Ted Baxter
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Ted Baxter was a fictional character on the sitcom Mary Tyler Moore. He was played by Ted Knight.
Ted Baxter has become a symbolic figure, and is often used when negatively criticizing media figures, particularly news anchors who are hired for their style and appearance rather than their journalistic ability.[1]
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[edit] Character
Baxter was the overbearing, pompous anchorman for the fictitious station WJM-TV in Minneapolis, Minnesota. While his massive ego consistently fueled his dreams of grandeur, his actual performance was the reverse. A running joke of the show was Ted Baxter's incompetence, evidenced by a steady stream of mispronunciations, malapropisms, and mercurial displays of temper. Constantly in fear of being fired, Ted Baxter is, in fact, the only character of the show to survive the mass layoffs that featured in the final episode, a deft twist of plot that further cemented the satirical comment on mainstream media implicit in his character.[2]
In the first few seasons of the show, the character of Ted Baxter was portrayed in very broad comic terms. Baxter was usually represented as a complete idiot who would mispronounce even the simplest words on the air. Knight became concerned at how the character was being portrayed and at one point considered leaving the show. To give Knight's character a more "well rounded" existence, the show paired him with Georgette, played by Georgia Engel, who brought out some of the more vulnerable aspects of Ted Baxter.[3]
[edit] References in popular culture
On the animated TV series The Simpsons, the recurring character of anchor Kent Brockman is an homage to Ted Baxter. The 2005 film Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy also makes extensive explicit and implicit references to Ted Baxter. In the episode "18th and Potomac" of The West Wing, C.J. Cregg uses Ted Baxter as the paradigm of a bad reporter. In the comedy-horror film Return of the Killer Tomatoes, Dr. Gangreen's underling Igor is shown to hold a diploma from "The Ted Baxter School of Journalism".
[edit] References in media culture
On the MSNBC news program Countdown, Keith Olbermann has used the character to disparage his rival Bill O'Reilly. He regularly refers to O'Reilly as "Ted Baxter" and reads O'Reilly's words in a Baxter imitation.[4]
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ See, e.g. Frank Boyle, IBM, Talking Heads, and Our Classrooms, College English, 55:6 (Oct. 1993), 618-626.
- ^ Dalton, Mary & Laura R. Linder, The Sitcom Reader: America Viewed and Skewed (SUNY Press, 2005), 232-234
- ^ Mary Tyler Moore Show
- ^ See (inter alia) http://mediamatters.org/items/200602240005
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