Adrift in a World Without Anchors

Anchorman: The very word suggests security and gravitas. Serious but sympathetic, the timbre of his voice is a firm tenor or a stentorian baritone, perhaps a bit tense in dire straits, but never panicky. Closing out the night watch, his signature sign- off sounds like a benediction. "Good night and good luck," said Edward R. Murrow. "And that's the way it is," asserted the decisive Walter Cronkite.

The future of the iconic American anchorman was on the minds of many this week as the news that Peter Jennings had been diagnosed with lung cancer raised immediate concerns that he wouldn't be able to continue as anchor at ABC News.

After the long goodbye of NBC's Tom Brokaw (who served from 1983 until December), and the forced retirement of CBS' besieged Dan Rather (in harness from 1981 until March), the departure of the 66-year-old Jennings (sole anchor since 1978) would complete a clean sweep of the venerable troika from the erstwhile Big Three. Even more significant, it would mark the end of a special kind of personality-driven news experience -- the last unique legacy (reruns not included) of the classic age of broadcast television.

The anchor's roots reach back to the birth of modern broadcast journalism in 1938, when CBS Radio launched its "World News Roundup" just in time to track Hitler marauding across Europe. The declamatory style of the town-crier announcer (familiar as the so-called Voice of God in the Hollywood newsreels) soon gave way to a new reportorial model in which the journalist became a commentator as well, guiding the listener through strange doings and complex geopolitics.

Murrow, of course, was the prototype for this new breed of broadcast journalist. When he moved from radio to TV, his visible presence only intensified the emotional link: the movie star looks, the patrician manner, the cigarette smoke swirling around his head like incense. On March 9, 1954, when Murrow delivered a slashing broadside at Sen. Joseph McCarthy, he was cashing in a lifetime of moral capital accrued from Munich to Panmunjom.

As an anchor, Murrow was a bit of a bust, but another candidate was waiting in the wings. During the TV coverage of the 1952 presidential conventions, CBS News President Sig Mickelson coined the term "anchorman" for his primary on-air reporter. The man Mickelson picked was Walter Cronkite.