Brokaw on the Media’s Disconnect

Tom Brokaw knows how to spin a good yarn.

We were chatting at Washington’s Newseum, where he was helping celebrate the centennial of my alma mater, the Columbia School of Journalism, when the longtime NBC anchor described how he and Walter Cronkite once escaped the craziness of Louisville on Kentucky Derby weekend by hitching a ride on a hot-air balloon.

Brokaw seems at ease after so many years in the Nightly News trenches, traveling around the country for occasional specials and promoting his latest book. And he delivered some biting observations about the news business in a video interview with my colleague Howard Kurtz for The Daily Beast.

Most Americans are not as ideologically divided as the pugilistic pundits they watch on television, Brokaw says. They feel disconnected from the “closed game” of politics, which has “its own language” and “its own culture.”

He is oh so right about that. When I watch cable going crazy over the latest Etch a Sketch comment or insult to Ann Romney, I often wonder what this has to do with the problems of ironworkers in Ohio or schoolteachers in Florida. Our media culture seems built these days on arguments, not solutions.

Brokaw tries to dismiss the polarization—at his own MSNBC as well as Fox News—as nothing new. “Before Rush Limbaugh, there was Walter Winchell,” he says. Maybe, but that was before we all had media in our face 24/7.

The worst symbol of the out-of-touch media, in Brokaw’s view, is the celebrity-filled White House Correspondents Dinner. He calls it “an exercise simply in hedonism.”

Tom’s solution? He long ago stopped attending.