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Wednesday, September 6, 2006
Katie, you won too late. Anchors don’t matter.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Once upon a time, my news world was the daily newspaper and the evening news. Even before Walter Cronkite, there was Douglas Edwards, a friendly button-down fellow who could have sold us an insurance policy, buried our dead and principaled our schools, all with our complete confidence. Douglas Edwards, like most of his era, liked America, thought we were good guys, and expressed alarm only when alarm was warranted. If he had an agenda, it was to see us all do well.
The big news Tuesday night was that Katie Couric ascended to the chair that on the Wooten’s first TV was occupied by Edwards. And thereafter, Cronkite and Dan Rather. Edwards owned me. Cronkite had me until Vietnam. The opinionated Rather failed to recognize, or at least to acknowledge, his own biases. Sometime in the process, I mostly quit watching the Big Three’s evening news.
Comes now Katie Couric, whose debut is accompanied by considerable promotion and some anticipation. First woman to anchor the Big Three’s big newscast. My sense of it is that it hardly matters anymore who reads the news on the three networks. The innocence we had, and the trust, are gone. Over time, and certainly with the arrival of cable TV and the Internet, we began to see what wasn’t there and how stories were being spun. Immigration, for example. The Media Research Center analyzed 309 network news stories on immigration in March, April and May. Almost twice as many voices (504) advocated looser immigation laws as advocated border control (257), analysts found. The majority of the country would have gone the other way. The GOP’s “conservative” base was addressed scornfully 89 times — as in Bush was split from his base on the issue — but only three stories , all on ABC, mentioned the word “liberal,” said Brent Bozell., the center’s founder.
Today’s question: Do anchors matter? Do you trust them? If not, when did you lose it? And, finally, is there anything the networks can do to regain the trust they’ve lost, especially with conservatives? Maybe it’s just nostalgia, but I want Douglas Edwards back. I don’t want to know what anchors think. I don’t want to know their politics. And most of all, I want to believe that they’re pulling for America. Naive? Then I am.
