We’ve lost two icons of media in just as many weeks, but (sadly) the wrong one will leave the much bigger legacy on the pop cultural landscape.
When you contrast two figures as stylistically and substantially different as Dick Clark (the New Year’s Eve countdown guy, the guy who paved the way for American Idol, and the mentor of Ryan Seacrest) and Mike Wallace (the 60 Minutes iconoclast of serious journalism), you really can see how different the two men were despite blossoming in roughly the same era. In my opinion (but not my preference), I look at Mike Wallace as the past and Dick Clark as the future.
Dick Clark used a breezy style to cover puff pieces and try to be liked by as many Americans as possible while (essentially) saying absolutely nothing for half a century on television and radio. He went out of his way to never ruffle anyone’s feathers, and seemingly had no values besides “entertaining America” (roughly the equivalent of being a department store mannequin glad to be in the store window and unwilling to say or do anything to jeopardize being there). By all following logic, he’s a man that shouldn’t leave much of a legacy at all…and yet what is TV’s glut of uber-popularity karaoke contest television (American Idol, The Voice, The X-Factor, Singing Bee, the singing parts of America’s Got Talent that win nearly every year) except for slightly updated versions of Clark’s American Bandstand? Sure, they’ve been given a populist twist by going after unknowns (who mostly stay unknown even after they’ve “won”), but without Clark’s paving the way for “say nothing” entertainment, these shows wouldn’t be in their heyday now.
Contrast that with Mike Wallace, an old school newsman who never pulled any punches whether he was interviewing Vladimir Putin or Tobacco company executives. [Even when Wallace interviewed celebrities, he used the polar opposite of Clark’s patronizing, faux-cuddly style as he really tried to get at the root of who Barbara Streisand and Bill O’Reilly actually were.] He was part of the last wave of “investigative journalism,” meaning reporters that aren’t merely reporting stories after they’ve already happened (hurricanes, gang shootings), but actually go out there to find out what the stories are (cigarettes kill people, Putin curtailing Russian citizen’s rights). He stands for a type of Edward R. Murrow, corporations-be-damned reporting that is almost non-existent in today’s television news media that is less independent from corporate sponsors than ever before.
I’ll miss Wallace’s type of reporter that isn’t merely content to just chase the stories that have already broken, and is pretty much all that’s left today on “liberal” news outlets like CNN and CBS. [I like Anderson Cooper, the man who gave a pitifully haphazard obituary to Wallace in Entertainment Weekly, but is he a real journalist anymore? No, and his increasingly-obvious interest in celebrity shows it.] I can see a future in which no one wants to get their boots dirty enough to find out if a corporation is lying about the dangers of their products (or nobody cares), but everyone wants to interview the latest celebrity. That’s why Dick Clark has a heir apparent in Ryan Seacrest, and I don’t see anybody out there like Mike Wallace.