Good ol' Charlie, our favorite anchor dad
Charlie Gibson this week officially occupied the anchor desk on ABC's "World News Tonight," becoming Charles Gibson in the process but otherwise remaining recognizably himself. Other anchors have kept their nicknames when they took the job: Tom Brokaw was never Thomas, nor Dan Rather Daniel, nor Bob Woodruff Robert, in his brief term. (Will Katie Couric be Katherine at CBS?). But Gibson is running against the additional weight of his congenital boyishness, his regular-guy demeanor and an all-purpose cheerfulness burnished over nearly two decades in the daddy chair of "Good Morning America," which required him to seem terrifically interested in anything at all. He is a Princeton graduate who has interviewed several presidents of the United States, but he does look like one of the junior Waltons.
The anointing of a network nightly news anchorman is news itself if only because it happens so rarely: They are chosen less frequently than presidents -- Peter Jennings was the ABC anchor for more than 20 years and would be there now if death hadn't intervened -- and, indeed, of all jobs in television it is the most presidential, a position both real and symbolic. The anchorman stands not just for his particularly corporate nation-state but for his constituents, his viewership; he represents them to the world, just as he represents the world to them. He must be a coolheaded voice of reason when all around, including actual presidents, are losing theirs -- their cool, their heads, their reason -- or a hurricane hits, or something blows up.
And like the presidency, it is not just a job you do, but a part you play. It's not to question the journalistic bona fides of Gibson or any of his colleagues to say that their hiring is first and foremost a casting decision, just as a TV news program is first and foremost a television show, one that earns its keep in just the same way as do "Two and a Half Men" and "American Idol." At the same time, the part dignifies the actor: Some presidents were doubtless presidential in the cradle, just as some anchormen may have sucked pacifiers and shaken rattles with precocious dignity, but in each case, the job bestows some kind of gravitas on the holder, although, as we have seen, it can't work miracles.
