Word: anchorman
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...totally missed the connection between Roger Gicquel and Walter Cronkite in your uncritical portrait of the French TV anchorman [Sept. 25]. I never noticed any pompous morbidity or any Christ complex in Cronkite. The old man is a charmer because there are wisdom and warmth in his restraint. Besides, he has a quiet sense of humor that his younger imitator lacks. As a Frenchman I feel I deserve better than Roger Gicquel...
...flesh, of course. But in spirit, nuance, mannerism, inflection and any other ephemeral component of credibility that might explain the graying CBS anchorman's enormous popularity. A faction in the state television monopoly wanted to replace the reigning crew of bland newsreaders with a single, reassuringly credible, American-style anchorman-en effet, a French Walter Cronkite. In 1974 French President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing made that scheme possible by splitting the monopoly into three parts. Officials of Télévision Française I, one of the new state-owned but competing channels, were...
...first six months on the job, Gicquel recalls, he was only an actor playing the role of anchorman. "I must have seemed a bit awkward," he admits, "like I was wearing my Sunday suit." But, "little by little, I began to understand that it was necessary only to be like I really was." Much of Gicquel's appeal seems to lie in a kind of Gallic avuncular gloom, and an ability to register an appropriate flicker of sorrow, anger, levity or weariness in reaction to whatever news he is reading-the same reactions that viewers presumably are having...
...story "multimedia" room large enough for simultaneous committee hearings at both ends. There are special TV anchorman booths and a special elevator for electronic equipment...
...journalist's job is to make the important interesting. But it isn't easy: just look at those dull graphics behind any network anchorman as he nightly tries to animate a subject like inflation. Boredom isn't something journalists like to acknowledge; it is merely endured. That ancient Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times," wouldn't seem a curse to a journalist. Editors deal in novelty and discovery; the negative and less talked-about side of this is knowing when to spare the reader the overfamiliar. Newsweek editors were once oddly attached...