MUIR ANCHORS A NEW ERA AT ABC NEWS
Earlier this year, David Muir spent weeks studying Spanish to prepare for his interview with Pope Francis in August, sitting down with a tutor several hours a week and practicing the language while strolling the streets of Manhattan.
The 41-year old anchor of ABC’s World News Tonight spent a semester in Salamanca, Spain, as a college student, and a rusty bit of the language was still rattling around in his head. But being able to make small talk in the pope’s native tongue more proficiently, Muir figured, might trigger clarity about the man who had never before given an interview to a U.S. TV network.
Good thing, too. The pope wasn’t about to conduct an interview without a quick measure of the man who would query him for an hour. “We’re inside the Vatican walls and they send me outside to this courtyard and tell me the pope is going to emerge any second,” Muir says in his Manhattan office. “I’m standing there. And about 20 minutes go
by, and the door opens. Instead of the pope, I get one hand that waves me in. So I walk through the door and standing right behind the door was Pope Francis. He simply wanted to meet me before we get in front of all these cameras. I knew I had only those few moments to put him at ease.”
Muir’s first words: “Su sancti
dad. Es un honor concerlo.” (Your Holiness. It’s an honor to meet you.)
Muir’s preparation for the interview — a big coup for the network ahead of the pope’s visit to the U.S. in September — is characteristic of the all-consuming ardor with which he approaches his job, colleagues and current and former bosses say.
The dapper newsman was named anchor of World News To
night a year ago, slipping into the august chair occupied by the likes of Peter Jennings, Diane Sawyer and Frank Reynolds. And the show, colleagues and bosses say, has shifted to reflect Muir’s restless pace, love of storytelling and penchant for on-site reporting.
“He’s the epitome of what a modern anchor needs to be,” says James Goldston, president of ABC News, who appointed Muir to the job. “He’s happy shooting on his little camera or cellphone.”
The Syracuse native was clearly groomed for the job, anchoring on weekends for nearly three years and racking up frequent-flier miles with assignments around the globe. But his appointment also speaks volumes about ABC bosses’ desire to reinvigorate the program, attract younger viewers and increase its audience through social media and compelling video — an approach that may appeal to fast-churn audiences but alarms traditionalists.
“He was a natural choice,” Goldston says. “He’s been preparing for this a long time. It wasn’t a difficult decision.”
World News Tonight has gained about 500,000 viewers since Muir’s arrival, a metric the Disney-owned network likes to trumpet as Muir enters his second year in the job. But the program still trails perennial leader NBC News, even as NBC had to introduce a new anchor, Lester Holt, in July after Brian Williams was suspended for lying about his role in news events.
“I’d be lying if I didn’t acknowledge that I feel personally some of that pressure,” Muir says. “But this is the most competitive evening news race in a decade, and it’s upping everyone’s game.”
Greeting a reporter in a pair of desert boots and straight-fit jeans, Muir looks every part the youthful, smartphone-era news anchor he has been marketed to be. References to his bountiful hair and central-casting looks are plastered all over the Internet. Talk show host Bill Maher once called him the “Ken Doll” anchor.
But he’s no broadcasting babe in the woods. Like Jennings, Muir had an interest in TV journalism that was sparked early. As a kid, he watched local news religiously and liked to play reporter, interviewing his sister’s friends. He wrote to local TV stations, and CBS affiliate WTVH gave him an internship after he turned 13. He continued to work there during school breaks and was hazed by staffers with a growth chart, he says. “What drew me to that was the notion that these journalists were out there seeing the world,” Muir says. “I did see the power in the storytelling and that they were seeing it firsthand.”
And he has always been a storyteller. “When she’d get home from work, my mom would say, ‘Can you just give me five minutes?’ because I’d be waiting at the door with a million stories.”
Muir was hired by the station before he graduated from Ithaca College. After five years there, WCVB in Boston hired him as weekend anchor. Candy Altman, vice president at Hearst Television who hired Muir at WCVB, recalls reviewing piles of tapes but not being satisfied with the candidates. Muir’s tape caught her eye because it “didn’t look like it was prepared by an agent.” (Muir says he didn’t have an agent at the time.)
“As soon as I started looking at it, wow,” she says. “He was still not polished yet as an anchor. But there was just something about the way he communicates and his reporting.
“David knows how to get people to talk to him. Getting people to trust you and open up to you is a skill, and David has that skill.”
His ambition was evident early on. He was a “go-getter,” Altman says. His work covering the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — Muir reported from Doha, Qatar — was noticed by ABC network officials.
ABC hired him in August 2003, and he soon became one of most highly traveled correspondents, reporting from New Orleans during Katrina, Mogadishu, Fukushima, Tahrir Square in Egypt.
Sawyer, who preceded Muir, says Muir’s deep and wide involvement in story production stood out. “I see his energy everywhere,” she says. “He has an unequal stamina.”
Muir’s ascent at ABC News at a relatively young age has raised some eyebrows among media critics. “The reductio ad absurdum of the good-looking white-male anchor is David Muir,” wrote media critic Frank Rich in a New York magazine piece that lamented the decline of network evening news. “His relatively modest reporting résumé didn’t even include a stint as a White House correspondent.
“Muir’s World News Tonight takes the network anchor’s role back full circle to its origins — a smooth newscaster hopscotching the world for headlines,” he wrote.
Kate O’Brian, president of Al Jazeera America who worked with Muir in her prior job as senior vice president of ABC News, doesn’t buy that interpretation. Muir’s on-camera cool belies his immersive style, she says. “If he weren’t interested (in being) on camera, he’d be an unbelievable executive producer,” she says. “When he was a reporter, he’d never turn down an assignment.”
More broadly, ABC News’ quickened style also feeds into traditionalists’ fears that network evening newscasts — the profession’s standard bearer — are, as a group, taking a video- and socialmedia-centric turn that softens the definition of news.
Andrew Tyndall, an analyst who watches evening news programs and sells content data to TV networks, says World News
Tonight is now airing a “non-traditional newscast” under Muir. (Tyndall’s customers include NBC News and CBS News but not ABC News.)
“It has a different sense of what news is,” he says. “They’re not using TV to cover general stories. They’re looking for what has most TV appeal and downplaying the stories that don’t. If you want to get major stories of the day, you don’t go to ABC.”
Muir scoffs at such criticism, citing his reports from the Hungarian border covering Syrian refugees and the work of ABC colleagues in Damascus. “You’d be hard-pressed to tell them what they’re doing is soft news,” he says. “I think it’s easy for people to say that because they are not the ones out there putting their lives in danger.”
“This is the most competitive evening news race in a decade, and it’s upping everyone’s game.”
David Muir