Anchors Are Just High-Paid Lures to Hook Viewers

The latest anchor shake-up at KCBS Channel 2--with Jim Lampley being the loser--affirms the minimal impact local anchors have on the journalism of the newscasts they front.

In England, TV anchors are more aptly titled “presenters.”

On this side of the Atlantic, they could just as accurately be called hosts. Alistair Cooke is more journalistic. Maybe Arsenio Hall too.

With rare exceptions, local anchors are personalities and nothing more, extravagantly paid studio emcees, news readers and chit-chatters who are the human chess pieces that station managers move around in their quest to attract the largest possible audience. Channel 2 has a new news director in John Lippman. Perhaps what it really needs, based on the unsuccessful chess moves, is a grand master.

Nevertheless, the game proceeds.

This is TV’s version of the old bait-and-switch tactic, with an anchor intended to be the tempting lure that hooks viewers, even though he or she has virtually no influence on the caliber of that program’s news-gathering and reporting.

Now you take Lampley, deposed last week from his 5 and 11 p.m. co-anchor thrones and asked to resume the local sportscasting job he held before being promoted. He’s an impressive package: attractive guy, wears a suit well, communicates facilely, reads a nice story, looks intelligent, has a sense of humor, makes good small talk and so on and so on.

These--not reporting skills or any other kind of journalism pedigree--are the only qualities a local anchor requires. Being smart or perceptive is allowed--if you really must --but it’s not a prerequisite.

There’s nothing more subjective than assessing the work of anchors. It’s akin to having a disagreement over which is the better breed, a poodle or a cocker spaniel. Who’s to say?

For example, KABC-TV Channel 7’s Paul Moyer doesn’t do a thing for some viewers. To me, he’s one of the best--a relaxed, agreeable, conversational news presenter who never gets flustered. His 11 p.m. newscasts with Ann Martin, another of my top choices, are primers on amiability. I’d give good old Jerry Dunphy, on medical leave from KCAL Channel 9, the same high grade.

If I had to pick an absolute favorite, however, it would be Colleen Williams at KNBC Channel 4. Now, it’s said by some of her colleagues that, out in the field, Williams has no reporting instincts. Yet in front of that camera, eyes moving from left to right, keeping ad-libs to a minimum, Phi Beta Kappa.

Who needs ace reporters reading the news anyway?

Unlike network anchors, who are sometimes called upon to actually cover crises and other major stories themselves--and to provide texture, context and interpretation--local anchors rarely face a challenge greater than negotiating their latest contract or reading from a TelePrompTer.

For some, even the latter can be a crisis, although it never has been for Lampley who, minus too-frequent coochy-cooing with his 11 p.m. co-anchor wife, Bree Walker, delivered as good a news read as anyone in town.

Before joining Channel 2, Lampley was a highly competent network sports journalist and even now is scheduled to cover next month’s Winter Olympics for Channel 2. However, despite occasional reporting forays in the field--it seemed for image purposes--he needed no journalistic skills to anchor local news.

He needed only to be a good communicator, and he was.

In fact, his anchor skills very much resemble those of his successor, Chris Conangla, who, like some political revolutionary recalled from exile after a change of regime, has now been restored to his old 5 p.m. anchor job.

Conangla had been jettisoned to Channel 2’s less-glamorous noon newscast to accommodate the arrival in September, 1990, of 6 p.m. anchor Michael Tuck. Lampley had been co-anchoring the 6 p.m. newscast with Walker, but was bumped by Tuck to the 5 p.m. program, forcing the transfer of Conangla to noon.

Tuck is pretty much the telegenic equal of both Conangla and Lampley, posing quite a dilemma: Three guys, all smooth on camera.

Thus, at issue here is not the verbal skills of these anchors--and certainly not the journalistic ones--but, all other things being about equal, their likability: that hazy, vague, undefinable quality that seduces viewers and makes stars out of some newscasters. How do you respond to them? How do you relate to them? Does the way they look and talk turn you off or on? Or make you forget them? Recognizability--that’s important too.

All of the above are unrelated to the competence levels of the newscasts these people anchor. But all of the above, TV news researchers say, are directly related to why viewers watch some newscasts and not others. Else why would top Los Angeles anchors earn five to 10 times what their stations pay the reporters and field producers who do the bulk of the work?

“Action News” at 5 and 11 p.m. will be no better or worse with Conangla and Tuck than with Lampley. The chess pieces are in different positions but it’s the same old board.