Diane Sawyer and the media’s favorite subject: itself

Diane Sawyer (Image via Flickr)

The kindly overlords at True/Slant headquarters e-mailed me yesterday at lunch time with the news: Charlie Gibson was stepping down as anchor of ABC’s “World News” and Diane Sawyer was to be his replacement. Though terse, the implication of the e-mail was clear: Did I want to write something about it?

I thought… and I thought some more. And, to be frank, though I’m not much of a Diane Sawyer fan, I started to write something… but nothing really came out. I deleted the e-mail.

This morning I opened my daily newspapers and my daily Web sites and they were filled with news about the palace intrigue, the changing of the “World News” guard, what led to Sawyer’s ultimate triumph, how long she’s waited to fill that slot and how this once again amps-up the rivalry between Sawyer and her long-standing bete noir, Katie Couric.

Reading these stories helped me realize why I had so much trouble getting exercised about the news. The Gibson-Sawyer shift gives the media a chance to write about its favorite subject — itself — almost to the exclusion of any “real world” perspective. It’s the ultimate in East Coast navel-gazing. Does anyone in America, other than the media reporters whose livelihood depends on who gets the first, best quote from ABC News President David Westin, really care about who anchors the evening news? (The rhetorical answer is: no. The actual answer is about 7 million people — the average viewership of “World News” — and dropping.)

Is it interesting that for the first time, two of the three traditional evening news broadcasts will be anchored by women at the same time? I suppose… but women populate the anchor’s chair on cable news channels six ways to Sunday and have for years. I saw a friend and old colleague on Facebook crowing yesterday that the news was another high point for women and equality — as if making Diane Sawyer wait a decade to take over a news position whose power and influence is on a downward slide and has been for years is some kind of compliment.

As if we needed it, Walter Cronkite’s death earlier this summer was a stark reminder that the traditional network evening newscast as a medium for news and barometer of the national mood is an anachronism, a slowly shrinking vestige of the days when empires controlled what Americans learned about their country and when they learned it. In a world where computer screens glow 24/7 in offices, headlines are delivered to your cell phone and CNN is the background noise in hair salons and car washes, the number of people who sit down to watch the network evening news each night to get, as “The Daily Show” put it, “aged news,” is shrinking every year.

And while my cynicism may be overwrought, it’s for the above reason that I just can’t get excited about reading the next five months’ worth of stories about how Diane Sawyer is going to put her own stamp on the ABC broadcast. Congratulations! You were just named head of the Pony Express! What kind of horses do you plan to employ?

Which leaves us with the other story we’ll surely see this fall as Sawyer plans to move into the big chair: newsrooms’ arm-chair psychology delight in an old-fashioned rivalry:

If nothing else, Sawyer’s new job carries with it the promise of sweet revenge, a chance to finally win a ratings race against her old rival Katie Couric, who used to beat her every morning as anchor of NBC’s Today and who capped off the winning streak in 2006 by becoming the first ever solo female anchor of a national network newscast. (via The ABC’s of Diane’s Deal – TheDailyBeast.com)

Remember all the ridiculous, thinly-veiled sexism that surrounded Katie Couric’s elevation to CBS’s throne? Was she too “soft” to anchor the vaunted evening news? Should a single mother be traveling the world reporting the news? Add in Diane Sawyer and her history, a close ratings race, an unending appetite for gossip and the media’s penchant for breathlessly covering itself and you’ve got the makings for some ugly, ugly coverage. And who wants to read that?