One Cure for Tighter Budgets: Anchors Away

Imagine for a moment: You’re running a Los Angeles TV station. You’re losing viewers to cable. Revenues are down. And suddenly you wonder:

“Do I really have to pay this sports guy $600,000 a year to read the baseball scores? Do I really have to pay this anchor $750,000 a year to read a couple of lines about a meaningless three-alarm warehouse fire?”

In short, you ask yourself: Would television news broadcasts sink without big-name, celebrity-style anchors?

Of course not. The whole cockeyed belief is being questioned at the highest levels of television these days now that CNN has succeeded by emphasizing news and reducing the importance of anchors--as its coverage of the Gulf War showed.

And on Monday, a significant new challenge to TV’s cult of personality unfolds here when KTLA Channel 5 launches a major morning news series with two anchors virtually unknown in Los Angeles.

Call it the no-name news.

It’s the latest test in a burgeoning trend that is downgrading the importance of anchors--with some star news personalities finding their salaries slashed as networks and local stations seek ways to stay alive in the new world of TV alternatives.

Even if Carlos Amezcua and Barbara Beck don’t succeed as the anchors of Monday’s new, daily two-hour “KTLA Morning News,” the trend of downsizing anchor importance, salaries and egos will continue, except for those few cases when big names can prove that they make a significant difference.

It is unlikely that Los Angeles, in the foreseeable future, will have another anchor to join Paul Moyer and Jerry Dunphy in the $1 million-a-year range.

And the chances are that neither one could land the same salary in today’s climate of financial crisis in traditional TV.

The case for belt-tightening got some more ammunition last week when the Federal Communications Commission officially disclosed what the networks and stations, and just about everybody else in TV, already knew--that declining audiences and revenues will continue.

“Television broadcasting will be a smaller and far less profitable business in the year 2000 than it is now,” said an FCC study, predicting that some weaker stations might “go dark.”

While the FCC study said that most stations in large markets such as Los Angeles will remain profitable, the revenue decline strikes at the very basis for negotiating stratospheric contracts for TV anchors, weather broadcasters and sports reporters.

The logic behind these contracts has always been that since the stations were such cash cows, on-air personalities such as Fred Roggin and Jim Lampley should be rewarded in proportion to the revenues they generate by attracting viewers.

But if revenues and ratings decline, the flip side of that argument is that the personalities should also be subject to proportionate pay cuts.

It seems insane to think that a network would ever agree again to $2-million or $3-million annual contracts for anchors such as Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw, especially since they now are also-rans, some of their colleagues are being let go for economic reasons--and their divisions are hard-pressed to stay afloat.

And local stations can be expected to fight tooth and nail before agreeing to salaries like $500,000, $750,000 and more for a number of news figures, including Tritia Toyota, Bree Walker, Kelly Lange, Hal Fishman, John Beard and Ann Martin.

Some of these--and others--will be quite happy to find themselves staying at their present levels, and not taking a cut, when contract time comes around.

Reports have already emerged that at least several major TV figures in New York earning between $500,000 and $750,000 have been replaced by newscasters who are paid in the $150,000 to $200,000 range.

At the networks, a number of well-known, highly paid on-air personalities have been told bluntly to either take a pay cut--or a hike.

The diminishing impact of many anchors is indicated by the ejection of CBS’ Rather, NBC’s Brokaw and even ABC’s top-rated Peter Jennings from the networks’ once-permanent 7 p.m. news slots in Los Angeles and New York.

In Los Angeles, the 7 p.m. slot now is occupied on the network stations by “Inside Edition,” “Entertainment Tonight” and “Wheel of Fortune.”

While that is unfortunate, downgrading the cult of personality in TV news is not, as CNN has shown. For every Ted Koppel--or Jennings or Rather or Brokaw or Cronkite--there is a celebrity pretender to news prominence, usually on local TV.

It is a situation created by TV, which now, for bottom-line reasons, must break the habit it instilled in viewers of regarding anchors as celebrities. Dunphy, for instance, symbolized Los Angeles TV for years as a star anchor eminence.

Thus, programs like Monday’s new “KTLA Morning News” are a test to see if viewers in the CNN age can be weaned away from the celebrity anchor syndrome that no longer is really profitable for television.

KCBS, for instance, has had a long line of anchors who have failed to lift it out of the ratings cellar, and yet the station--part of a network that is firing good news people left and right--keeps forking out monstrous sums for celebrity-style local anchors. Does this make sense? Isn’t it part of the financial problem?

The lunatic notion that people should be paid $500,000 or more for a mundane chore like reading the news now seems positively obscene as their companies and less fortunate colleagues struggle for survival.

Yet, according to a source, the lowest-paid sports headliner at the local network stations--where Roggin, Todd Donoho and Keith Olbermann hold forth--earns about $550,000 a year.

You can’t blame people for getting what the traffic will allow. But the gravy days are over. And as salaries become more realistic in TV news, we will probably hear fewer beauty queens announce that they want to be anchors. It’s funny how word gets around.