Goodbye Good Riddance Brokaw Who?

Exit NBC anchor Tom Brokaw: a nonentity in the service of wealth and power

By David Walsh
6 December 2004

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With a great deal of undeserved fanfare, NBC Nightly News anchorman Tom Brokaw delivered his final broadcast December 1. Brokaw was an American celebrity—in Oscar Wilde’s words, he was well known for being well known. His bowing out after 21 years on the job predictably became one of the major news stories of the day.

A self-satisfied nonentity, who has made no contribution to America’s understanding of itself or the world, Brokaw was praised as having the values of the “heartland,” one of the “plain-spoken figures that lean on tradition and instinct.” The news reader was feted as something akin to a modern-day Abraham Lincoln.

Brokaw is a very wealthy spokesman for the American ruling elite, who has never to anyone’s knowledge uttered a genuinely controversial sentence or formulated a thought that would make the powers-that-be lose any sleep. In recent years he has been earning, simply in his anchorman capacity, something in the vicinity of $7 million a year. This is in addition to income gained from authoring the best-seller, The Greatest Generation, his homage to the generation that fought in World War II. Brokaw now plans to spend more time on his 5,000-acre ranch near Yellowstone Park in Montana. He will be missed by few, and remembered by even fewer.

In the two decades during which Brokaw presided over the NBC evening news the American media suffered a dreadful decline. Television news, in particular, has been transformed by economic and political processes into a purely profit-driven operation. More fundamentally, television news programs, packaged (and on occasion criticized) as entertainment, have become organs of state propaganda, transmitting the policies and claims of increasingly right-wing administrations in Washington as “news” and “facts.”

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