I’ve been doing it since the days of Huntley/Brinkley and Walter Cronkite. Hell, I used to sit next to my Dad and watch John Cameron Swayze do the Camel News Caravan and Douglas Edwards read the news on CBS. My point is I’ve been watching TV news pretty much from the beginning. And maybe I’m just stepping into the cranky part of my dotage but it’s getting harder and harder to do. Watch the news I mean.
First of all if it’s a Saturday or a Sunday you have to FIND the news. If there’s a football game, basketball game, golf tournament, tennis tournament or just about anything else that requires a jock strap (that leaves out soccer, unless we want to include tampons) the networks will often as not either delay or pre-empt the news on the weekend. When they do bother to broadcast it at all it’s usually pretty thin stuff. And it’s becoming more style than substance by the minute. Take last Saturday for example.
On ABC I found the news being anchored by one David Muir. He may be a competent journalist but I’m not sure I could prove that easily. And there’s the problem of his looks. He looks like he just climbed down off a wedding cake. A 1959 wedding cake. That Brylcreem look is one I find somewhat disturbing. Kind of like the Eagle Scout who took an axe to his grandmother.
So I tried CBS. Over there was a young man named Jeff Glor. From the bio on his website we can insinuate that he is about 30. Trouble is he looks like, even though it’s only 6:30, he should call his mother RIGHT NOW so she knows where he is and won’t worry about him not being home for supper on time.
Now I don’t necessarily have to get the news from somebody who looks like he (or she) went to school with Zeus but do they all have to look like they just showered and blow-dried their hair after cheerleading practice? It’s not that I think they should all look like Quasimodo or even Benicio Del Toro but is having finished no lower than first runner up at the pageant necessary for good journalism?
So I settled on Lester Holt over at NBC. Now Lester at least looks like he’s been around the block a few times…it’s an open question whether he had to stop and ask for directions but they’re all starting to strike me that way. I’m getting information from people who literally don’t have sense to come in from the rain…in a HURRICANE!
Anyway I settled down with NBC, the network whose legacy includes Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, John Chancellor and Tom Brokaw. And a few minutes into the “news” they start in telling us about Air Force One. Not the movie, that was a whole different kind of stupid. The President’s plane.
There was no new information about the plane that you probably couldn’t have found on Wikipedia if you were interested enough to look. So the point of the alleged “story” was really to let us know about a program that would be on the National Geographic Channel the following night. These are called “promos” in the broadcasting business and there’s too many of them in the news as it is but when the promos pretend to be news content that frosts me.
On the weeknights I had to give up watching NBC Nightly News because of Jay Leno. Remember when NBC announced that Leno would be appearing on prime time 5 nights a week when he moves on from the Tonight Show? Well that was worth about 5 minutes of conversation during the Nightly News between Jay and Brian Williams. I don’t know what that was but it wasn’t news. And ever since then I haven’t felt the same way about Brian. He seems like a funny, fun guy (he used to show up on Imus in the Morning and he was very funny there) but at the anchor desk he’s just too earnest. Like somebody who wants to be my friend so much he makes me nervous. Come on, I’m not that cool. Truth be told I never was cool at all. If I were a girl he’d be the boyfriend I dumped who just never went away. He’d keep showing up to wash my car and make like Eddie Haskell with my mother.
Then there’s Charlie Gibson. Does smarmy sound about right to you? Yeah, me too. Like a greasy uncle. Probably sells used cars, BMWs but used BMWs. “Excuse me,” he’d insist, “we call them ‘pre-owned.’” Oh, so nobody who owned it before actually used it? What’s the matter, wouldn’t it start?
And now we come around to the CBS Evening News. Which, in terms on content, may just be the best of the three but I just can’t watch it. I never liked Katie Couric when she was with the Today show over at NBC. She was cute and perky I guess but I’m not big on cute and perky. I guess I like old and a little grumpy.
Luckily, it turns out I’m available.
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