Ever since I can remember, we’ve treated TV news anchors as if they were a combination of royalty and high priests. Any time one of them dies or even retires, we carry on as if the flags should be lowered to half-mast. It’s ridiculous and, worse yet, it’s unseemly.
Please understand, I’m not taking this opportunity to jump on Dan Rather. After all, he, at least, is leaving under a cloud, his reputation in tatters -- and not just because he’s spent the past several years running third in a three dog ratings race with Brokaw and Jennings.
You can go back to Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, John Chancellor and Walter Cronkite. We treated them all with a deference that was totally out of proportion to the work they did. Essentially, the job description requires that they read the captions to the news footage we’re watching and to introduce the on-site reporters. Do you really think that constitutes the mental equivalent of heavy lifting? For doing what your uncle Sid could do --and with a lot more pazazz -- they’re paid enormous amounts of money. On top of all the dough, they are constantly the honorees at testimonial dinners, but that’s fine, so long as I don’t have to attend. But the trouble is, they’re regarded as important people by way too many of us, and that’s not good. Why? Because it makes us all look like a bunch of saps – what H.L. Mencken called the boobus americanus and what P.T. Barnum simply labeled suckers.
Because these anchors get to spend their entire careers talking about important events and important people, they naturally come to regard themselves as important. Self-delusion is a form of insanity and we should not encourage it by fawning over them. When they finally sign off for the last time, you notice that the testimonials inevitably mention how many political conventions they covered, how many space missions, how many inaugurations, assassinations, uprisings and wars, as if they had had a hand in any of these earth-shaking events. It wasn’t their hands that were involved, it was their behinds, as they sat year after year at those desks, declaiming in those store- bought voices what we were seeing with our own eyes -- all thanks to the journalistic peons who actually went places and did things and took risks so that we could sit home and watch it.
Now, I’m not saying we should kill the messengers. I’m just suggesting it’s time we stopped canonizing them.
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©2004 Burt Prelutsky
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