit To Read

by 2 Comments

 

 

And the winner is …. “Diane Sawyer to anchor ABC ‘World News.’ ”

 

In case you missed it, right up there with Afghanistan, health-care reform and swine flu is the news that someone other than Charles Gibson will be anchoring the flagship ABC evening program “World News” next year. Whew! Yes, Diane Sawyer is going to read us the news–all 22 minutes of it.

 

And why not Diane Sawyer? She is one of the most gifted people working in television, and she must be heartily sick of getting up at 3:30 a.m.

 

If there is a better resume floating around ABC News, it is hard to think whose it might be. Sawyer got her start as a local television reporter in Louisville, Ky. She worked as a press assistant in the Nixon White House. After Nixon’s retirement, she helped the president write his autobiography and prepare for the legendary interviews with British journalist David Frost.

 

In television, Sawyer has been a star for nearly 40 years. Energy, ability, hard work were taken at the flood and led on to victory. Compared to the dolly-bird journalists so favored in television these days, all peroxide and lip gloss, Sawyer is the real thing: an capable, experience journalist.

 

So why is she going to helm the evening news? Because, foolishly, both we and the networks–even in the twilight of their being–are in a time warp where we think it is important who reads the news at night. It is the Walter Cronkite-Edward Murrow legacy.

 

Yet those of us who know something about television, know that reading the news is a sinecure. If you are a halfway decent sight-reader, the work is light lifting. The networks and the anchors have tried to conceal this by making the anchors “managing editors,” but the subterfuge has its limits.

 

Television news is put together by a phalanx of producers and correspondents and it is, in fact, hard for the anchor to substantially reshape the product. The anchor’s views can be known and over time, and he or she can change the product by changing the culture. This can also be expressed as firing people you do not agree with. A friend of mine at ABC got cast into outer darkness when the anchor changed.

 

These upheavals are taken for granted. Television is a tough business in which the few who get to the top are well rewarded, but many fall victim to the star system and the star’s team.

 

I wrote for television anchors once and they were of two schools: Those who showed up and read what was put in front of them and those sought to influence what was put in front of them. We, the writers, liked the former and loathed the latter. We were proud of our work and did not want it denigrated by some star.

But the networks want to promote the concept that the newscaster is some kind of uber-journalist who spends long hours covering the news, bullying sources, confronting bureaucrats and exposing fraudsters. In reality, they are driven around in limousines, have lunches with other famous people at expensive restaurants, and spend a lot of time suggesting to the producers that they read an article in some newspaper, especially The New York Times. Often the skill of the producers is in parrying these suggestions. In Evelyn Waugh’s great comic novel “Scoop,” the protagonist parries the proprietor’s suggestions by saying, “to a point, Lord Copper.”

 

As fewer and fewer of us get our news from the networks, it is curious that who is going to read it to us is still newsworthy. It is not curious why someone would want the job. It pays wondrously and has all the prestige you can stand. The only downside is the ratings: the daily goad delivered by the Nielsen company.

 

I think Diane Sawyer will be a great anchor and she will be able to take it easier than at “Good Morning America.” But we will be deprived of her talent which has shined at breakfast time for a decade. –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

 

Television Political Talk, It’s a Growth Industry

by Leave a Comment

This is the year of the political talk show. Never have so many had so much to say about so little. No wonder CNN snapped up Tony Snow, when he left his job as White House press secretary. David Gregory, the uncontested successor to ABC’s Sam Donaldson as press corps lightening rod, is missing from NBC’s booth at the White House. He is doing a talk show for MSNBC–just one more talk show host in long lineup that includes Bill O’Reilly, Hannity & Colmes, Keith Olbermann, Dan Abrahms, Wolf Blitzer, Glenn Beck, Lou Dobbs and Campbell Brown. Even C-SPAN does politics.

But if you do not get cable, do not worry. You can still get your fix of talking hosts on over-the-air broadcasting. Beginning on Friday night, there is “Washington Week with Gwen Ifill.” It is the national anthem before the main event. The first-string players take the field on Sunday morning. On my dial the lineup is “Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace,” “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” “The Chris Matthews Show,” “Meet the Press with Tim Russert” and “Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer.”

Two programs, “Meet the Press” and “Face the Nation,” have been around since the days of radio. But all political broadcasting today owes much to a half-hour show that thundered to life 25 years ago. I speak of “The McLaughlin Group” and its extraordinary host, John McLaughlin.

McLaughlin invigorated the television talk show. He made the host a participant and encouraged contention, even shouting, among the guests.

It is hard now to remember how static the talk shows were. The host was a magisterial figure, who pretended he had no interest in the discussion. I was a panelist on “Meet The Press,” when Bill Monroe moderated it. There was a single guest who was interviewed by a panel of reporters. You could get in two questions, and that was it. It was a structure more satisfactory in concept than in practice. Once, when I was on the panel, Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson was a guest. I knew Jackson well and while we were in makeup, he said, “I want you to take me to the mat, and ask me the hard questions.” Of course he knew, and I was to learn, that the format did not include hard questions.

McLaughlin’s show is now in some decline, overshadowed by the resources and sheer volume of the competition. It has moved to another channel in Washington; and its rating are falling, according to The Weekly Standard. The show is a little tired, and McLaughlin’s conservatism a little idiosyncratic.

I have to confess that McLaughlin has been important to my career. I started a television talk show called “White House Chronicle,” which airs on some PBS and many public access channels, mostly because I got tired of waiting on the short list to be a guest on “The McLaughlin Group.”

At a White House Correspondents’ Association annual dinner, McLaughlin came over and told me how much he enjoyed my show. I told him how much he was responsible for it. This seemed to make him very happy.

Meanwhile, back on the dial, it is all politics, all the time. Or, more accurately, it is more people saying more about the tiniest perturbation in the week’s presidential campaign news. The question is whether the public interest in politics will continue after this extraordinary election year–and with it, the 24-7 political talk.