At the time of his death, Tim Russert was my favorite journalist on television, to the point that I actually had Meet the Press on my DVR. Yep, I'm a dork. Anyway, with Russert's death, I was pretty much looking at the anchors on the major networks...and not liking any of them.
But hey! It's not all bad. It turns out that Aaron Brown, former anchor at CNN until about two or three years ago, returns to television journalism tonight. For those of you who knew me when CNN fired Brown and replaced him with Anderson Cooper (for the following reasons, in this order: 1) Cooper looked cool standing around pointing at Katrina damage and looking solemn, 2) Cooper makes women and gay men feel happy in their pants, 3) Brown steadfastly refused to take part in the rest of CNN's slide down into pseudo-news and empty-headed journalism, 4) Cooper didn't, and 5) low ratings), I was pretty ridiculously outraged for about two weeks. Once again, I'm a dork.
Anyway, Brown is back as the anchor of PBS's weekly show "Wide Angle," which is not so much a weekly summary of news as it is an in-depth look at one international issue each week. For example, it looks like this week is all about Darfur. Anyway, I like this guy, so I'm donating my modest advertising skills to his cause.
I think Wide Angle is on Tuesdays at 9pm on PBS, but really, your DVR could tell you better than I could.
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3 comments:
2 weeks? As long as I have known you, you have said "fuck anderson cooper" every time he has been on the screen.
Wide Angle aired here at 10 PM last night so I switched back and forth between that and 360. When I first read about Aaron Brown doing Wide Angle I was under the impression that it was a new international news show and that he would travel to those places that it focused on. Yesterday, I was surprised to learn that Wide Angle is not a new show; it has been on PBS for 7 years. What's new is that Aaron Brown is the new HOST of the show. All he does is introduce the week's documentary and interview someone at the end. I was kind of disappointed in that. I guess I have been spoiled having Anderson travel to places like the Congo and do the researching and storytelling himself. But, this is Aaron Brown, he always seems to prefer to just sit in the anchor chair and yak anyway, don't know why I expected something different from him. I thought the Dafar doc was great, I was just disappointed in Mr. Brown's role in it, or lack there of. Or maybe I missed it, switching back and forth, did he go to Dafar?
Yes, it appears the format is an extended news documentary (last night's was good) followed by Brown interviewing someone on the subject. I don't think he travelled to Darfur, no -- I think his role is more of a news director on the program.
I guess something missing from my original post is the reason why I like Brown so much -- for one, he does very good interviews. More importantly, he's one of the few anchors on TV who actually appears to be thinking about the story as they deliver it and actually listening to the answers to their questions as they interview. Instead of, you know, just reading off the prompter (see: anyone behind a desk at CNN), simply waiting for their turn to ask another question (see: Chris Matthews), or trying for nothing more than that "Gotcha" interview moment (see: Wolf Blitzer).
I don't really think Cooper brings anything to the anchor position. He is good on location, probably because investigating the story himself makes him more invested in it, which comes across on-screen. Behind the desk, though, he's just another talking head. His 360 show is filled with as much fluff as substance, like those nightly segments when he psuedo-flirts with his female sidekick and goes over wacky stories of the day, or asks viewers to caption a photo, or like last night when he continually teased an upcoming story about a woman who died in a hospital waiting room and no one helped her -- not that you can't do a story on that, but that's your TOP story? The one you're going to advertise going into every commercial break? It's pretty heavily toward the Sensational end of the news scale -- shocking video, but there is little need for the public to actually watch it.
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