LATimes

Friday, October 12, 2001

U.S. STRIKES BACK: MEDIA/CULTURE Amid the Cacophony, a Reasoned Voice Surfaces

By HOWARD ROSENBERG, Times Television Critic

War means jitters, and jitters mean trouble. So at a time when the U.S. clearly benefits most from stability, CNN is fortunate to have as its main guy, spending hour after hour on camera, someone known for his thoughtfulness and composure. Bespectacled and bookish in appearance, he is Aaron Brown. The steadiest man on television. Instead of seamless, more important, he is earnest and—recalling Walter Cronkite playing Moses on CBS—trustworthy. A French horn in an industry dominated by kazoos, is Brown what TV news is pursuing or what it is fleeing, en route to the next Gary Condit after the war coverage fades? No one in the business is more unslick, no one more conversational, no one more serene or reflective while interviewing or relating a story. Inside his professorial brain are elbow patches and a pipe. He was at a terrible place at the right time, events making him TV's big-time news-anchor-come-lately, the junior partner joining old-line Brokaw, Jennings & Rather. Going on the CNN payroll last summer as head of a planned prime-time newscast (it was to have started this Monday), he was doing little until summoned to center stage by the fiery holocausts of Sept.11. "I was driving to work, then I was on television," said Brown by phone from CNN's Atlanta headquarters after completing a three-hour chunk of war coverage. He'd be back. Asked to assess his war anchoring, Brown thought he'd been "a little conservative the first day in characterizing what was happening." He's right, he was oddly flat. "On the plus side," he added, "I think I have been calm. I think I've said in a hundred different ways, this is what we know, this is where we are, we're OK, the country's still out there. I think viewers do take cues from us. If we're nuts, it makes them a little crazy too." In the anomalous way that crises sometimes make careers, Brown's prominence and stature rose dramatically as the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center crashed to the pavement, sending lethal swirls of dust and debris across lower Manhattan. He had done odds and ends for CNN since coming over from ABC News, and anchored its coverage of President Bush's important speech on proposed stem cell research. Yet the terrorist strikes became a bloody signature that announced his presence to most CNN viewers. What a way to sign in. An arriving anchor's nightmare or blessing? "It's both," said Brown, at age 52 a TV journalist for some 25 years, the last decade as a weekend anchor and correspondent for "Nightline" and other ABC News programs, after years of local newscasting in Seattle. "On the one hand, it's certainly the most awful thing imaginable," he said about the terrorism that killed thousands. "On the other hand, you hope that when the big story comes you are able to tell it and get a piece of it. And this is the biggest story in my life. This is an extraordinary—excuse the expression—break. I know I'll look back on it and say how lucky I was." Brown hoped he wasn't sounding callous. On the contrary, journalists are typically conflicted when reporting epic events that severely damage humankind, at once repulsed by the horror and exhilarated by covering it. "I've been very tired, but they have to drag me off the air," Brown said. "This is not Princess Diana. This is not O.J. This is the real deal." A TV studio is no impenetrable bunker, though, and there are few nights that Brown doesn't feel the pain deeply "when I get a few minutes to myself that are quiet." He "cried like a baby" in his hotel room after the Sept. 11 terrorism. "I'm not having an easy time with this emotionally," he said. "I've had some trouble with some of the images, with the planes, the crashes. I had a hard time with the memorial at Yankee stadium, and sometimes when I go home, wherever the bed of the night is, it just comes out. I'm not a machine that does this." Which is why Brown "understood the Rather moment for what it was." He meant Dan Rather, the tense, imploding, sometimes emotional CBS News anchor who was unfairly ridiculed in some quarters for weeping during a late-night chat about the terrorism victims with David Letterman. "You're fatigued, stuff happens," said Brown. "I'm just grateful that it's happened to me in my own hotel room." Yes, hotel. Keeping the New York-based Brown from his wife, Charlotte Raynor, and their 12-year-old daughter, Gabby, are 16-hour days, a separation extended last week when he temporarily moved to Atlanta for war coverage. "It's the mother ship," Brown said. "The generals [military consultants] are here, the maps are here, the toys are here, the anchor desk is set up in a way that's more functional, and all the material comes through here." Toys are hardly what Brown is about, though, as he moves to the forefront of CNN's effort to reverse its recent ratings losses and beat back strong challenges from its younger 24-hour news foes, the Fox News Channel and MSNBC. If he does catch on with viewers, his influence could be profound on younger TV journalists. In copying him, they would be adding smarts to a business in desperate need of IQ points. That he was even hired seems almost miraculous, his scholarly demeanor and slower rhythms the antithesis of what much of TV news appeared to be careening toward before the terrorist attacks. That includes CNN, which recently revamped its format and joined Fox and MSNBC in deploying gaudy, Internet-like graphics that compete with the humans occupying the upper portion of the screen. As Brown typically pauses to reflect with finger pressed to nose, headlines rush by across the bottom of the frame, human brain and technology coexisting uneasily, journalism's Jurassic and Triassic ages somehow meeting in the same picture. Has CNN ordered him to speed up? "Early on I was told I should be a little more urgent than I am," he said. "I nodded and smiled. But at the risk of sounding stupid, I don't have an act. I do me. I talk to people. When it's urgent, it's urgent. I think my bosses have become comfortable with it. Peter [Jennings] would talk to me about it when I was with ABC. He is much more formal. I think he would have liked me to sit up straight and be a more formal person." Brown did heed Jennings' counsel to be "measured all the time [and] don't get ahead," advice he has applied on CNN after earning his big opportunity. From Seattle to 2001, he had been a work so long in progress that divine intervention may have been required. Brown: "I've told people that sometime last spring, God looked down and said, 'It's your moment, it's your time.' " Cross your fingers.

Howard Rosenberg's column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be contacted via e-mail at howard.rosenberg@latimes.com.

-- Anonymous, October 12, 2001