P
to a point, it's fun to howl at Will Ferrell's priceless portrayal of
Ron Burgundy, the fictional local TV news star at the center of
"Anchorman." The movie is set in the prehistoric era of the 1970's,
when such infotainment inventions as Action News and Eyewitness News
were still in their infancy. With his big ego, big lapels, big ties,
big hair and pea-sized brain, Ron is every newsman who's ever told us
"This is what's happening in your world tonight!" while remaining
clueless about anything happening beyond his own teleprompter. Ron
Burgundy has only one flaming passion: to end up in the big time of
network news.
You have to laugh — until you realize that he and countless others like
him have made just that leap in the three decades since. The local news
revolution nailed in this movie — the dictum that the popularity of a
news "personality" with the viewers, not the story, must always come
first — has long since overrun most of both network and cable news.
(The occasional holdout, typified by "Nightline," must often fight for
its life or be subsidized at PBS.) No sooner do we rejoice at the
demise of much of the 70's cultural detritus lampooned in "Anchorman,"
from polyester leisure suits to unembarrassed on-camera sexism, than we
start wondering if TV news may be even more farcical now than it was
then. But these days the farce isn't so funny. The worst damage
committed by Ron Burgundy at the movie's mythical News Center 4 of San
Diego is to overplay the pregnancy of a panda at the San Diego Zoo. Our
news culture, and not just TV news, muffed the run-up to a war.
Watching Mr. Ferrell go on TV to promote "Anchorman" on the eve of its
premiere, you had to notice just how plausibly his buffoonish,
supposedly anachronistic, fictional persona fits into our "real" news.
He turned up in his Burgundy blazer on the "Today" show the same
morning The New York Post broke its front-page exclusive on John Kerry's choice of Dick
Gephardt as his running mate. "This is an excellent journalism
periodical," said Mr. Ferrell while thumbing through the offending
tabloid before the crowd of "Today" show groupies in Rockefeller
Center. Thus we watched a fictional anchorman mocking a fictional story
from a real newspaper on a real news program — but was it so clear
which was which? Only a week earlier, "Today" had committed its own
equivalent of The Post's gaffe by failing to broadcast the live story
of Saddam Hussein's court appearance in Baghdad. It stuck instead with
an interview in which Robert Redford promoted a new movie in which he
does not play Bob Woodward.
When Mr. Ferrell turned up on "The Daily Show" the next night, Jon
Stewart ribbed him for not basing his characterization of Ron Burgundy
on the fake anchorman Mr. Stewart himself plays on TV. But such is the
vacuum now often left by the real news that Mr. Stewart's fake anchor
is increasingly drafted to do the job of a real one. One recent
instance occurred after Dick Cheney appeared on CNBC on June 17. The
CNBC interviewer, Gloria Borger, asked the vice president about his
public assertion that a connection between the 9/11 hijacker Mohamed
Atta and Saddam Hussein's government was "pretty well confirmed." Not
once but three times Mr. Cheney said that he "absolutely" had "never
said" any such thing. But Ms. Borger had been right. And it was left to
Mr. Stewart, not her actual TV news colleagues, to come to her defense
by displaying the incontrovertible proof on "The Daily Show": a clip
from "Meet the Press" in December 2001, in which the vice president
flatly told Tim Russert "it's been pretty well confirmed" that Atta met
with "a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service."
Then again, maybe Mr. Cheney thought he could lie to Ms. Borger because
he mistook CNBC, home to Dennis Miller, for a fake news outlet. That
isn't hard to do. In another stop on his "Anchorman" promotional tour,
Mr. Ferrell crashed the set of that network's "real" business news
program, "Power Lunch," where he spewed false headlines ("Kenneth Lay
likes to wear makeup as a woman!") and repeatedly kissed its normally
staid female anchor, Sue Herera, on the lips. Far from disowning this
invasion of fiction into its journalism, CNBC turned the incident into
a constantly replayed promotional clip. The real anchor hardly seemed
to mind, telling Jacques Steinberg of The New York Times that she
enjoyed showing viewers "a different side of me." You can't get much
more Burgundian than that.
P
to a point, it's fun to howl at Will Ferrell's priceless portrayal of
Ron Burgundy, the fictional local TV news star at the center of
"Anchorman." The movie is set in the prehistoric era of the 1970's,
when such infotainment inventions as Action News and Eyewitness News
were still in their infancy. With his big ego, big lapels, big ties,
big hair and pea-sized brain, Ron is every newsman who's ever told us
"This is what's happening in your world tonight!" while remaining
clueless about anything happening beyond his own teleprompter. Ron
Burgundy has only one flaming passion: to end up in the big time of
network news. 
