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For the new Beau (and Belle) Ideal, Americans now turn to the Nightly News.
While he reports a story, he sells himself-his voice ringing with the authority of an Exxon spokesman, his face strong and supple enough to advertise the most expensive cologne. While she reads the news, we read her face-why has she changed her hair style, switched to contacts, worn that blouse? For those who want their news neat, the new breed of TV readers and reporters represents an instrusion of Hollywood typecasting (virile heroes, willowy starlets, and the occasional flaky character actor) into the business of disseminating information. And Hollywood, whether from envy or from scorn, has immortalized these new sex stars with Peter Finch's insane-as-hell anchorman in Network and, more recently, Jane Fonda's cottony-soft newswoman at the beginning of The China Syndrome-a character based on, and in some ways a parody of, Kelly Lange, a KNBC (Los Angeles) newshen and protégée of Mr. News Personality himself, Tom Snyder.
The tough guys in print news are the ones who are mad as hell, for TV has become the U.S. public's primary source of current-events reporting. Imagine-Americans would rather have their news read to them than read it themselves. Instead of graduating from the hard-drinking, fire-engine-chasing, widow-bullying Front Page school of journalism, these kids seem fresh out of charm school and Pepsi commercials. (Yeah!) They couldn't find a national-news story unless they tripped over it in the New YorkTimes Summary Box, and they can't report it until they've applied their throat and hair sprays. (Goddam right!) Everybody in print journalism is as grizzled and incorruptible as Lou Grant; everybody in TV news is as pompous and vapid as Ted Baxter. (That's tellin' 'em!) True story: At a Chicago TV station, a Baxteresque anchorman complimented his Lou Grant-type managing editor on a piece of street reporting Baxter's co-anchor had done the day before. "And what do you have for me today?" asked Baxter. Replied Grant, evenly: "Contempt."
That's the story on TV news as it might be reported-in-depth by The National Star (which is a newspaper, too, as are the screaming tabloids and the wireservice digests known as the small-town gazette). But it's not the whole story. For a start, the percentage of...