D.C. Dispatch August 16, 2005

The media are missing the mark in using Peter Jennings's death to lament the state of network news.

Past, Present, and Peter

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The Peter Jennings coverage that poured out this week was different from the usual run of great-life journalism.

Jennings had a hugely successful career, and media outlets everywhere lavished praise on him for the intelligence and sophistication he brought to television news.

But there was an asterisk to the Jennings story. The good news about his remarkable life in broadcasting was followed immediately by the bad news that it's no longer possible to live such a life.

"The Last of the Iconic Anchors: Jennings's Death Signals the End of a News Era," said a headline in USA Today. The paper's Peter Johnson wrote: "Like his longtime competitors Tom Brokaw at NBC and Dan Rather at CBS, Jennings had enough influence within ABC News to push for serious, in-depth stories and coverage of world events that mattered to him and that he felt viewers needed to know about—whether they realized it or not. And that's something viewers might never see again."

The Daily Telegraph of London noted, "The networks' ratings have plummeted as viewers turn to blogs, 24-hour cable news, and more-partisan sources, abandoning their parents' ritual of sitting down as a family to watch their favorite anchor every evening. Underlying the flood of commentary and hagiography was the sense that Jennings's death formally ended that era."

It's a familiar theme today: The happy Golden Age of the Anchors is over, and we have entered the dark and dangerous Time of Chaos.

If Jennings were here to see all of this, I suppose he wouldn't be surprised to see his long, brilliant career reduced to a peg for a trend story. This is what journalists do. And, in fact, it's completely accurate to say that the powerful network anchors are a thing of the past.

But it's not the cataclysmic news that media people insist on making it, or a drum that needs to be pounded incessantly every time the subject is a network anchor—or when one dies.

By tying Jennings's death to the networks' gloomy future, we imply that somehow he and his fellow anchors failed. After all, while the three of them were still on the job, a huge swath of the public drifted away from the networks and almost certainly will never return again. The chairs they recently vacated are much smaller, figuratively speaking, than they used to be. It's as if Brokaw, Jennings, and Rather took Captain Cronkite's wonderful ship and sailed it straight to the bottom of the ocean.

But they didn't do that. The anchors are not at fault for the disintegration of the old, centralized media. And this new landscape of news that's rising before our eyes isn't a failure. To the contrary, it's an evolutionary advance. At the moment, it's hard to see this, because we're still adjusting to the new reality of hundreds of channels and thousands of blogs. It can feel overwhelming, which is why it's only natural that Americans born before about 1980 miss the era when networks were king; it's what we grew up with, and in retrospect, it seems so much simpler.

The emotion that greeted the news of Jennings's death was, on some level, an expression of this anxious nostalgia. "I am weeping for a man I never met," began one of the posts on ABC's Peter Jennings message board a few days ago. Dozens of others posted replies, some saying they'd wept, too, and were so happy to know they weren't alone.

And that's the problem, isn't it? Without the anchors, and that little nightly circle around the tube, people feel more alone. This is a bit strange, given the connections that technology has given us—cellphones, BlackBerrys, e-mail, and all the rest. It's a demonstrable fact that we're more connected to others every hour of the day than we ever were as we sat and watched the nightly news shows with Mom and Pop. It's just not the same kind of connectedness we got from Brokaw, Jennings, and Rather—that inchoate sense that we were sharing something not just with our family, but with great masses of other American families. Which really was kind of beautiful.

But let's not be prisoners of our own era. The networks were a product of the specific technological and cultural features of the mid-20th century. Thanks to those circumstances, we wound up with three extremely powerful concentrations of media power, the likes of which this country had never seen. And thanks to a corps of talented journalists who were in the business for the right reasons, Jennings prominent among them, the networks became, by and large, a force for good.

But the American system doesn't like great concentrations of power. Whether it's the corporate trusts or the great newspaper empires of the early 20th century, or the networks of our own period, we tend as a society to go after focused power, to break it down, atomize it, redistribute it, spread it out. This is what healthy democracies like to do.

So this extraordinary node of media power is breaking down before our eyes, and we are moving rapidly into a new kind of media age. Like the age of the anchors, it reflects who we are as a society right now. It will have its own bold and brilliant figures, its own voices of reason and gravitas. They won't be exactly like Peter Jennings. But if they're really good, they'll have him as their model.

William Powers is a columnist for National Journal, a weekly magazine covering politics and government published in Washington, D.C.