Who's your Cronkite?

Caitlin Flanagan has an intriguing Atlantic Monthly essay (behind subscriber firewall, I fear) about how Katie Couric went from being a star on the Today show to being a turkey helming the CBS Evening News. In her piece, which is kind of a review of a trashy new biography of Couric by hatchet man Ed Klein, Flanagan writes about how what made Katie great on Today, in terms of her personality and presentation, has made her bad in the evening news format. That's obvious. But Flanagan's deeper point is pretty smart:

That Katie has bombed at CBS is a testament, not to the existence of a glass ceiling, but to the fact that real revolutions are so thoroughgoing that they don’t just provide a new answer, they change the very questions being asked. Katie’s mandate to lure women and young people to the nightly news was in itself ridiculous and doomed to fail—and a goal beneath her talent and ambitions. No woman needs to storm the Bastille of nightly news, because the form has become irrelevant: Oprah has immeasurably more cultural, commercial, and political clout than Charles Gibson and Brian Williams, and no young person is ever going to make appointment TV out of a sober-minded 6:30 wrap-up of stories he or she already read online in the afternoon. Because Katie remembered the old world, the one in which the most-respected news was broadcast at the end of the day, she thought that she was taking a more powerful job. But the Today show—broadcast for four hours a day, a forum for interviews with many of the top newsmakers of the day, as well as for the kind of lifestyle-trend stories it pioneered and that have come to play such a big part in the nightly news—is a far more culturally significant program. One reason that this huge star didn’t have a tell-all biography written about her until now is that while she was at Today, no publisher wanted to antagonize her; a booking on the show was every new author’s dream. The release of Klein’s splashy book, then, is evidence not of Katie’s elevation, but of its opposite. She made the kind of mistake that women a generation younger than hers probably wouldn’t have. She spent her time gunning for a position that had been drained of its status and importance long before she got there. And what she has learned, the hard way, is that her climb to the top has been not a triumph but the act of someone who slept through a revolution.

That's a sharp observation. It also made me think about which media figures are most influential in framing the kinds of things I think about. In my mom and dad's day, it would have been Cronkite, or whoever reads the evening news program they watch (maybe it still is). As for me, leaving aside the behind-the-scenes journalists (top editors, producers) whose job it is to set the agenda for the next day's paper/broadcast, I have to say that the answer is almost exclusively ... bloggers. There are about nine or 10 blogs I check in with daily, and though I definitely don't share the political views of all of them (or any one of them consistently), the kinds of stories that grab those bloggers' attention are the kinds of stories that I'm usually focusing on.

I was kind of taken aback to realize that, actually: that I'm a paid-up member of the Mainstream Media, but I take my intellectual cues not primarily from establishment media, but from weblogs. And here's one reason: this afternoon I have to finish my column for this coming Sunday's paper. It needs to be edited by Wednesday to fit our production schedule. I can do some tweaking on Friday if necessary, but it's pretty much a lock. I know what I'm writing about, and I will have written about a similar topic all week on my blog, and probably read three or four blogs commenting on the same thing by the time my dead-tree column is published. It's not that you can't get smart, interesting opinion journalism in conventional ways. It's that by the time the columns appear in print, your favorite bloggers have likely already had their say about it, and at least half of them had a better take than the columnist.

It's not that, say, George F. Will is always and everywhere a smarter observer of politics and culture than, for example, Ross Douthat. It's that once upon a time, I used to make sure to read Will every time he published. Now I only read him incidentally, and then usually only because Ross Douthat or another blogger I read devoutly (or aggregator blogsite, like RealClearPolitics) read the fresh Will column first, and decided that the old conservative warhorse had something interesting to say this time out.

I find that I watch the evening news in a meta-sense. That is, I watch it to see what the Official Story is. Off the top of my head, I think NYT columnist David Brooks is the only mainstream media figure whose opinions I consistently follow to see what I should be paying attention to. Again, the point is not that I agree with the figure all, or even most of the time; the point is I trust him or her to tell me what I should be thinking about.

How about you? Who's your Cronkite?