Brokaw

"The Brokaw Report: Families in Crisis" on NBC tonight at 8 (WMAR-Channel 2) lays out an all-too-familiar and depressing picture of today's American family, the "walking wounded," anchor Tom Brokaw calls them:* A Missouri family in which both parents work, and their latchkey children take on not only household chores, but the emotional burdens of wondering whether this month the money will run out.* A Camden, N.J., single mother, with four children fathered by three different men, who at 23 is barely out of childhood herself.

You know who I blame for the terrible tone in American politics? Tom Brokaw. No, not the man himself, but what he represents. Since Dan Rather famously beclowned himself, Mr. Brokaw stands as the last of the respected "voice of God" news anchors (CBS News executive Don Hewitt's phrase). These were the oracles who simply declared what was news and what wasn't. Walter Cronkite, the prize of the breed, used to end his newscasts, "And that's the way it is" -- as if he were speaking not just with journalistic but also epistemological and ontological authority.

"Pearl Harbor: Legacy of Attack" has as much to tell us about the relationship among media, national memory and the rituals of holiday remembrance in American life today as it does the events of Dec. 7, 1941. The two-hour special that premieres tonight features NBC anchorman Tom Brokaw telling us what happened at Pearl Harbor that day and what it all means. Part of Brokaw's authority, of course, comes from his best-selling books with the men and women who fought World War II, "The Greatest Generation" and "The Greatest Generation Speaks."

Food, spies, money, politics, education and war are on the agenda for the sixth season of the Baltimore Speakers Series, which returns in October at the Meyerhoff Symphony Hall. Among the eight luminaries who will be speaking in the series sponsored by Stevenson University are former Washington schools superintendent Michelle Rhee, former CIA operative Valerie Plame and her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, and sustainable food champion Michael Pollan. In addition, former U.S. military commander in Afghanistan Stanley McChrystal will speak, as will Azar Nafisi, author of "Reading Lolita in Tehran," and Ron Chernow, biographer of business titans J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller.

The worst thing that can happen to any city is to have a major disaster.The second worst thing is to have the media show up in droves to cover it.At a time when a city's ability to provide essential services to its own citizens is shattered or severely taxed, more than a thousand reporters, photographers, producers, editors and technicians can suddenly appear with a long list of demands.And we can be demanding.We need hotel rooms, preferably near the epicenter of the disaster.We need good phone communications for ourselves and for our laptop computers.

NBC anchor Tom Brokaw announced yesterday that he will step down after the November 2004 presidential elections, and he will be succeeded by the man long presumed to be his heir - Brian Williams, the anchor for sister station MSNBC. As recently as last summer, Brokaw mused publicly about how long he would stay in the television news business; he also took a 10-week vacation, further stoking speculation that he might be poised to leave the field altogether. Because he has helped to establish NBC Nightly News at the top of the ratings, his departure has not been hastened by the network.

THE NO. 1 best-selling book this week is "The Greatest Generation," by NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw. The most acclaimed and second-highest grossing film of 1998 was "Saving Private Ryan."Though Steven Spielberg's film is fiction and Mr. Brokaw's book is something akin to oral history, they have in common a fashionable theme: The nobility of those who served in the armed forces during World War II and, by extension, Americans of that age in general.You might describe this perspective as GI envy.

LOS ANGELES -- NBC and PBS will cooperate on next year's national political conventions under an unusual arrangement that will put Tom Brokaw and other NBC correspondents on PBS' "McNeil/Lehrer Report."Under the plan announced yesterday, the PBS program will come on the air around 7 p.m. with convention coverage. Anchors Robert McNeil and Jim Lehrer will be reporting from a studio in the convention city. Brokaw and the other NBC correspondents will be at the convention hall.At 9:30 or 10 p.m., Brokaw and the NBC personnel will do their own program for their network while PBS maintains its coverage.

The title of Tom Brokaw's new book "Boom! Voices of the Sixties" suggests another "generations" book, an account of baby boomers creating the 1960s and vice versa. But it isn't -- not exactly. For Brokaw, "Boom!" refers not to boomers but rather to explosive differences before and after the decade's "volcanic center" of 1968. As for boomers, if one adheres to the standard demographic definition as the generation born from 1946 through 1962, then perhaps half the people whose voices are invoked here are boomers' older brothers and sisters, such as Pat Buchanan (69 years old)

Wanted: a few good white people.That's the theme of an advertising campaign for a Chicago suburb that serves as the focus for a heavily promoted NBC News report on race titled "Why Can't We Live Together?"The population of the suburb -- Matteson, Ill. -- is "tipping" to majority black, anchorman Tom Brokaw says in his introduction, and the village trustees have launched a billboard campaign to attract white homeowners to replace some of those who have fled as black people moved in.Matteson seems like it could be an excellent launching pad for the kind of discussion on race that President Clinton urged just last week.

NEW YORK - Former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw and his wife escaped injury in a three-car accident on a New York City highway that killed one woman and injured a mail truck driver Friday. The accident happened about 1 p.m. as Brokaw was driving in the left lane of the northbound Bruckner Expressway in the Bronx. The Brokaws said they noticed a spool of cable bouncing in the far right lane, which caused the driver of the green SUV to lose control as she tried to avoid it. The Brokaws said the SUV slid into the middle lane, forcing a mail truck into the couple's lane.

Like any good journalist, which he indisputably is, Tom Brokaw has a tough time with the word "I." Using "I" means talking about yourself, and saying what you think and feel and believe. It's a great word for a talk-show host. It's a terrible word for a veteran TV journalist who's spent the past 40 years keeping onlookers out of the sanctum sanctorum inside his head. On TV 1968 With Tom Brokaw airs at 9 p.m. Sunday on the History Channel.

The title of Tom Brokaw's new book "Boom! Voices of the Sixties" suggests another "generations" book, an account of baby boomers creating the 1960s and vice versa. But it isn't -- not exactly. For Brokaw, "Boom!" refers not to boomers but rather to explosive differences before and after the decade's "volcanic center" of 1968. As for boomers, if one adheres to the standard demographic definition as the generation born from 1946 through 1962, then perhaps half the people whose voices are invoked here are boomers' older brothers and sisters, such as Pat Buchanan (69 years old)

No anchorman in the history of American television has ever been as groomed and prepped as Brian Williams was to take over NBC Nightly News from Tom Brokaw last night. The transition was announced 2 1/2 years ago, and for the past 10 years Williams has been sitting in at the Rockefeller Center anchor desk in New York any time Brokaw needed to be away from it. "One of the things we're very proud of is that we've planned for a long time to make this a very smooth, seamless transition," Neal Shapiro, president of NBC News, said this week.

Tom Brokaw's mother once told him a story that helped shape how he approached his work as anchor of NBC Nightly News. His grandfather, she told him long ago, was a South Dakota farmer in the 1920s. One Christmas, he received enough money to buy a crystal radio set. From then on, Brokaw's grandfather listened to news reports on the two-tube contraption "sitting up half the night, headsets on, forgoing sleep, listening through the static." The image of his grandfather listening, fascinated, never faded.

Last week, Dan Rather rocked the television world by announcing that in March he would step down as CBS Evening News managing editor and anchorman, thereby ending the longest tenure as chief news presenter in history. On Wednesday, Tom Brokaw will sign off as anchorman and managing editor of the NBC Nightly News, television's most popular newscast, after 21 years in that job. A report also is expected to be released this week about a 60 Minutes II story focusing on President Bush's military service that was presented on air by Rather and was based upon documents of questionable authenticity.

As a speaker at an April 1999 banquet in Washington, MSNBC anchor Brian Williams delivered one irreverent riff after another, a few of which he directed at his channel's parent network. "I'm cocky about my own employer - there's very little they can do to me, punishment-wise," Williams told the laughing throng of guests, largely print reporters and political figures. "I'm already in cable." Not for long. With NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw's announcement this week that he intends to step down in November 2004, Williams has been tapped to assume a job that he says he has coveted since he was a small boy. He promises that NBC's viewers will not be startled by a brashly different feel to his show.

The Democratic presidential candidates who made their national debuts Sunday in the first of a series of NBC television debates were a less contentious bunch than their predecessors of four Decembers ago. That may be explained by the fact that while they disagree on basic tactics of campaigning, they agree on strategy. They all want to attract the middle-class voters who have drifted away from the party in the past two decades.All, that is, except Edmund G. "Jerry" Brown. We don't know what he wants.

PHOENIX - It had been years since Glen Campbell made news, yet all it took to wangle the singer back into the limelight was a mug shot - a startlingly unflattering one. Now, after a series of humiliations that began with his arrest for extreme drunken driving in November, leading to a month in rehabilitation and a short stint in jail, the singer reclines in the overstuffed den of his 10,000-square-foot Italianate manse, the television tuned to weather, his...

President Bush doesn't read the newspapers or pay much attention to other media reports, he told Fox News Channel's Brit Hume last week. The president said aides deliver the news themselves. Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. doesn't much care for the state's two largest newspapers. They invariably seek out ways, he believes, to say bad things about his administration. In returning from Iraq early last month, a bipartisan group of U.S. representatives promptly denounced the media's coverage of the tenuous postwar period as unreasonably gloomy.