Anchor Wars: Dan Rather, Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw
“I know a lot of people think I’ve got the CBS eye tattooed on my ass,” Dan Rather says, conceding his public image as a tough, hard-charging telejournalist. Yet during the day, as he prepares for The CBS Evening News, Rather frequently slips out the back door of the CBS Broadcast Center to the playground of the New York City housing project on West Fifty-sixth Street, taking the air, contemplating life, as immobile as one of the park winos. The real Dan Rather, he says, “simply loves the news.”
A few clicks of the dial away from Rather, ABC’s World News Tonight presents the modish, immaculately groomed Peter Jennings, the very image of the diplomatic correspondent with his English-cut suits and mid-Atlantic diction. Off camera, however, Jennings is tieless, hustling on the phone for stories, dragging on one of the scores of cigarettes he smokes daily, his voice revved up to talk-radio speed. He says he sometimes gets so emotional about stories that he once considered quitting TV “to work for the refugees.” His wife, Kati Marton (the third Mrs. Jennings), says the austere man on the screen isn’t the man she sees at home.
On NBC Nightly News, Tom Brokaw looks like just another pretty face on local TV in, say, San Jose or Phoenix. Around the NBC news room at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, however, a co-worker has rechristened Brokaw “Duncan the Wonder Horse” — in tribute to his prodigious work habits. In his office, Brokaw keeps hand-exercise grips to fight down his tensions; privately, Brokaw is the one with the tattoo, the confrontational style. “I am formed,” Brokaw says, in what might be considered a reference to one or possibly both of his rivals. “I don’t reinvent myself every night.”
Who says the camera doesn’t lie?
The common perception is that what we see is what we get, that we know our anchormen, with their instantly recognizable faces, that we can call them by their first names: Dan, Peter and Tom. Each week night they come into nearly 40 million American households to deliver the news, familiar guests at our hearth: three white, prosperous, middle-aged males — Rather is 55, Jennings, 48, Brokaw, 46 — each highly qualified for his work. Even their programs are outwardly similar. After time for commercials is subtracted, each has 22 minutes of stories and the same general rotation of the news — actually, “the olds.” Invariably, it’s Washington (White House and Congress), War Zones (South Africa and the Middle East), American Heartland (tornadoes, drought, farm foreclosures, 30-car pileups on California highways) and Human or Animal Interest (the boy who fell through the ice, the baby born to the brain-dead mom, Bambi’s mother and lost whales).
These rhetorical models have apparently grown so much alike that the viewing public itself gives them almost identical attention. The biggest news about the evening news right now is that the holy writ of the Nielsen ratings shows Rather, Jennings and Brokaw each commanding an audience of about 15 million people, give or take a million or two. Looking at Dan, Peter and Tom and their three evening broadcasts, it’s possible to conclude, after Gertrude Stein, that the news is the news is the news.
It’s possible, but it would be wrong. In fact, Dan, Peter and Tom, and their programs, are distinct from one another — as distinct as their on-air personas are from the men playing the anchor’s role. What we get isn’t what we see. It’s more intriguing. And the audience, subconsciously, knows this. Viewers have read the implicit iconography of the evening news and aligned themselves in accordance with their understanding of the subtext of each man and program. The proof is all there in the ratings books. Demographics never lie.
The iconographic Dan, of course, is country & western, appealing to an older, idealized America of the imagination. Peter is urban, projecting an image with which a more youthful market can identify. Tom positions himself somewhere in between, in the middle — an avatar of suburban values. Together they form a three-way mirror of America that tells us where the country is today — vide, the tightened race among the triple demographies of the news. They also tell us where the country is heading tomorrow, as the weight of viewer numbers shifts toward one or another end of the scale.