Anchors as Rock Stars

I can not watch any of the retrospective or who-haa going on regarding Tom Brokaw's "retirement." It stuns me at the adulation and self-promotion that a simple retirement has generated. People are behaving like it is the death of a close friend, admittedly I never understood the whole Princess Di thing with the teddy bears and flowers. If the self-promotion by NBC is peeled away, are people really that interested in a multi-millionaire's "news reader's" retirement?

I just can't get the image of Jack Nicholson in Network out of my head. This multi-million dollar annual salary anchor (Nicholson) sniffs (doing his best Marie Antoinette impression) his way through a newsroom that is being devastated by cost cutting layoffs; never so much as considering that a single one of his annual millions could have spared a dozen jobs of his co-workers. Or is this just more the cult of celebrity that popular society has devolved into? In the words of proto-thug Ron Artest, "Where's the camera?"