A look back at the ‘attitude’ and ‘edge’ of the late Aaron Brown’s CNN newscast

Aaron Brown. ET video via YouTube.

Former CNN anchor Aaron Brown died on Sunday. His passing recalls what might be called a golden era in cable news. Brown, who worked for CNN from 2001 to ’05, hosted a prime-time newscast, competing with yet another prime-time newscast on MSNBC anchored by Brian Williams. Sadly, cable news has long since given way to politically oriented talk shows during the prime viewing hours of 8 to 11 p.m.

On June 20, 2002, I wrote a critical overview for The Boston Phoenix of what Brown and Williams were up to; at 2,700 words, it’s as much an artifact of a bygone era as Brown’s and Williams’ programs. Courtesy of the Northeastern University Library Archives, I’m republishing it here. As The Associated Press’ obituary puts it, Brown’s newscast was “quirky” and “cerebral.” There’s nothing remotely like it on television today.

Anchors away

While NBC grooms old-fashioned Brian Williams, CNN’s Aaron Brown is honing the new New Thing

By Dan Kennedy | The Boston Phoenix | June 20, 2002

For a man who’s supposed to be the future of network television news, Brian Williams looks an awful lot like the past.

Just 43 when it was announced that he would anchor the “NBC Nightly News” starting in 2004, Williams in some respects seems older than Tom Brokaw, whom he’ll succeed. At 62, Brokaw is the youngest of the Big Three (CBS’ Dan Rather is 70; ABC’s Peter Jennings is 63). And Brokaw’s folksy-yet-serious, everyman persona still seems modern compared to the stern omniscience of Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley and John Chancellor in the 1960s and ’70s — or, for that matter, of Ted Koppel today.

But though the Cronkites and the Koppels have always been able to trade on their experience and credibility, Williams — who anchors “The News with Brian Williams” on MSNBC at 8 p.m. — often comes off as stiff and portentous. He is said to be intelligent and funny, and he probably is. On camera, though, the expensive dark suit, the cuff links, the perfect tan, the just-so head angle designed to show off his “good” side (does he in fact have a left ear?), and the grave, hectoring tone can border on the ridiculous, especially on a slow news day.

Williams’ ascendancy comes at a time when the network newscasts are under fire as never before. With a combined audience of about 30 million viewers per evening, the three half-hour programs remain the closest thing we have to a mass news medium. Yet audience share has fallen from 75% in 1970 to about 44% today — and most of the remaining viewers are so old that, as Frank Rich put it in a piece on the Rather/Jennings/Brokaw triumvirate for The New York Times Magazine earlier this year, the advertisements “amount to a grim tour of a medicine cabinet largely for the aging, the infirm, the impotent and the incontinent.”

In such a context, NBC’s decision to name Brian Williams the designated anchor seems conservative and hidebound. At a time when the networks ought to be thinking seriously about how to reinvigorate their fading news franchise, NBC is sending us someone straight out of Anchor Central — an old-fashioned news reader who lacks Brokaw’s nimbleness, Jennings’ on-camera intelligence, and Rathers’ arresting just-plain-weirdness. This isn’t a move to build audience and strike out in new directions — it’s a move to hold on to what’s already there, or at least to lose it as slowly as possible until, inevitably, the network newscasts fade to extinction.

Yet a rough draft of what the network newscast of the future might look like — and how it might even succeed and grow and shuck off its financial dependence on Depends — is already on the air every weeknight at 10. CNN’s “NewsNight,” anchored by Aaron Brown, is not perfect by any means, and much of the reason has to do with Brown himself, who alternates between refreshing candor and annoying self-absorption. But “NewsNight,” which debuted on Oct. 15 (Brown himself began work at CNN on Sept. 11, 2001, less than an hour after the first tower was hit), works as an invigorating alternative to the traditional newscast, with longer stories, some attitude and edge, and the arch presence of Brown, who, despite being 10 years older than Williams, comes across as an entire generation younger.

Not to wax too enthusiastic. “NewsNight” has been devoting a lot of time to the trial involving the murder of young Danielle van Dam, mainly because the lawyer for the neighbor accused of killing her is making an issue of the exotic and varied sex life indulged in by Danielle’s parents. And Brown gave an entire hour to the arrest of Robert Blake — something that he apologized for the next night. At its best, though, the show comes across as a less-boring version of “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer” or the television equivalent of “All Things Considered.”

That’s not something you can say about any other network newscast, either on broadcast or cable. And it’s having some success: in April “NewsNight” actually beat the Fox News Channel’s “On the Record,” hosted by Greta Van Susteren, before sliding back to second place in May. (The third cable news show competing in that time slot, MSNBC’s “Alan Keyes Is Making Sense,” is a non-factor in the ratings. Which, if you’ve seen it, makes sense.)

***

It’s not that Brian Williams isn’t a pretty good anchor — he is. And his seriousness is nothing to sneer at in an era when it’s getting increasingly difficult — especially on cable — to tell the difference between news programming and the World Wrestling Federation. (Which, by the way, recently changed its name to World Wrestling Entertainment, or, in its promos, simply “WW.” I fully expect that in 10 years it will simply be called “W,” with a certain former president taking the place of Vince McMahon.)

But — and this is unfair, but so what? — the full Williams package adds up not so much to gravitas as to the appearance of gravitas. As Newsday media columnist Marvin Kitman recently wrote of Williams, “He is a nice, clean-cut, very sincere trying-to-be-a-journalist type person.” And that’s because, well-intentioned and hard-working though he may be, Williams — unlike the current Big Three anchors — never really aspired to be anything but an anchor. Yes, he worked for a time as a White House correspondent, but by his own admission he’s wanted to be an anchorman since he was six years old. “I am a 43-year-old anachronism,” he was recently quoted as saying in The New York Times. “I am the kid in front of the TV set wondering about what it was like to anchor the evening news.”

Now, maybe there’s nothing actually wrong with lusting for the anchor desk. But the mythology of television news has it that our anchors are supposed to have been globetrotting correspondents who were pulled in from the field and practically forced to sit behind a desk. The model is Edward R. Murrow, who reported on the bombing of London while standing on the rooftops of that city (granted that Murrow, who reached his zenith in television in the 1950s, was never really an anchorman in the modern sense). Walter Cronkite was a hard-bitten United Press reporter before he went into television. Dan Rather stood up to Richard Nixon. Peter Jennings washed out when ABC tried to make him a twentysomething Ken-doll anchor, then rebuilt his career by spending years in the trenches.

No, there’s probably no need for any of this dues-paying. What, after all, is wrong with simply being a competent news reader? But any network that dares defy this mythology risks a backlash. As though anticipating such a development, NBC has announced that Williams will get some much-needed seasoning during the next two years. But reassurance like this only calls attention to the problem.

There’s something of a Max Headroom quality to Williams — you know he’s got legs and feet, but somehow he just looks wrong when he’s not seated in his comfortable anchor perch. The week after his anointment, he was dispatched to India to report on that country’s nuclear standoff with Pakistan. On the MSNBC newscast one night, he walked through a busy outdoor market in New Delhi with an Indian nuclear scientist, dressed semi-casually with sunglasses, and mouthed banalities. Noting that tensions between the two countries had eased, Williams asked, “Was it fear of the worst that did the trick?” Moments later he observed: “God forbid if the worst should happen, the death toll here would be staggering.” Yes, and that’s the news from here. Only time will tell. Back to you.

In Williams’ defense, his dispatch — like nearly all reports on MSNBC — was so short that, even if he were so inclined, it would have been nearly impossible to offer any more than the broadest, most obvious strokes. Williams will get a chance to do better work starting on July 15, when MSNBC completes its death plunge into oblivion with an all-talk format (Phil Donahue! Two hours a day with Pat Buchanan and Bill Press!) and Williams moves to sister station CNBC.

The reconfigured Williams program is supposed to feature more interviews and longer segments than his current newscast, and will put him head-to-head at 10 p.m. with Greta Van Susteren and, yes, Aaron Brown. (“The News” is already rebroadcast on CNBC at 10, but that’s hardly a true test of Williams’ appeal.)

Williams may find that he’s got some catching up to do.

***

The first annoying thing about Aaron Brown is the way he greets his viewers. A typical example as he takes the handoff from Larry King: “Thank you, Mr. King, and hello again, everyone.” The operative word is again, which he uses every night. “NewsNight” appears at 10 p.m. Period. Yet Brown makes it sound like you’ve missed something — like the whole world was watching earlier, but you missed it, and only now are you getting around to tuning in. You idiot. This impression is immediately reinforced by his launching into his nightly commentary, which carries the label “Page Two.” Page Two? What the hell happened to Page One? Then there’s “Page Two and a Half” — a rundown of what’s coming up during the hour. Argh!

Such quirks aside, though, it doesn’t take long to realize that “NewsNight” is a pretty high-quality show. For one thing, there is “The Whip” — the round-up of CNN reporters from around the world who preview what they’ll be reporting later in the newscast. It can’t be an accident that this feature has become a staple, because when you can promote the likes of Christiane Amanpour from the Middle East and John King from the White House, you’ve got a journalistic advantage over the competition.

For another thing, there is Brown himself. Brown took the place of Bernard Shaw, a solid, stolid, old-fashioned anchor who retired last year. Shaw was a link to CNN’s glorious past, when Roger Ailes wasn’t eating its lunch and AOL Time Warner wasn’t screwing things up. Yet Brown’s got an off-kilter, postmodern thing going that the straight-arrow Shaw never could have mastered. It’s not that Brown isn’t serious — he’s quite serious, as much so as Brian Williams. But whereas Williams functions as the generic anchor, “NewsNight” is built around Brown, who freely mixes news-reading and commentary; who exudes friendliness and solicitude, yet sometimes seems to be controlling a barely suppressed rage (or disgust) at the world; and who, at times, seems capable of blurting out just about anything, as he did when he compared territorial turf wars between the FBI and the CIA to in-house sniping between CNN’s morning and evening crews.

The testy Brown was on display one recent night when Jonathan Karl delivered a long report on that day’s congressional hearings regarding intelligence failures preceding Sept. 11. Toward the end, Karl revealed that a high-ranking FBI official had been transferred out of counterterrorism, possibly as punishment for his ineptitude. Said a somewhat incredulous Brown: “I don’t want to suggest that we are quite burying the lead, but that is a tantalizing little piece of information.” To borrow what someone once said about Gary Condit, Is that a smile, Aaron, or are you showing your teeth?

Later, Brown got a little too cute for my taste when he asked Bishop George Niederauer about the new sex-abuse guidelines drafted by the U.S. bishops in Dallas. “Does Rome — and I’m not always sure what I mean when I say that, to be perfectly honest — does Rome have to sign off on this?” asked Brown. Oh, come now. Yes, it’s fine to acknowledge that the Vatican hierarchy can be rather bewildering, especially for a non-Catholic (as Brown is always quick to point out about himself). But are such circumlocutions really necessary when asking a bishop if the pope has veto power?

But Brown does ask smart questions, such as when he put Sen. Evan Bayh on the spot about those secret intelligence hearings, wondering how the American people could benefit if they were taking place behind closed doors. (Bayh’s answer amounted to mush from the wimp, but that wasn’t Brown’s fault.) Brown appears to be at ease with pop culture, too, or at least some elements of it. He introduced a segment on Bono and Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill’s tour of Africa with a reference to “Rattle and Hum,” and he closed an interview with writer Sebastian Junger’s new Vanity Fair piece on sexual slavery in Kosovo by saying of the magazine, “There’s a lot of really cool stuff in it.”

What impressed me the most, though, was the way Brown handled an interview segment on violence in the Middle East. It was a day when a suicide bomber had killed 17 Israelis, and Israel had moved its military back into Yasser Arafat’s base in Ramallah. On cable it has become de rigueur that you bring in two (or three or four) people to shout at each other. Brown, though, brought them in one at a time — Israeli consulate official Ido Aharoni followed by PLO representative Hassan Abdel Rahman — so he could calmly ask a few questions of each. Now, I don’t know — maybe he had to do this because Aharoni and Rahman refuse to appear together. But MSNBC, Fox or even other CNN shows simply would have settled for second- or third-rate guests so they could put them on and let them yell at each other.

Brown’s not averse to conflict — he later hosted a virtual shoutfest in which Newsweek religion writer Ken Woodward openly sneered at officials of sex-abuse-victims groups. But his attempt to go for light rather than heat on the Israeli-Palestinian dispute was most uncable-like — and most welcome.

***

As with Brian Williams, Aaron Brown lacks the deep reporting background of an earlier generation of anchors. According to a recent New York Times profile, Brown spent his formative years in radio, hosting talk shows, doing basketball play-by-play, and making a documentary on prisons.

But Brown has logged a lot of time behind the anchor desk, including a 2 a.m. newscast on ABC in the 1990s. He later worked as a reporter on ABC’s evening newscast, “World News Tonight,” covering such stories as the election of Nelson Mandela and the trial of O.J. Simpson, which may or may not give him more reporting experience than Williams. Regardless, Brown seems utterly confident on camera. Whereas Williams is scripted to a fault, Brown gives the illusion — at least I assume it’s an illusion — of making it up as he does along, right down to trying to decide whether to go to a commercial break.

Williams may well give NBC executives what they think they need at 6:30 p.m. — a solid news reader and a stable presence who can hold on to the network’s share of aging viewers. What Brown has done, though, is to point the way to something else.

For some time now, observers who are worried about the future of network news have suggested that at least one of the networks ought to try a 60- or even 90-minute newscast in prime time, combining hard news with the best of magazine shows such as “60 Minutes,” “20/20” and “Dateline.” Last year, in an interview with “The NewsHour”’s Terence Smith, both Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw identified 10 p.m. as the ideal time slot for such a newscast. Earlier this year the idea got further impetus when it was endorsed by TheWashington Post’s Len Downie and Robert Kaiser in their book “The News About the News.”

“NewsNight” may be what such a program would look like: solid and serious, but at the same time quirky and irreverent enough to hold the interest of younger viewers more accustomed to getting their news from Jon Stewart, David Letterman and Jay Leno than from Rather, Brokaw and Jennings.

In his piece on the Big Three, Frank Rich paid them a backhanded compliment, writing that it’s “a comfort to know that a complicated world can be distilled into a compact and reliable daily report that, for the most part, goes down as easily as the prescription pills that are hawked in between segments…. The evening news, in a triumph of form over content, restores order in a discrete half-hour.”

Trouble is, no one under 55 thinks the world works that way, or trusts a newscast that tells them it does. Brian Williams may one day figure that out. Aaron Brown — whether you find him refreshing, annoying, or (most likely) both — already has.


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4 thoughts on “A look back at the ‘attitude’ and ‘edge’ of the late Aaron Brown’s CNN newscast”

  1. Thank you for the insight. I either missed or don’t remember your column from more than 20 years ago, but it was (and is) spot on. I liked Aaron Brown and even traded emails with him after he left CNN and taught at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. (Tim Coco)

    1. Tim, Aaron sent me a kind email after the piece ran. He didn’t even object to my snarking about his snarkiness. He did explain that “Hello again” amounted to “Welcome back from last night’s newscast,” but if he explained what he meant by “Page Two,” I’ve long since forgotten.

  2. i distinctly remember his coverage of 9/11 – and didn’t realize that was his first day at CNN.

  3. I’ve always liked both Aaron Brown and Brian Williams. (The latter’s Amazon election show was actually quite good!).

    Brown’s work at CNN impressed me but I’ll always have memories of his overnight ABC show World News Now. It had a great blend of the serious and the quirky.

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