Dragging Anchors: I Made the News Today...
For decades America's news anchors have been respected and authoritative figures. But as the number of viewers plummets, a new type of celebrity is reading the news.
By Leonard Doyle
Published: 05 July 2007
When the handsome Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa announced that he and his wife were splitting up last month, one of the first journalists on the story was Mirthala Salinas, the anchor for the Spanish language Telemundo channel.
Sharing the news with her viewers she deadpanned it, as though reporting a forest fire in Topanga canyon threatening some celebrity homes. What Salinas failed to mention, though,was that she was the other woman, and that they had been in an adulterous relationship for the past two years.
News of the affair sizzled across SoCal, as southern California is known on the news channels, as the Mayor confirmed it and pleaded for privacy "for his children". It was a rare occasion in which the Anglo community was paying attention to what was going on in the parallel universe of LA's Spanish speakers. The Los Angeles Times even put the story on the front page along with a lot of hand-wringing at the inappropriateness of it all.
"There really is no question that this is unacceptable," clucked Kelly McBride, a self-appointed media watchdog. "You can't sleep with your sources."
The world of the news anchor, born of the idea that the news is a public trust, is in freefall. Today's news presenters like the much-criticised Katie Couric of CBS News and the idolised Anderson Cooper of CNN, are the creation of the media campaigns that the old Hollywood studios used to manufacture their stars.
Dan Rather complained that the decision to bring in Couric as his replacement to anchor The CBS Evening News represented a desire "to dumb it down, tart it up". He may well have a point. The old world that Rather represents is long gone. I once met him in his cosy, windowless office just off the main CBS newsroom on West 57th Street in New York. His room was furnished like a gentleman's club, all dark wood and leather armchairs while an aromatic candle burnt near by. At a minute to six, he walked the 10 or so steps to his anchor's chair where he delivered the news straight in an east Texas drawl.
For a time he finished every broadcast with the word "Courage" until the mockery got too much. Then on his final CBS Evening News broadcast, he signed off for the last time with "Courage", linking it to the attacks of 11 September 2001 and the courage of his fellow journalists in reporting the news.
This is not a characteristic readily associated with the newest crop of TV anchors. With his prematurely grey head of hair and steel blue eyes, the newest star, Anderson Cooper, gazes from the cover of June's issue of Vanity Fair magazine. No bad dye jobs for the man People magazine has named one of the "sexiest men alive". "I don't get the appeal," he protests, "I am pale and skinny with grey hair".
What CNN is doing, says the media critic Neal Gabler, is to turn the news into a backdrop for its handsome young star. Whether he is in Baghdad, London or Sri Lanka "these are locations for the movies in which Cooper plays, effectively foregrounding the anchor while back grounding the news," says Gabler.
Young people find news a turn- off, the thinking goes, but they love celebrities, and Cooper is fast being made into an international celebrity. He pops up on Oprah, the The Daily Show, and Jay Leno's Tonight Show. There are billboards in virtually every city where he looks out soulfully while advertising the channel's signature Anderson Cooper 360 degrees show. There is even an "Anderson for President" poster on sale as well as online gossip sites charting his every move. He is "a god among men" says one of his blogger fans.
One of the low points of his career, as far as his critics are concerned, was a Mother's Day segment in which he interviewed his own mother, saying afterwards: "How many anchors would have their mother on the programme?" When Cooper showed up in the "spin room" after a recent presidential debate in New Hampshire, he caused as much interest as some of the presidential candidates.
Then there is the added frisson of the sexual orientation of the pin-up newsman who has just turned 40. He won't talk about it, but everyone seems to have an opinion as to whether he is actually America's first gay anchor. "Absolutely," is the answer I received in an unscientific straw poll.
What is certain is that Cooper reflects the rapidly changing world of US television news in which the highly paid anchors are really aggressively marketed stars, who may or may not have a background in journalism. Take Lauren Jones, the star of Fox's upcoming reality TV show Anchorwoman. The bikini model's previous assignment was as "eye candy" for the World Wrestling Entertainment channel where she conducted backstage interviews and made eye-popping announcements in the testosterone-charged ring.
She has a total lack of journalism experience, but has been assigned to a local Texas TV station to report the news. The juiciest of her on-air clashes with the station's journalists will then be broadcast nationally in the show Anchorwoman.
Jones has been reporting for KYTX for about a week now and the station's competitors are already up in arms. "What they're doing is making a mockery of every legitimate local news station in the country, the people that work there and the viewers whose trust they and we, as an industry, try to earn every day," said Brad Streit, of KLTV-TV.
The reality is that they are terrified by their own plummeting ratings and are probably scouring the cable channels for their own eye candy. In the old days the news networks saw their role as keeping a sharp check on the rich and powerful and their anchors had enough gravitas and credibility to be trusted by the nation. Walter Cronkite was famously the conscience of the nation, who reported from London at the height of the Second World War and stiffened the spine of Americans who might have preferred to sit that one out.
Those who followed him, Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather and the late Peter Jennings were newsmen who had earned their spot in front of the teleprompter by covering wars and White House scandals. Though much mocked towards the end of his career, the folksy Rather was known for a long time as "the most trusted man in America". He earned his spurs reporting on the Kennedy assassination, and he also covered the Vietnam War. As the CBS White House correspondent during Watergate, he had the nation on the edge of its chairs with his hostile confrontations with President Nixon. Only then was he allowed to sit in the anchor's chair. Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings were also experienced newsmen as well as TV hunks. Brokaw worked in local television all over the country and Jennings, with his good looks and baritone voice, was dispatched to the Middle East where he was a reporter for seven years.
The network news shows still attract a bigger audience each evening than any other regularly scheduled programme on TV. And when a big story breaks, Americans turn in droves to their nightly news anchors. However, the big newscasts actually lost about 40 per cent of their audience between 1981 and 2001.
Where it all went wrong is much debated, but the news channels are acutely aware that almost nobody young is watching the news networks any more. The average age of viewers for ABC and NBC is around 60 and on CBS - even with Katie Couric replacing Dan Rather on the screen, it is just over 60. The cable networks CNN and Fox are much the same.
And with the death of the old-style news anchor comes the rise of the celebrity anchor and the TV executives' hope that the new stars of news "start throwing off heat" and bring the viewers back again.
Mirthala Salinas: Reporter and the Mayor
At 4 pm on 8 June, the Mayor of Los Angeles Antonio Villaraigosa issued a terse statement announcing that he and his wife, Corina, were separating after 20 years of marriage. Two hours later, the Telemundo anchor Mirthala Salinas delivered the bombshell to her Spanish-language viewers on the evening news. "The rumours were true," she declared, introducing the story as a "political scandal" that had left "many people with their mouth open".
What Salinas, 35, did not reveal was that she was the cause of the split. She and the 54-year-old Mayor had been conducting a relationship since she was a political reporter. The affair has been an open secret around LA's city hall for weeks and Mr Villaraigosa officially confirmed it this week.
The anchor issued a statement afterwards: "I first got to know the Mayor at a professional level, where we went on to become friends," she said.
Salinas said she hoped "everyone can understand and respect my desire to maintain my privacy".
Kyra Phillips: The Bathroom Indiscretions
On 30 October, "audio difficulties" left viewers across the US watching President George Bush give a speech, while listening to Kyra Phillips' candid bathroom chat with a colleague. The mishap, dubbed "Kyra Phillips, live from a bathroom near you", was recently voted the funniest YouTube video of all time.
During the 90-second conversation, which interrupted the President's speech to mark the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, Phillips could clearly be heard extolling her husband's virtues, before calling her sister-in-law a "control freak".
Oblivious to the millions of CNN viewers listening to her conversation, the 38-year-old newsreader waxed lyrical on the subject of men, gushing: "I'm
very lucky. My husband is handsome, loving... passionate, compassionate, great, great human being. They're hard to find. Yup. But they are out there."
A zipper was then heard being undone, with Phillips spared further indignity when an unknown woman interrupted her, insisting: "Your mic is on. Turn it off. It's been on the air."
Mika Brzezinski, MSNBC's Morning Joe: The Angry Presenter
One US television news anchor has become an icon for many by refusing to begin a news bulletin with the release of the celebrity heiress Paris Hilton ahead of news from Iraq.
With undisguised anger, the co-host on MSNBC's Morning Joe programme Mika Brzezinski refused to read the script she was handed, grabbed a cigarette lighter and tried to set it on fire onscreen and eventually crumpled it up in a ball.
"No, I hate this story and I don't think it should be our lead," said Ms Brzezinski, the daughter of Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was National Security Adviser under the former President Jimmy Carter. The first time the story came up, Ms Brzezinski refused to read it.
When it came up again at the top of the next bulletin she took a fellow anchor's cigarette lighter and tried unsuccessfully to burn the script. The third time around, she took the script and fed it into a paper shredder.
