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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
December 5, 2004
Anchors away
Tom Brokaw has retired after 23 years of reading the NBC Nightly News. Dan Rather will soon end 24 years of delivering the CBS Evening News. Peter Jennings who has been doing ABC World News Tonight for 21 years isn't leaving so far as I've heard though he has passed the mandatory retirement age for most professions. I'm now so old myself I can remember when they were all fresh faces. They came from outer nowhere in America -- from small-town South Dakota and Texas in the case of the first two; and Mr. Jennings from a little town "north of the border" -- Toronto as it is known up here. They all went to the big city of New York and over the decades became embodiments of the big-city slickness shedding their tell-tale accents and wrong-coloured suits. Yet each remaining in his heart a country boy and a patriot according to his own lights. Perhaps out of a natural partiality for Texas my favourite of the trio has been Dan Rather -- although he is an apostate Texan and they are like apostate Catholics: black sheep but family. And more dangerous than any enemy who could come from the outside. He retained within the cynical glare of TV news that terrifying Southern charm and was adroit in putting things the Texas way. We might remember him from the night of the long chads in Florida during the hung election in 2000 between Bush and Gore trying to find ways to fill the dead air with new descriptions of how close the race was (From Daniel Kurtzman's collection of Ratherisms:) "Don't bet the trailer money yet." "It's a ding dong battle back and forth." "They both have champagne on ice but after the night is over they might need a pick axe to open them." "Tight like a too-small bathing suit on a too-long ride home." "It's spandex tight." "Tight as the rusted lug nuts on a '55 Ford." "Frankly we don't know whether to wind the watch or bark at the moon." Mr. Rather leaves his office under a cloud for the on-air exploitation of an obviously fake memo in a reckless attempt to sink a President's re-election campaign -- a rare exposure of the degree of malice animating much of the nightly news. He leaves as others have noticed rather as Richard Nixon left office after Watergate his whole career viewed through the single peekhole of one unforgettable mistake. The CBS anchor was incredibly irritating to the people who did not share the political assumptions he had grown into -- which is to say people like me. But he was a man for all that. * Here in Canada a rite of passage at the death of Pierre Berton. I hated him though with that special hatred we reserve to someone for whom we also feel affection since for any Canadian he was family too. He was one of our pioneering "smugglies" to use the politer half of Scott Symons's excellent term for Canada's self-regarding liberal media and social elite -- all those old white men who used to wear bow-ties. In his horrible little book The Comfortable Pew Berton cast himself as a little Moses leading the soi-disant enlightened out of church in the Red Sea crossing of the 1960s. But like the American anchors I could also appreciate him as one of the great hacks with a genuine talent for shooting the breeze. He was a first-rate researcher and a nimble author of the better sort of journalistic prose. And he was from the Yukon: we give points for that. I had an unpleasant encounter with him at a book-signing in London Ont. many decades ago. I have forgotten what his latest book was then about but there was something profoundly offensive in its premise as I was at pains to explain to him. He took my remarks with grace and dignity the old rogue. He was a model of industry to any aspiring hack. No one knew how to get paid so many times for the same piece as Berton knew. * My late hero George Grant once said of his own worst enemy the 17th-century philosopher who is by reputation the founder of English-speaking liberalism that: "After all there are worse accounts of Justice than you will find in John Locke." I have the same feeling about the passing of the guard in the North American media. I did not like these guys. But after all there are worse ways of covering the news. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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