Anchors Away?

Since the announced retirements of news anchors Lloyd Robertson from CTV News and Kevin Newman from Global, there has been an interesting series of articles in Canada’s major papers, all with a similar theme. Toronto, Winnipeg, Calgary and Thunder Bay have all had their readers chewing over the idea that television news needs a re-think and the days of the powerful anchor are dead.

As the regular readers of this column know, to paraphrase the late Vince Lombardi there are three things I am passionate about: God, my Family and the News. (And Liverpool FC, but that’s a subject for another day.) So it will come as no shock that I feel duty-bound to add to the debate.

I don’t think the days of the anchor are done, for reasons I’ll quickly get to. But I do want to cede one debating point to my print opponents. They are absolutely correct when they say that there is no anchor as powerful as Walter Cronkite was, and Canada’s anchors have never has similar influence. Mind you, events made Cronkite into Cronkite. He was the one in the studio when John Kennedy died and he happened to be the anchor and news editor when CBS News finally turned on the Vietnam War in reporting on the Tet Offensive and its aftermath. Full kudos to CBS for doing it first, but the mood of the United States was already turning strongly against the war and in many ways the major media followed rather than led public opinion.

There will not be as powerful a grouping as say Cronkite and Huntley-Brinkley were to the 1960s or Rather, Brokaw and Jennings were to the 1990s. The simple truth is that there are a lot more news shows with anchors than there used to be and it’s hard to stand out in a crowd.

And yet, there is still a strong role to be played by the right person. If pressed to express a concise definition of what a good general news medium (newscast or newspaper) should be about, it would be this: the consumer will be suitably informed and capable of forming an opinion regarding whatever will be the important discourse of the next day.

That definition is left intentionally broad. Important discourse is as varying as public mood, which as a thousand computer programmers attempting to predict the stock market ruefully know is completely unpredictable. The big stories - war, peace, oil vomited into the Gulf of Mexico - are obvious. But Michael Jackson had been reduced to the perception of a burned-out creepy guy - then he died and became as beloved as Mickey Mouse. I don’t know why anyone cares about the large-bummed Kardashians and neither do you. Point is, there are people who do care these things, it is part of their discourse and therefore they are part of news.

So, given that the public cares about things that news editors may think are utterly trivial; and news editors care about other things that they wish to enhance or inject into public discourse, news is therefore a conversational medium. The medium offers up what it believes to be the consumer’s needs, but the medium must also satisfy the consumer’s wants, or else it’s time to fold up shop and go into Public Relations to earn one’s keep.

The crux of it though is in that word ‘conversational.’ A conversation implies communication between or among individuals; actual people with actual voices and actual personalities. This is why I have become a robotic drone on my view that newspapers that will survive the non-terminal  shrinkage of their marketplace share will be those papers that breathe with the thoughts and opinions of their writers, provided those writers also have excellent reporting skills. Every style sheet known to man or wire service should be burnt.

For television, it’s actually easier. While the editorial choices of what stories to present and how to present them will always vary from newsroom to newsroom, the fundamental nature of television requires a human voice narrating the story. Whether the story is presented as a mini-documentary or Rip Trenchcoat standing in front of the White House, the visuals require words.

Finally, fill in for me the final word of this phrase: People are creatures ? No, not the night, unless Alice Cooper is reading this. Habit. We like familiarity and therefore a familiar voice is a comfort especially when the news itself is hard as a cast iron frying pan.

The late Don Hewitt, creator of 60 Minutes and pupil of Edward R. Murrow coined the term anchor. I do believe it shall prove as durable as the nautical device from which it borrowed its name. Be seeing you.