What's the News About the Nightly News?

This month, Anne exchanges email with Tom Brokaw, anchor and managing editor, NBC Nightly News With Tom Brokaw.

Anne Americans have never been all that interested in foreign news. But in light of September 11, the current confrontations in Israel, Iraq, and North Korea, and Americans' intellectual unpreparedness to cope, do you regret that over the past 20 years, big media reduced foreign coverage because editors, executives, and producers had decided that their audiences just weren't interested?

Tom Actually, the two subjects that were not ignored were the Middle East and terrorism. All of the networks did a substantial amount of reporting on the Taliban in Afghanistan, the rise of Osama bin Laden, and the failure of peace efforts between the Palestinians and the Israelis. What we no longer do is use the incidental or episodic foreign development as a filler in a broadcast. Having said that, I agree that given a choice between a routine domestic story and a foreign story, we're much more likely to go domestic. Foreign-news coverage tends to be crisis driven. Moreover, foreign policy has been only a faint image on the campaign radar screens in the last three election cycles, and that has added to the public malaise on global developments. One of the many changes in the American culture following September 11 was an increased appetite for foreign news. I suspect that will remain for as long as the terror threat seems viable -- which could be a long time.

Anne On the one hand, with 24-7 news channels and Internet news sites, consumers can completely customize their personal input of news. On the other hand, while we've all read about the imminent demise of the nightly network news as a format, you're coming off an all-time ratings high, and during crises, Americans do seem to crave a trusted source -- someone like you. Is this a contradiction?

Tom A well-organized summary of the day's most important developments still has a place in this crowded news and information universe. My guess is that most viewers are also dedicated consumers of other sources of news. The evening broadcasts simply complement their other news resources. For the foreseeable future, I believe that there will be a place for the nightly network broadcast, but its chances of survival would be greatly enhanced if it were expanded to one hour. That said, I'm not confident that will happen in my professional life.

Anne When it comes to the civic discourse, isn't it a bad thing that TV news lost the semiexemption from conventional profit margins that it had in the 1960s and 1970s?

Tom During the 1960s and 1970s, the network news was essentially a duopoly: NBC and CBS, with ABC still being a relatively minor player. The broadcast networks were so rich that they were willing to indulge their news divisions with fat budgets to shore up their "public service" image with Washington overseers. In fact, a staggering amount of money was spent, not on the essence of editorial coverage but rather on the trappings of it: chartered planes, layers of unnecessary personnel, redundancies in the assignment organization. The greater financial test, I believe, is whether the networks will continue to find room for news broadcasts that are in the public interest, if not high on the popular-issues list. For example, the future of energy consumption is not a subject that's likely to generate huge audiences, but it is an indisputably important subject. Even a low-rated network-news broadcast attracts several million people, especially when it is recycled across cable platforms. Will networks be willing to underwrite those broadcasts? It is increasingly a difficult proposition.

Anne Do you think that the "right here, right now" urgency in our culture is more bad than good? Worse than it was 10 or 20 years ago? And do you think that anti-American sentiment around the world is just a price of empire?

Tom I'm not sure that the American culture has ever been anything but right here, right now. It's part of our national character, but it is accelerated by the tools of modern technology, which are designed for speed and dispersal. The second part of your question, about anti-American sentiment, is much more complex. I do think that it is partly the price of empire, partly envy, and partly the result of a kind of American myopia in which we're determined to see the rest of the world only through our prism.

Want to Know How She Does It?

This month, Anne exchanges email with Allison Pearson, author of the best-selling novel I Don't Know How She Does It.

Anne One day, a few years after I had left my executive job at Viacom to start my own company, I was on the subway. It was midday, and I was sitting on a train with a funky grab bag of ordinary middle-class people. According to the norms by which I previously had some standing in the world, I no longer existed. I had to construct and, more important, believe in a new definition of success. When I read I Don't Know How She Does It, I was delighted by how exquisitely you captured the crux of that struggle. How would you define success for a (Western, professional) woman of the 21st century?

Allison Success for a Western woman is still bound up with a traditional male idea of achievement. Basically, women entering corporations are obliged to say, "Unsex me here!" like doomed Lady Macbeths. The price of competing equally with men is to remain childless - but men don't have to pay that price. Gender plays a big part: Women bring new life into the world, and I suspect that they have a surer grasp of what's really important. Sucking up to superiors, playing office politics, and sitting through time-wasting meetings that are really male arenas of grooming and display - women lose patience with all of that big-ape rubbish once they've had kids and need to get home to read them a bedtime story.

Anne I think you're onto something with how intolerant women become of time wasting at work after they have children. If we feel as though the work that we do may make a substantive difference in the quality of someone's life, then time away from our kids feels like a reasonable trade-off. But if the job feels socially useless, or worse, then time away from the family feels wasteful and stupid. Do you get the sense that women want something more than just personal "lifestyle" balance?

Allison From talking to women, I got the impression that making large amounts of money is less important than a sense of being appreciated and of working in a personally rewarding environment. Every woman I interviewed wanted greater flexibility in her working life - and was willing to trade pay to get it. Why are companies so damned slow to respond to this need? The passionate response to my novel suggests that both men and women have a profound sense of something being not quite right about the way we live now. There's a feeling that if things don't change, then we could be storing up trouble for ourselves and for future generations.

Anne What about the man's role? In your novel, it felt like Kate didn't seem to respect her husband, Richard, even though he did a pretty good job of holding down the fort while she chugged away at work. He didn't seem as sexy as her almost lover, Jack Abelhammer, the titan of industry, did he?

Allison I don't really believe in the househusband. Here's the problem: Woman wants man to become more domestic, more like a woman, so man familiarizes himself with the laundry basket and becomes more like a woman - and woman no longer wants to have sex with him because he's not enough of a man! It's not fair, but then biology has little to do with justice.

Anne When all is said and done, how do you define success for yourself?

Allison I find the definition changing. A year ago, having I Don't Know become a best-seller would have been near the top of the list. Now I just want my two kids to know that they have their mum back after her long absences spent writing and promoting the novel. You can't imagine how much they hate my computer!

Anne So will you unplug and stay home now?

Allison I did suggest to Anthony, my husband, that I might stay home full-time with the kids, and he got this look on his face - sort of a sphinx with a migraine - and said that he would pay me to go to work. He reckoned that I would be unbearable to live with if I didn't do some kind of job. People have said that Kate Reddy gives up work at the end of the novel, but that isn't so. We leave her knowing that she's going to climb back onto the machine: She can't help herself.

Anne The trick is that the machine that Kate is climbing back onto is one of her own making. By the way, "She Can't Help Herself" would be a great title for your next novel.