Two important things happened recently. Katie Couric was appointed by CBS as the first solo female anchor of a network evening news show in the USA. In Britain, meanwhile, I stopped watching BBC Television news. Not only are these two things important, they are linked.
Couric, who will earn in the region of £8.5m per year, is an astounding and, to the British, largely incomprehensible confection. For years, along with Matt Lauer, she presented NBC’s breakfast show, Today, for which she earned a mere £5.7m per year. She is now 49 and has the face of a pixie, excellent legs — she is said to like low camera angles, to exploit this asset — and a weird and not entirely healthy obsession with colon cancer, a condition that she brings up at every possible opportunity. In fairness to her, this disease killed her husband in 1998. But still.
So far, so predictable: tough chick with the face of America’s sweetheart and a plausible, caring manner makes a lot of money in television. Welcome to the USA. But what people tend not to notice — though plainly NBC and CBS have — is that Couric is not some breakfast-show bimbette, but the best television journalist in the world.
Lying in bed in a New York hotel, jet-lagged, watching Today is — for me and, I discovered, for our own anchor Kirsty Young — one of the joys of visiting America. Couric switches from the lightest, fluffiest nonsense to the heaviest, most ominous issue without so much as a pause. In seconds, she can slice and dice any story; and, in an instant, the pixie face can harden into cold anger. I saw her interview some dumb reality-show winner who had just got a book deal.
“Isn’t that,” said Couric, the smile frozen into contempt, “kinda stupid?”
Go, Katie. The one time I saw her fail was when she went to interview the famously uninterviewable Philip Roth. But even her failure made great, though distinctly uncomfortable, television. I found myself angry with that great writer on her behalf.
The job she has been given, that of evening news anchor, is among the most important and venerated in the whole of the US media. Her male equivalents include Walter Cronkite, Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings and Dan Rather, who preceded her at CBS. These are men whose handsome, aged faces and austere manner have consoled and informed America through the cold war and beyond. Though she is the first woman in that position, she is certainly not the first woman to rise high in serious US television news — Connie Chung, Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer were years ahead of her. But the point is that “anchor” means what it says. She will hold everything together; she will keep us steady amid the tumult of global events.
Americans, of course, take journalism much more seriously than we do, especially when it is on television. George Clooney’s recent film Good Night, and Good Luck, about CBS’s resistance to Senator Joe McCarthy, portrayed journalists as the most important players in the political game. The faces and voices that bring the world into American homes are — but for the odd scandal — admired, trusted and, above all, authoritative. People will believe their anchor before they will believe their president.
Over here, neither we print journalists nor our television colleagues have any such status. And, significantly, we don’t really have news anchors, except for Jon Snow, but (see below) there is a problem there. We have people like Young, Huw Edwards and George Alagiah, but their role is much more neutral than that of their American counterparts. Indeed, most of the time we barely notice who they are, unless, like Anna Ford, they are uncommonly beautiful; like Reginald Bosanquet, uncommonly drunk; or, like Angela Rippon, uncommonly prone to showing their legs on The Morecambe and Wise Show. Furthermore, none of our television news is anything like as good as the best American shows. Sky and ITV have adopted mad, Starship Enterprise sets, within which presenters wander as if lost, and Channel 4 News has so many issues of objectivity that I find it just too annoying. But they are commercial operations: if they are bad, that is their business. The BBC, however, is our business, and its primary news shows are now unwatchable.
Of course, they have long been unwatchable if you object to political bias. The BBC won’t listen, but I’m afraid that the case is unarguable. The corporation is suffused with soft left and hard anti-American prejudices that seep into almost all the news coverage. By the time one gets to Newsnight and sees Gavin Esler treating any old hoodlum or crook with extravagant respect before turning to sneer at some decent American congressman, one can find oneself indulging in that awful, crazed habit of shouting at the TV. Looking down at the vast BBC newsroom, I once made this point to an executive, who just looked blankly back as if I had unaccountably lapsed into Hungarian. To get her attention, I asked her to tell me which newspapers she could see on the desks. Amid that sea of reporters, only one title was visible — the eccentrically left-leaning Independent.
Justin Webb, a BBC Washington correspondent, provided even more conclusive evidence: America is often portrayed as an ignorant, unsophisticated sort of place, “full of Bible-bashers and ruled to a dangerous extent by trashy television, superstition and religious bigotry, a place lacking in respect for evidence-based knowledge. I know that is how it is portrayed because I have done my bit to paint that picture...”
In fact, bias is not the real problem. It is probably impossible to produce truly unbiased news; and, anyway, it is relatively easy for even the averagely well informed to aim to the right when watching BBC bulletins. Nor is talent the problem. With one or two exceptions, the BBC’s television journalists are a smart and gifted bunch and, naturally, I yield to nobody in my admiration of Jeremy Paxman, The Great Paxo. No, the real problem is stylistic. The main shows have become dead and uninformative.
Two examples. I was watching the Paris riots on BBC and waiting for somebody to explain what was going on. I saw lots of shots of people shouting, lots of interviews with people about the violence, but no analysis whatsoever. Exasperated, I turned over to Sky, which, in spite of its mad, bad sets, does at least show some commitment to facts and analysis rather than interminable colour. When it comes to bird flu, of course, the BBC has gone completely insane. One report, after the swan was found, involved getting various foreign correspondents to stand next to cages full of birds and report gravely that, yes, people were very worried.
