[Infowarrior] - Jim Lehrer's last anchor broadcast tonight

[Richard Forno]

(Yup, I'll be there, too. --- rick)

Jim Lehrer on his last turn at PBS anchor desk tonight

http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/zontv/2011/06/jim_lehrer_steps_down_from_pbs.html

I know where I'll be tonight at dinnertime: In front a TV set tuned to PBS to see Jim Lehrer's last broadcast as a regular anchor on public television.

Friday (June 3) is Lehrer's final turn as a regularly scheduled anchor on PBS after 36 years in the job. And to me, that certainly marks the end of an era in TV news -- as well as the loss of a TV presence that I came to count on to help me make sense of an increasingly complex and sometimes confusing crush of unfiltered  information.

Lehrer's longevity is unprecedented. Walter Cronkite was the anchor and managing editor of the "CBS Evening News" for 19 years. Tom Brokaw filled the same roles on NBC for 22 years. Lehrer has been on the job on public television since 1975 when he started co-anchoring with Robert MacNeil.

 And he has consistently been a beacon of responsible daily journalism across all that time. No one in TV news takes the journalist's role as a provider of trustworthy information for American voters more seriously than this one-time city editor of the Dallas Times-Herald.

Because he will still play have a voice in editorial decisionmaking and appear occasionally on Friday nights on "NewsHour" to moderate the show's popular segment with David Brooks and Mark Shields, I asked Lehrer this week to describe what exactly happens tonight. Is he really stepping down from the anchor desk? I would hate to mischaracterize this moment of passage in a career as storied as Lehrer's.

"In personal terms, it's huge for me, because I've been doing the daily, or more or less daily, anchoring for 36 years," the 77-year-old Lehrer said in directly answering my question about the importance of what happens on "NewsHour" Friday night.

"To not have that daily responsibility any more is huge," he continued. "It's not unpleasant. It's not a negative. Obviously, this was my decision and I'm getting to do it my way. So, I'm very comfortable about it, and I'm very much at ease about it. But it is huge, and there is no question about it... This is an important milestone in my life."

In early May when Lehrer announced that he would be stepping down from the regular rotation of "NewsHour" anchors, it came as a bit of surprise despite his age. That's because he told me in a widely-quoted January interview that he did not see any end in sight.

"I'm feeling great, " he said. "I'm not tired. And I still hear the sirens. And as long as I hear the sirens, I'll still be there to find out where the hell they're going."

When I asked this week about the seeming change of heart, the University of Missouri graduate said there was no one factor responsible for the decision to end one of the most remarkable runs in TV history tonight.

"The reason is just simply that, you know, I have been doing daily journalism for 52 years," he explained. "And I still get a kick out of it, and I always will. But I just need to step back, I need to slow the pace down a little bit here. And I've been slowing the pace down for the last couple of years. And now, I'm just ready to take some of the final steps."

Lehrer, a prolific author, says, "I have some more books I want to write. And I want to spend some more time doing other things --  some personal things with my family, and my kids and and my grandkids. You know, stuff like that. It's no huge thing, like, 'Oh my God, I was slobbering on the air and now I have to go away.' If I was, I didn't notice it."

Lehrer was away from the anchor desk for three months in 2008 when he underwent heart valve surgery. In December, 2009, the "NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" was renamed the "PBS NewsHour," and he was joined by a panel of anchors that includes Gwen Ifill, Ray Suarez, Jeffrey Brown, Judy Woodruff and Margaret Warner. That quintet remains in place.

"I kind of decided a couple of years ago that I wanted to consider kind of gliding away so to speak," Lehrer says. "And, you know, there can be all kinds of false drama involved in who replaces Anchorperson A and Anchorperson B, and I wanted to make damn sure that this did not happen in our situation. So, I kind of prepared the way, the glidepath."

Lehrer believes the "NewsHour" still has a vital role to play in American life, despite changes in lifestyle and technology that have radically altered the ritual of evening news viewing.

"The thing that people forget is that with all this news coming out -- more and more words, more and more information -- there has to be a trusted source from which this comes," he says."We've spent years developing that trust, and even though people may not sit and watch all these nightly news programs the they used to, they still want to have that source they can trust. They want to be able to say, 'Oh my God, well, this came from PBS or NBC, or fill in the blank, and that means this is something I need to pay attention to on the fact part of it."

 The word "fact" brings an added sense of intensity to Lehrer's voice: "I mean, there's plenty of stuff out there on opinions and analysis and what people think about things," he says. "But the basic facts are another matter. People hear something on the radio or read it in a blog, but they still want to know what the hell the basic facts of the matter are. And that's the purpose, I believe, that the "Newshour' serves -- providing those facts."

The era of fact-based journalism won't end tonight with Lehrer's last regular turn at the PBS anchor desk. But its twilight shadows will certainly deepen with one of its brightest lights signing off.