Posted on 06/26/2002 7:38:48 AM PDT by wallcrawlr
Brian Williams is studying gravitas so he can be a deeply serious shallow liberal.
Easily the funniest debate in medialand these days is the one about whether Brian Williams has the gravitas needed to replace Tom Brokaw when Tom retires in 2004. A recent Nexis search for interpretive articles about the titanic transition at NBC turned up at least 15 entries in which somebody weighs in on the gravitas issue. A couple of the articles, to be sure, are less concerned with Brian than with the collateral question of whether this issue is keeping women from serving as anchors. Here the main weighers-in were Greta Van Susteren of Fox News, who was quoted as stating, "There are 280 million people in this country--surely they can find one smart woman to deliver the news," and Erik Sorenson, president of MSNBC, who posited that there are "major pockets" in our society that are not yet ready to accept women as anchors "because of a perceived lack of gravitas."
But the debate centers on Brian's gravitas shortfall, and an Associated Press story leaves you thinking that the chaps who promoted him agree that there is a serious issue here, and not just in some pockets. "The gravitas issue is real," writes AP television writer David Bauder, who adds that NBC News President Neal Shapiro says that one of the network's goals over the next two years is to season Williams. In other words, NBC management first irrevocably commits to give him the job--Brian's contract appears to be airtight--and then trains him to fill it. This is not what they teach at the Harvard Business School.
Yet what is truly laughable about the whole gravitas debate is the premise on which it is based. An individual with gravitas is understood to be a deeply serious person, and the premise is that Tom Brokaw (like Dan Rather of CBS and Peter Jennings of ABC is exactly that. Far more plausible is an alternative perspective: that Tom (like those other two guys) combines seriously good looks with a demonstrated ability to swallow and then regurgitate simplistic liberal views. Brokaw was clearly tilting against California Governor Pete Wilson when Pete was trying to eliminate mandatory sex and racial preferences in state contract awards. He stuck it to Dan Quayle for suggesting that Murphy Brown was setting a bad example for America in the TV episode glorifying single motherhood. Rejecting the possibility that there might be some moral issues associated with abortion, he said in an interview with Mother Jones magazine that it was a simple matter of "whether a woman has a right to control her own body" (a view rejected even in Roe v. Wade).
Especially unforgettable was Brokaw's weird discovery--this was in 1986--that homelessness was now engulfing families with breadwinners. In the example he brought on-screen, the family earned $20,000 ($32,000 in today's prices) but somehow couldn't get off the streets. Another lulu involved Dan Quayle again. In the 1988 vice presidential debate between Quayle and Lloyd Bentsen, Brokaw was given the opportunity to ask either candidate anything he wanted and ended up by asking Dan what the government should do about "the 65 million American children who live with their families in poverty." Unfortunately, neither candidate informed him that his figure was twice the total number of Americans living in poverty, and also exceeded the total number of American children.
The evidence suggests that the major perpetrators of televised liberal bias do not see their views as biased. Half or more of the country votes for candidates who oppose these views, yet television anchors seldom come in contact with this alternative world and see themselves as expressing ideas that represent a kind of noncontroversial high-minded norm. This is evidently the way Brian Williams sees things. Two years ago he was being quoted (e.g., in the Philadelphia Inquirer) as deriding the idea of liberal bias, which, he said, "first started after the Earth cooled."
With a little seasoning, the new anchor can be expected to gravitate even more firmly into the liberal corner.
This 80's movie presaged the Clinton years with style and form winning out over substance.
He might be more egotistical than Jennings. He uses all these wierd contractions and "insider" words that noe one really uses...I'm surprised he's not from Canada. If I were an SNL writer, I could come up with material for years on this guy.
Brian Williams here at Cleveland Center, that center which has been at the epicenter of a heated, tortuous, internecine, gravitational, interleige, facile, tumultuous, trendificient, multitudinous debate over whether or not it is safe to let your child play intramural athletics, on the holy day, that which the men who know, have called it, the holy day or Ramadan. Much more is at stake here than mere flagrant joint flexing and muscle tightening, much more. What is at stake goes to the very heart of the SCOTUS decision of Roe v. Wade, otherwise known as a woman's right to choose. Right nw I must go to Col. Ken Allard back at the studio...hold on, I am getting word the Jim Miklashewski has important defense news, at Defense, what is it Mik?
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