Powers applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Performing the News: Identity, Authority, and the Myth of Neutrality, and reported the following:
Ever wonder why broadcast journalists tend to talk alike? Three pages into the sixth chapter of Performing the News, I explore the origins of news anchor voice. More specifically, I trace how General American, a supposedly “accentless” variety of American English, became the broadcast news standard. It’s one of the central themes of my book. The Page 99 Test strikes again. Here’s an excerpt:Visit Elia Powers's website.General American is viewed as broadly palatable and unobjectionable… Many believe it is also the clearest and, to viewers, the most authoritative… Yet General American was not always the broadcast news standard. In radio’s early days, there was little standardization. Provided that journalists sounded well educated, regional dialects were permitted. That changed when stations sought to unite the country around a “correct” form of speech with uniform pronunciation standards. As a journal article from the 1930s explained, radio “offers a standardization which freely admits certain outstanding localisms and regionalisms, crystalizing some, absorbing others,” thus developing “distinctly American speech.”While some norms have changed, General American remains the gold standard in television news. There are practical reasons for this, as I explain in the book. Many on-air journalists begin in small television markets and work their way up. To achieve big-market ambitions, they must appeal to hiring managers and news audiences who live in different regions and have diverse tastes. Sounding geographically ambiguous—like you’re from “everywhere but nowhere,” as one interviewee put it—can be an asset.
In the early twentieth century, many public figures who lived on the East Coast spoke with the British-influenced transatlantic accent. While some viewed that accent as sophisticated, others thought it sounded “artificial and affected” and preferred “pure” Midwestern speech. Sounding vaguely Midwestern became the norm in broadcast news due largely to an influential pronunciation expert from Ohio. John Samuel Kenyon was not the first scholar to reference General American, but he was arguably the most prominent. Kenyon, a linguist and English professor, authored several guides to American English pronunciation. Acknowledging that no official standard existed, he implicitly endorsed how he and other northeast Ohioans spoke as the model. Some linguists, however, dispute that General American ever reflected how people in Ohio—or in any region—actually talked.
Broadcasting companies adopted Kenyon’s guidelines in their speech and language manuals, such as the NBC Handbook of Pronunciation. An NBC executive promoted the ideal as “decent American pronunciation, affected as little as possible by localisms.” Stations established diction and pronunciation courses for announcers and newscasters, sending some to the Midwest to eliminate unwanted regional accents. Radio broadcasters received awards for speech precision and exemplifying proper General American English. Efforts to promote uniformity in pronunciation were largely successful. Standardized speech became the norm on radio and eventually on television, which originally featured regional accents before becoming increasingly homogenized.
General American has long been considered a neutral, accentless way of speaking. However, I argue that it is not neutral. What is considered neutral has historically reflected tastes of white male news managers and assumed tastes of predominantly white, middle- to upper-class audience members. Neutrality implies not taking sides or not having strongly marked characteristics or features. General American privileges ways of speaking associated with educated white Americans.
Audiences are conditioned to view familiar newscaster accents as natural and authoritative, and underrepresented ones as inferior and unprofessional. Yet nearly a century ago, as page 99 shows, new broadcast speech practices did not come naturally to most journalists. They had to learn them.
--Marshal Zeringue
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