Last week saw the retirement of Tom Brokaw, a man with a speech impediment and impeccable Midwest credentials who anchored the NBC Nightly News for more than two decades. Brokaw’s retirement followed the abrupt resignation of Dan Rather, the fathomlessly batty liberal who had anchored CBS News’s nightly spot for ever as well.
Rather left in less celebratory a context. He had been caught running a story on George W Bush’s service in the National Guard that relied on faked documents. After nine days of being mauled by bloggers, Rather capitulated. An official report on the screw-up is due this week.
Inevitably, commentators tried to make something of this changing of the old guard.
But the sad truth is it doesn’t really matter any more. Once upon a time Walter Cronkite, the CBS anchor before Rather, was able to turn the course of the Vietnam war simply by the authority of his reporting, the vastness of his audience and his broadcasting presence. He was an institution.
When he left the stage the nation stopped, listened and reflected. The news anchors themselves, in the heyday of network television, acquired a kind of oracular glow, a comforting sense that, whatever else was going on, some kind of reliable narrative, some kind of verifiable truth could be found within.
There were other authorities then as well. You may have seen on visits to the US or from television clips Johnny Carson, an unflappable, wry, Midwestern comic who entertained Americans in the television hour before bedtime for years. Nobody has replaced him. Yes, there’s the goofy irony of David Letterman, and the cheesy Vegas act of Jay Leno. But neither has what you might call authority.
Today’s iconic late-night American wit is Jon Stewart, whose Daily Show, however hilarious and indispensable during the election campaign, is still, proudly, a “fake news” show.
It mocks, parodies and jokes. It serves a niche market — the younger, smarter set.
Unlike the days of Carson there is no unifying American centre any more. Even for humour. Even before you go to bed. We are all subcultures now.
If a Carson or a Cronkite were to emerge today, where would he go? The biggest phenomenon in news-opinion programming is Bill O’Reilly’s The O’Reilly Factor on Fox News. On a good night he gets 3m viewers. That’s about 1% of the country. And he’s the market leader! Even the network news shows get a fraction of the audience they once commanded. Cable, satellite and the internet have all fractured audiences into a thousand tiny, lucrative and not-so-lucrative markets.
One way you can tell how steep a decline the network television news has undergone is to observe the advertisements in the 6.30pm or 7pm slot. Incontinence aids, antacids, arthritis pills. Sometimes you feel they have been prescribed for the programme itself.
We live, it seems, in an age in which authority is absent. There was a time when the BBC back home as well as abroad, for example, commanded universal respect. Not so much any more. Ditto the monarchy. Or the top political parties.
But in America the decline of authority has been particularly swift. The erosion of privacy means that every public figure has his soiled laundry on the internet — affidavits and all. Only recently the presidency was reduced to evidence about oral sex.
The Catholic Church hierarchy, once a key pillar of American social order, is now close to being the punch line to a joke. The Supreme Court, perhaps the last institution to shield itself from public scrutiny, is still recovering from its abrupt and divisive political intervention in the 2000 election.
The New York Times? Only last year it had to report on dozens of fabricated stories published in its august pages. Even The New Yorker no longer publishes anonymous articles. Its institutional voice can find authority only in a changeless font.
The Ivy League? It’s still a peerless collection of great universities. But American academia has been marred by politicisation since the late 1960s, its professors almost uniformly leftist, its campuses often places where dissent, rather than being celebrated, is crushed.
Yes, there’s baseball . . . with steroids. Or the Super Bowl, apart from the notorious case of Janet Jackson flaunting nipple on live television during an entertainment slot. In fact it’s extremely hard to find a part of American public life where trust and authority are still held high.
And this, I think, goes some way to explaining the resilient appeal of the current president. In a world where a national culture has been replaced by subcultures, George W Bush, like Ronald Reagan, has clearly grasped the symbolic solidity of the presidency.
His refusal ever to countenance failure or a change of course, while politically risky is culturally canny. In a world without authority and with danger and confusion, Bush is a rock. Even when Americans disagree with him, he seems strong and unyielding. His penchant for absolutes is tailored for a culture where doubt and confusion rule.
Bush is a classic family man, in contrast to Bill Clinton, his predecessor. He’s a stickler for routine and punctuality. The order he has imposed on his life — after four decades of rampant disorder — has been projected out to the country as a whole.
Sometimes his political statements are mere assertions of the banal. “We will defeat terrorism.” “Marriage is between a man and a woman.” “The war in Iraq is hard work.” But the very banality of these short phrases — and his constant use of the indicative — somehow reassures.
No, Bush doesn’t command personal authority. He is too divisive a figure for that; and too weak a character inside. But this very internal weakness has led him to invest the office of the presidency with a form of protective strength. He understands the role and so he has largely fulfilled his most significant pledge in 2000: to restore the appearance of honour and integrity to the White House.
In a world where the anchors have retired into irrelevance, this president has provided rigidity to the ship of state. It may prove too rigid, too unyielding and too prone to error. But it is solid. And solidity is what Americans now lack — and unconsciously yearn for.
