Jeff Glor and the New Age Anchorman

Pelley, who had been anchor for just six years when he was suddenly dismissed last June, had succeeded Katie Couric, whose five-year tenure was even shorter than Pelley’s. Of course, Couric, who left CBS in 2011 to host a short-lived daytime talk show (Katie), and later served as something called the Yahoo! Global Anchor, is symptomatic of the brief transits and deepening obscurity of contemporary network news readers. If, like me, you were unaware of the existence of Jeff Glor—or of Scott Pelley, for that matter—you are not alone.

Which is why, when Glor’s appointment was announced, I thought immediately of the summer of 1983, when Barbara Matusow’s The Evening Stars: The Making of the Network News Anchor was published by Houghton Mifflin. It occurs to me that this long, detailed account of the changing of the guard at the three network evening news programs, now out of print, was probably the high-water mark of what we might call the Old, or pre-Internet, Media. Or at any rate, the zenith of its sense of self-importance.

Matusow is a veteran chronicler of press and politics—indeed, she was married to the late Jack Nelson, who presided over the Los Angeles Times‘s gigantic old Washington bureau—and in The Evening Stars she treated the accessions of Dan Rather (1981) at CBS, Tom Brokaw (1982) at NBC, and Peter Jennings (1983) at ABC to anchorman status as historic events. Presidents may come and go, she seemed to suggest, but the men behind those anchor desks were the power in the land.

Of course, this was never true, even then; but Matusow and people like her could be excused for their perception. In 1983, when cable television was still in its infancy and “personal computers” had just been invented, the Old Media enjoyed a genuine monopoly in the news. There were a handful of wire services and national news magazines, large and small daily newspapers were awash in cash and advertising, and three main commercial networks broadcast on television. In the early 1960s, all three began running half-hour news programs at the dinner hour, and some of the news readers—Chet Huntley and David Brinkley (NBC), Walter Cronkite (CBS)—became celebrities in their own right.

The myth of Walter Cronkite, “the most trusted man in America,” dies hard; but in fact, the Huntley-Brinkley duo at NBC were considerably more influential and popular—and as such things go, sophisticated—in their time than Cronkite’s stolid, workmanlike program at CBS. But Huntley quit television in 1970, and Brinkley was later replaced by John Chancellor. This gave Cronkite, whose earnest demeanor and stentorian voice suggested gravity, something like senior status for the rest of the decade.

It is difficult now to convey the centrality of those evening news programs to the national political agenda, but they commanded huge audiences and enjoyed near-absolute influence on emphasis and content. If John Chancellor didn’t approve of so-and-so, or if Harry Reasoner at ABC thought such-and-such was important, there were few countervailing forces in America to persuade people otherwise. When, in 1981, CBS’s mandatory retirement policy compelled the 65-year-old Cronkite to step down, the story was treated as a kind of national calamity, the abdication of a long-serving, much-beloved, monarch. The fact that there was a disputed succession to Cronkite’s sinecure—Dan Rather versus Roger Mudd!—only added to the melodrama, and prompted Barbara Matusow to write.

To be sure, in retrospect, we now see that the golden age of the TV anchorman was circumscribed, and comparatively brief. It took awhile for the culture of network television to evolve from its infancy at mid-century; by the time the millennium had arrived, the invention of the Internet and growth of cable television had redefined the concept of media. Now, in place of an assortment of authoritative gatekeepers, there were multiple sources of news and information and opinion, continually expanding and dividing the national audience.

This is not to suggest that the network news broadcasts—or, for that matter, the New York Times and Associated Press—are now without influence. On the contrary: Certain institutions remain disproportionately influential in driving the news cycle, and the audience for individual cable channels is smaller than the networks. But the power and notoriety of the “evening stars”—the men and women who choose what stories to broadcast, and how to cover them—is significantly diminished, just as their programs, in pursuit of lost relevance and income, are increasingly comprised of “soft” features, devoid of what most of us might recognize as news.

This, in turn, is reflected in the shortened tenures and indistinguishable faces of the once-invincible anchormen: Jeff Glor at CBS now joins the ranks of Lester Holt of NBC, who swiftly replaced the disgraced Brian Williams, and David Muir, ABC’s fifth anchor in the past dozen years.

The news-reading trio that Barbara Matusow celebrated remained in place for a quarter-century, and then fell away. Tom Brokaw retired in 2004, and in the following year, Peter Jennings died and Dan Rather endured a symbolic flagellation when, in an upset of fortunes, New Media successfully unmasked a deceptive Old Media story, kept the scandal alive—and CBS fired him. Still awaiting vindication, the 85-year-old Rather may yet be seen talking on camera to equally-decrepit rock and country-music performers on The Big Interview (AXS TV).

Philip Terzian is a senior editor of The Weekly Standard.