Election Night marks end of era for Tom Brokaw and TV news

NEW YORK -- As a 16-year-old high school student, Tom Brokaw spent his first working Election Night in a radio station newsroom in Yankton, S.D. He reported results from rural polling places, and ate chicken catered from Kip's Blue Moon restaurant.

His last Election Night will be considerably grander.

NBC News is building a huge temple of democracy at New York's Rockefeller Center. A giant jigsaw-puzzle map of the United States will cover the famed ice skating surface and the General Electric building will be the backdrop for an electronic bar graph tracking the Bush-Kerry fight.

And when either candidate reaches the magic mark of 270 electoral votes, fireworks will explode over the New York City skyline.

OK, that last part's a fib.

But you get the idea.

NBC is expecting a big night for TV viewers, and Brokaw will be at the center of it all.

Election Night will also mark the end of an era in broadcast journalism. For more than two decades, the three biggest networks have turned to the same men to anchor coverage of important news stories -- Brokaw, Peter Jennings and Dan Rather.

This should be Brokaw's last hurrah, since he steps down as NBC's chief anchorman Dec. 1. By Election Day 2008, certainly one and maybe all three network faces will be different. Rather turns 73 on Halloween and is fighting for his future after CBS's botched story on President Bush's National Guard service. Jenning is 66.

"It's a natural transition and it's a new generation taking over," said Brokaw, 64. "I had my opportunity when I replaced John (Chancellor). Dan replaced Walter (Cronkite)."

What Brokaw has found most touching are the moments in airports -- most recently Phoenix after the final presidential debate and Los Angeles -- where folks approached him to say they'll miss seeing him on television.

"That probably means more to me than anything we could do around here because I've always felt that the essence of television news (is) it's a mass medium," he said. "We are connected from these large, glittering, bells-and-whistles sets in New York to ordinary households in the Southwest, the Midwest, to barrooms and schools and other places.

"They rely on us," he said. "You feel at the end of having done it all these years that if people still have faith in what you've done and feel a personal connection, and feel it so strongly that they're willing to come up to you and express that, that's very gratifying."

His biggest disappointment after two decades anchoring "Nightly News" is that the broadcast is still 30 minutes long and not an hour.

On Election Night, his sidekick in an anchor booth overlooking the rink will be Tim Russert. Brokaw's eventual replacement, Brian Williams, will report that night from a nearby booth adjacent to the rink.

NBC will almost certainly be the most-watched network that night, and not for nostalgic reasons. Brokaw has been lengthening NBC's lead in the evening news ratings race in recent months, and it has been the network of choice for most big political events this year.

Citing an NBC News poll that found 74 percent of Americans who said the election was very important to them, Brokaw said the last time he saw such a tuned-in electorate was during the 1968 Vietnam-era campaign between Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey.

"Here you have two men of privilege, both from Yale University, both from the same fraternity, members of Skull & Bones, with distinctly different points of view about how the world should take shape in the next four years and what the place of the United States should be in it," he said.

"That's a story of almost Shakespearean proportion, when you think about it," he said. "And that's the story that we need to tell."

Brokaw waves off the idea of a "Churchillian farewell" at the end of next month, but you can certainly expect the occasion to be marked on several NBC News broadcasts. He's not retiring; Brokaw plans to continue to write books and work on documentaries for NBC News.

To see him immediately after Dec. 1, you'll have to travel.

Brokaw is already planning a fishing trip to New Zealand, and mountain-climbing expeditions to Argentina and Chile. A recent trip to Los Angeles to visit his daughter and her family reminded him of other obligations.

He arrived in time for dinner and took his grandchildren to school the next day. Then he took the next flight out.

"I'm kind of a fly-by grandparent, and I don't like that very much," he said.

A fellow adventurer has already called to assign Brokaw a 12-step program for easing into his new life.

The first step?

"Walk out the door," he said.

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On the Net:

http://www.msnbc.com/

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EDITOR'S NOTE -- David Bauder can be reached at dbauder"at"ap.org