Op-ed: Why the TV anchorman is outdated
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The TV anchorman position is outdated and silly, says Frank Rich in a recent New York Magazine article.
Rich looked at how the Brian Williams controversy played out on NBC and how viewers responded to the new anchorman, Lester Holt:
The interchangeable blandness of the two Nightly News anchors and the continuity of their viewership confirm the reality that lurked just beneath the moral outrage, torrential social-media ridicule, and Comcast executive-suite chaos of the Williams implosion: For all the histrionics, this incident of media blood sport was much ado about not so much. The network-news anchor as an omnipotent national authority figure is such a hollow anachronism in 21st-century America that almost nothing was at stake. NBC's train wreck played out as corporate and celebrity farce rather than as a human or cultural tragedy because it doesn't actually matter who puts on the bespoke suit and reads the news from behind a desk.
Rich joined MPR News' Tom Crann to discuss the future of TV news.
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