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Diane Sawyer, not the biggest star in the history of broadcast news but surely the glitziest, will become anchor of ABC's World News in January, a promotion long destined and long overdue. The former home of Peter Jennings and his well-cut trenchcoats, ABC has long aired the most flashy and cosmopolitan of the evening newscasts. As Katie Couric is to perky so Sawyer is to sparkly.
Because of Sawyer's real or perceived gravity—earned or ascribed on account of her tenures in the Nixon White House and as an energetic investigative reporter—she has managed to retain a semblance of journalistic credibility while playing the role of the glamour girl with the utmost enthusiasm. Three decades ago, she spurned suggestions that she'd be taken more seriously if she dyed her hair brown. Can it be that her refusal constituted a strike at the stereotype of the dumb blonde? And, anyway, did she also enable Fox News to hire female personalities willing to don bimbo-ish skirts and doff good taste in makeup?
Here she is on the cover of Vanity Fair in September 1987, when her name was already in circulation as candidate for anchor positions and the vision of journalist in an off-the-shoulder look was sufficient to cause a minor scandal. It is impossible to imagine Barbara Walters wearing Farrah-feathered hair and such a knowing grin. Though Sawyer will only be the second woman to become a sole anchor of the network news, she will break the glass ceiling for pageant queens. Just as NBC's Brian Williams is skillful about nodding with his handsome heavy chin, Sawyer is terribly sly about using her Junior Miss smile from its better side, the left.
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As demonstrated by Vulture, by Vanity Fair, by very fine work in the paper of record, by your vituperative correspondent himself, NBC Entertainment has transformed itself into a marvelous object of derision. (Tune in tonight for the debut of The Listener! It’s Bringing Out the Dead meets Medium meets general anesthesia!) This week, NBC News, feeling left out of the fun, got in on the act of degrading the airwaves. Congrats to Steve Capus and his team for reminding viewers just how awful television news can be.
It was one thing on Monday, when, on local late-night news shows, NBC affiliates devoted perhaps twice the time to the launch of Conan’s Tonight Show that they did to the end of GM as we know it. But Monday was followed, as according to custom, by Tuesday and Wednesday, when the network ran a two-part special hosted by Brian Williams and titled Inside the Obama White House. Many have compared BHO with JFK, and the precedents for this program do, indeed, date to the "new frontier"—A Tour of the White House with Mrs. John F. Kennedy and a hand shandy by Judith C. Exner.
Speaking of Mafia molls, the special’s dumbest moment was the tracking shot showing Obama walking the portico as if he were taking a date into the Copa 'round the back way. Maybe. There are so many bits of ridiculousness here that it’s tough to pick a favorite. The pulsing dance music scoring a shot of Rahm Emmanuel opening a door? The adrenalized zooming on envelopes labeled "top secret"? The segment pretending to offer an “anatomy of a talking point” that could have been approved by David Axelrod himself?
The president’s opposition couldn’t have been giddier at seeing "the media" so blatantly submerged in "the tank." And his supporters would have been better off spending those two hours reading How to Watch TV News, which ought to be required reading for high-school students, with its clear analysis of a journalismesque business always dancing the "Madison Avenue shuffle." Seriously, NBC could have provided a greater public service by showing Bo play on a PuppyCam.
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