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" Once upon a simpler time in television, the news knew its place, and basted like a turkey until our electronic daddies started carving at 6:30 on the dot. Back then, which of the Big Three newscasts you attended, so to speak, helped pinpoint your identity no less than your choice of church, for the evening news was a ceremony of a frankly sacerdotal hue. At the appointed hour, instead of the hectic transcript nineties audiences can access at the touch of a mouse or a remote, each day&amp;#039;s intimations of chaos were coaxed into a soothing processional, demonstrating that even if all wasn&amp;#039;t right with the world, what was wrong had, once again, stayed manageable. Short of Lee Harvey Oswald, not much could fluster the ritual, either. Its linchpin was the anchorman as sachem--lofty but intimate, benignly radiating the Great White Hunter sagacity that Walter Cronkite&amp;#039;s long reign at CBS pinned down as the essence of the job.  As religions go, this one probably peaked in 1980, the year Cronkite&amp;#039;s name was bandied about, lightly but to a beguiled public response, for the vice-presidency. With what passed for modesty on Olympus, he later allowed (not lightly--the glimpse of his fantasy life was breathtaking) that the highest post he actually felt qualified for was secretary of state, although why he&amp;#039;d have accepted either demotion was unclear. Even for CBS&amp;#039;s broadcast rivals, which used to work variations on the liturgy--most famously Chet Huntley and David Brinkley&amp;#039;s Vladimir-and-Estragon act, waiting for LBJ on NBC in the sixties--Cronkite&amp;#039;s example has become the Tradition. For NBC&amp;#039;s Tom Brokaw and ABC&amp;#039;s Peter Jennings, no less than for Dan Rather, Cronkite&amp;#039;s successor at CBS, it&amp;#039;s still Yahweh or the highway.  Like a lot of traditions, though, this one looks weirder once deprived of the circumstances that rationalized it. Not that it was ever anything but absurd--or free of sham, either; for this heretic&amp;#039;s money, Cronkite owed his dominance largely to his superior gift for plummy humbug. But in the primitive days before satellite feeds could zip us to events worldwide in an eye blink, the sacramental momentousness of each network&amp;#039;s nightly summing up had some practical justification, and their collective clout was for real when broadcasting&amp;#039;s erstwhile Big Three were the only game in town.  And that&amp;#039;s the way it was. Now, however, in the age of Ted Turner, MSNBC, and the Internet, the old-style newscasts can&amp;#039;t muster either the internal logic or the viewer loyalty they used to. Since the world has changed and their gig&amp;#039;s template hasn&amp;#039;t, today&amp;#039;s Cronkite wannabes seem like men out of time, bizarrely self-important islands in the channel surf, their overripe demeanors shaped by assumptions of their significance to the commonweal that no longer apply. Convinced that they&amp;#039;re still leading the parade, no matter how much traffic whizzes by, they&amp;#039;re put-putting down the information interstate in the same tin lizzie--the &amp;#039;65 Pomp, a wizardly car in its day. But now the old gas guzzler ticks over only on special occasions, usually and revealingly tinged with nostalgia. John Glenn&amp;#039;s shuttle flight last fall, for instance, was a story Rather basked in--as did, less fustianly, his NBC and ABC counterparts. It was an assertion of their fading prerogatives; broadcast news doesn&amp;#039;t get too many unchallenged opportunities to do its old job of declaring consensus anymore. When it comes to relaying information, which, after all, is journalism&amp;#039;s job, we&amp;#039;re clearly better served by today&amp;#039;s proliferation of less-oracular outlets. News-biz Luddites profess dismay at the unreliable quality of the unpedigreed options now on tap, and Matt Drudge, for one, hasn&amp;#039;t been shy about giving them ammo. But since such criticism hardly applies to CNN&amp;#039;s blue-chip but blessedly matter-of-fact operation--which, as their parent networks retrench, the Big Three&amp;#039;s own reporters now watch to keep abreast--it&amp;#039;s apparent that what broadcast-news traditionalists miss most is their old monolithic authority, whose demise I can&amp;#039;t see as anything but healthy. Maybe nobody&amp;#039;s picking Drudge to win a Pulitzer, but nobody&amp;#039;s likely to mistake his Web site for the Ten Commandments, either.  It&amp;#039;s not that today&amp;#039;s broadcast anchors aren&amp;#039;t up to guiding us--though Jennings, at least, has a distinct whiff of the Avignon papacy about him. But the magisterial eminence they affect is now chimerical, something you&amp;#039;d never guess from their public competition. The rub-a-dub-dub among these three men in a tub recalls the talk-show duels of the early nineties, when Letterman, Leno, and--for a while--Arsenio Hall were vying for Johnny Carson&amp;#039;s crown, unaware that Carson, like Cronkite, had taken it with him. (Dave, of course, has since caught on, which is why he&amp;#039;s even more irascible than ever; Jay, like Dan, still hasn&amp;#039;t.) Rather and Brokaw, in particular, now often trade potshots in the press--a feud that flatters both men along with Arsenio Jennings, since it fosters the illusion that they&amp;#039;re still titans whose only serious rivals are one another. To the rest of us, they&amp;#039;re more like prestigious but aging restaurants--the Brokawteria, Dan&amp;#039;s House of Beef, Chez Peter--surrounded by fast-food joints open at all hours. Still, Dan&amp;#039;s the chef whose plight you notice. Of the traditional Big Three newscasts, his is invariably the most purple--florid where Brokaw is terse and Jennings languid. This last does have its appeal; for all his undoubted competence, not to mention what seem to be annual resolutions to get himself taken seriously, I&amp;#039;ve always enjoyed the way Jennings seems to turn toward us direct from the more engrossing task of mixing the perfect martini. When aliens land, Jennings will be the anchorman most likely to know how to communicate with them, gabbing away excitedly with his eyebrows (I&amp;#039;ve found the perfect martini) while his lips stay disconcertingly sealed. But Rather will be the one who overstates the landing&amp;#039;s meaning, in a voice tense with imperfectly quashed dread of guessing wrong when we&amp;#039;re all counting on him. Sure, he still talks about going back to full-time reporting--&amp;quot;what I do best&amp;quot;--the way Chekhov characters ramble about going to Moscow, and he&amp;#039;s felt frustrated enough with broadcast journalism&amp;#039;s de facto abdication to Turner&amp;#039;s outfit to contemplate jumping ship to CNN himself, or so he claims. Yet he&amp;#039;d come off as quaint as a stern-wheeler next to Bernie Shaw&amp;#039;s nuclear-sub sangfroid.  Still believing that his own presence certifies an event&amp;#039;s importance, Rather feels bound to invest even trifling situations with spurious momentousness; he&amp;#039;s the iron foot in the velvet mouth. One morning last September, not because we needed to know right then so much as because it wanted to stay competitive with CNN and that Internet yegg in the fedora, CBS interrupted its regular programming to bring us more of Clinton&amp;#039;s Hugh Grant routine, mea gulpa-ing about Monica to shoals of clerics at a White House prayer breakfast. When Rather loomed up to announce that news was breaking like wind, the first thing you noticed was the anchorman&amp;#039;s dishevelment; normally, even the bags under his eyes are made by Vuitton. The second was how quickly the minor drama of Clinton&amp;#039;s speech took a backseat to the major spectacle of Rather in crisis--clearly, this moment was one more banana peel tossed under his lifelong quest to locate his own dignity in relation to events. At one point, thinking he was doing a voice-over, he droned for what felt like thirty seconds without realizing he was on camera; the contrast between his voice (stentorian) and face (My, what an interesting bug on my desk) made for a certain ignore-that-man-behind-the-green-curtain effect.  Brokaw handles what he&amp;#039;s probably aware is an increasingly silly job with dispatch, and Jennings is so disengaged that he&amp;#039;s practically the anchorman as geisha. But Rather is a Method anchor, searching for the authenticity in a role he&amp;#039;s never grasped is phony by definition. As guardian of the Tradition, he&amp;#039;s got good reason to feel self-conscious, since only time, fame, and a mania for grizzled-old-newsman posturing have turned him into the last of the giants. In fact, he was the first of the Twinkies; like Brokaw and Jennings, he became a star not least on his leading-man good looks. This wasn&amp;#039;t the case with the first generation of news anchors; those radio vets were rumpled and homely, adding to their trustworthiness. (Then again, they owed their careers to their voices--and old-fashioned print journalists used to deride them as lightweights, too.) Nonetheless, Rather&amp;#039;s been setting himself up as the venerable conscience of TV news since at least 1987, when he wrote a New York Times denunciation of his own network&amp;#039;s cheeseparing execs, called &amp;quot;From Murrow to CBS Mediocrity?&amp;quot;  On all the Big Three newscasts, the deterioration he condemns is real enough--the result of budget cutbacks, an emphasis on soft news, and the corrupting effects of corporate synergy. (ABC&amp;#039;s whoring for parent company Disney is only the most flagrant example.) Yet his stance is undermined by its obvious showboating; he buttresses his own rep by ostentatiously aligning himself with CBS&amp;#039;s legendary old guard while continuing to front for the outfit that&amp;#039;s allegedly trashing its legacy. Rather&amp;#039;s castigations of celebrity-oriented TV journalism could easily apply to Person to Person, the Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous of the 1950s; its host, on a busman&amp;#039;s holiday from the more serious See It Now, was Edward R. Murrow. While CBS Newshas obviously known finer hours than this one, in fact it never had the sterling integrity Rather now mourns--while also claiming to embody it, which I think makes him dead.  The simple fact is, today&amp;#039;s audience--unlike Cronkite&amp;#039;s or Murrow&amp;#039;s--has plenty of alternatives. The current debate over broadcast journalism&amp;#039;s standards ignores the perfectly reasonable, altogether unalarming possibility of broadcast journalism&amp;#039;s obsolescence, at least on the traditional networks--commercially driven entertainment venues whose inclusion of allegedly virtuous, uncompromised news divisions was always inherently contradictory and largely a historical accident. It&amp;#039;s telling that Fox has established itself as a major broadcast network without mounting a big-league news operation, while UPN and the WB don&amp;#039;t bother with news at all. And I don&amp;#039;t find the omission sinful; they&amp;#039;re responding to a changed marketplace in which the news has been boutiqued--not necessarily to its or our detriment, either. Rather takes it for grant-ed that CBS News is crucial to our well-being, but nobody got that upset when Macy&amp;#039;s discontinued its book department. The decline of the anchorman doesn&amp;#039;t mean that today&amp;#039;s TV audience has lost its hankering for reassuring authority figures--far from it. But tastes have evolved, and in these less-patriarchal times, we&amp;#039;d rather have Mommy read us the bedtime story--in a more appropriate setting than the nightly news, where such fairy tales never belonged. Rather may never have heard the old high school joke, quite popular in the 1960s, about meeting God: &amp;quot;Guess what? She&amp;#039;s black.&amp;quot; Whether he knows it or not, one big reason he&amp;#039;ll never be our Cronkite is that Oprah already is. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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