THE NATIONAL CAMPFIRE

Let me step out of character for a moment, and point you toward this really wonderful little piece in today's WaPo with a touch of nostalgia. Anne Applebaum writes that what got Rather into trouble was the arrogance that comes from the assumption that a certain amount of credibility and authority comes by definition with being one of the voices of the nation, as the Big Three anchors truly were. Back when the three nightly news shows were essentially splitting the national audience three ways, they had unrivalled credibility and authority.

That's coming to an end, an end, as she and others have pointed out, hastened by CBS's arrogance in this case. What's coming next is only vaguely in sight, but she suggests, and I agree, that it will involve people surfing between outlets all of which have their own point of view and all of which are aggressively checking one another.

Now, in one sense, since I've always taught that the only solution to the inevitable problem of human bias is channel surfing and broad based media consumption, that suits me just fine.

On the other hand, it is hard not to mourn something that's passing here. There were moments of great national trauma, or tragedy -- or joy and triumph, for that matter -- when the nets would suddenly all switch over to a major story, and the national consciousness would be defined by those choices. The Kennedy assassinations. The King assassination. The conventions (but you know how I feel about that.) Challenger. Inaugurals. The ability for the country to be pulled together in quite the same way is beginning to be lost because we are losing the credibility of those who served as the arbiters of what constitutes a story important enough to put everything else aside.

You know I'm not suggesting they don't deserve to lose an awful lot of that credibility. I mean, clearly -- I'm trying to do my little part every day to chip away at it. But there were those moments when you knew the whole country was watching the same thing, and that unity was in and of itself something special. Now, short of a catastrophe along the lines of September 11th, would that happen again?

Just a thought.