Is it time for news anchors to take a ‘Vow of Chastity?’

News’ anchors Katie Couric, Brian Williams, left, and Charles Gibson, on the NBC ‘Today’ show in 2008, for cancer research. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

Let’s think of the fall of NBC’s Brian Williams as the climax of a narrative that began in the 1950s when the television news business was still young.

It was in 1958 that Edward R. Murrow of CBS addressed a convention of broadcast news directors and offered, “It is not necessary to remind you that the fact that your voice is amplified to the degree where it reaches from one end of the country to the other does not confer upon you greater wisdom or understanding than you possessed when your voice reached only from one end of the bar to the other.”

It turned out to be Murrow’s most famous speech, hitting this high point near the end: “This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire.  But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends.  Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box. There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance and indifference. This weapon of television could be useful.”

What began with radio and accelerated with television was this:  a technology used primarily for entertainment could be leveraged to communicate the news to a huge audience. The mix of television and entertainment was there from the beginning. Even the virtuous Murrow could succumb to it. He used his show “See It Now” to help take down Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his witch hunts against communism. On “Person to Person” he would invite us into the homes of celebrities such as Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, and Harpo Marx.

As television news evolved through the 60s into the 70s, news leaders and network executives saw the need for the development of standards and practices, guidelines to responsible journalism that have evolved to this day.

On April 14, 1976, Richard S. Salant, president of CBS News, wrote a preface to an early set of standards for his network.  It contained a thick paragraph that seems prescient in light of controversies surrounding Brian Williams:

One [conviction of Salant] is the overriding importance peculiar to our form of journalism of drawing the sharpest possible line – sharp perhaps to the point of eccentricity – between our line of broadcast business, which is dealing with fact, and that in which our associates on the entertainment side of the business are generally engaged, which is dealing in fiction and drama.  Because it all comes out sequentially on the same point of the dial and on the same tube, and because, then, there are no pages to be turned or column lines to be drawn in our journalistic matrix, it is particularly important that we recognize that we are not in show business and should not use any of the dramatic licenses, the ‘fiction-which-represents-truth” rationales, or the underscoring and the punctuations which entertainment and fiction may, and do, properly use.  This may make us a little less interesting to some – but that is the price we pay for dealing with fact and truth, which may often be duller – and with more loose ends – than fiction and drama.

Did Brian Williams misremember that he, unlike his talented daughter, was not in show business?  Did he ultimately reject a duller rendition of fact and truth for a version of his story that because of its dramatic license was more compelling? Did his multiple appearances on entertainment programs, including Thirty Rock and David Letterman, offer a sign of his seduction, not just a dabbling with the entertainment world, but some kind of succumbing to it?

Can the culture that produced Brian Williams be changed?

In 1995 a group of Danish filmmakers, led by Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, believed that too many of their tribe had abandoned cinematic integrity in favor of cheap products and quick profits.

As I described in a 2012 essay on the line between fiction and non-fiction, “To guide their own art – and to challenge their contemporaries – they set forth a 10-point platform, which focused on things they would NOT do, techniques they would NOT use.”  They called their manifesto a Vow of Chastity.

It contained such strictures as “Music must not be used unless it occurs when the scene is being shot,” and “The director must not be credited.”

Is it time for future network news anchors to formulate their own Vow of Chastity.  What would be its tenets?

Before I take a crack at answering that question, let me provide a context articulated by others as to what went wrong at NBC.  For Ken Auletta at The New Yorker, we have invested so much marketing and hype in establishing the authority and credibility of network news anchors that it should not surprise us that they develop a God complex.

For Maureen Dowd at the New York Times, the network’s elevation of Williams signifies the last desperate gasps of a dying form of news presentation.  It seemed only fitting that on the day Williams was suspended for six-months, an unprecedented moment in the history of news anchoring, another announcement competed for attention:  the impending departure of a fake anchor, Jon Stewart, from the Daily Show.

There is a famous story in the history of sports journalism about Stanley Woodward, the sports editor of the New York Herald Tribune. Tired of the hero-worship inspired by his scribes, he told Red Smith and his colleagues “Will you stop Godding up those ball players.”

Maybe this Vow of Chastity will invite all of us to stop Godding up those anchors:

1. It is the primary job of anchors to report, write, edit and deliver the news, not make the news.
2. Anchors should travel broadly covering important and even dangerous news sites, but they should leave the riskier assignments to experienced war correspondents. They should resist trying to make themselves look important, dashing, or heroic.
3. Their presence at a news site should never make things more difficult for other journalists or for rank and file citizens who have to live and work there.
4. They should never make appearances in motion pictures, except for the use of their images from actual historical footage.
5. They should never appear in sitcoms, even for their own networks.
6. They should never appear on entertainment talk shows.  They can appear on public affairs programming when the topic is on the news.
7. They should never appear in advertisements or derive income from them, even after they cease their role as news anchors.
8. They can give speeches and presentations at universities, before professional groups, at business meetings, but the remuneration from such activity must be governed by standards and practices and at least some of it donated to charity.
9. They may participate in the promotion of news programs at their own stations and that of affiliates, but they should avoid staged moments, including those ridiculous “power walks” of news teams, that have long been the source of parody and ridicule.
10. No anchor should make more than $10 million dollars per year.

Note: nothing in this manifesto prevents an anchor from writing a book, expressing strong opinions, engaging in public debate, being transparent about personal preferences and biases, and, most of all, embracing the mission of making the news interesting and relevant.

Dear readers:  Please take another look at the elements of my Vow of Chastity.  What is missing from the list?  What would you revise or delete?  Let us know what you think about the role and status of news anchors.