Some Inspirational Anchor Reporting

Local news anchors don’t have to be reporters. For the most part, they’re recruited for their ability to be likable, to communicate and read stories smoothly, to project authority and credibility and to announce with conviction, “Exclusive team coverage!”

Yet KCAL-TV Channel 9 anchor Pat Harvey recently returned from an active week of covering the historic South Africa election. On Monday night, she chided “the networks” for giving the erroneous impression at times last week that all of Johannesburg was “under siege.” Harvey, who is black, also shared her personal feelings about rubbing shoulders with long-disenfranchised black South Africans as they waited in line to cast their first vote ever. “They could have been my grandfather . . . ,” she said.

Harvey’s anchor colleague, Jane Velez-Mitchell, meanwhile, was the reporter and also helped produce and write Sunday’s dandy Cinco de Mayo special on Channel 9. It was one of those rare television hours that conveyed, without puffery, the strength and diversity of a Latino population that is so often the subject of negative coverage. Who were these inspiring people? No one seen with regularity in newscasts, that’s for sure. Instead, it’s jerks like those behind the melee at Sunday’s “L.A. Fiesta Broadway” who inevitably capture TV’s center stage.

On another channel, there also has been terrific work by KABC-TV Channel 7 anchor Christine Lund, whose recent stories disclosing the cruelty of horse tripping in Mexican rodeos, or charreadas , have lit a bonfire under the movement to ban this savagely destructive sport.

Horse tripping by charros , or Mexican cowboys, has a long tradition as a popular roping event at these rodeos, which have moved north into California and the Southwest. Following the death in committee of an earlier California bill to ban horse tripping for entertainment, a similar bill has gathered momentum and appears nearing a vote by the full state assembly.

Some charro leaders have protested Lund’s coverage, and they claim that the anti-horse tripping movement led by animal-welfare activists is a racist-style attack on Mexican culture. They also claim that the event is not cruel or inhumane and that, because of the skill of the participants, only rarely are horses harmed or seriously injured by having their front legs lassoed.

But that was contradicted by Lund’s horrendously graphic hidden-camera footage of terrified horses at charreadas taking terrible falls--some even landing on their heads--after having being roped at a full gallop.

“You can sit and discuss tripping and read about it, but it is a visual event,” said Cathleen Doyle, a member of the California Equine Legislative Council. “Only when you can see it does it turn around people who normally would call animal-rights activists a dirty word.”

Lund’s latest story prompted Friday’s extremely tough “20/20” segment on horse tripping, during which charros and the Channel 7 anchorwoman herself were interviewed about the controversy. Other magazine shows have gotten into the act after Lund’s initial report, and she says that National Public Radio also has interviewed her in connection with a story it’s preparing on the topic.

Doesn’t being interviewed like this transform journalist Lund--a longtime avid horsewoman--into activist Lund? After all, though her reporting has been fair within the context of an expose--giving both sides their say--Lund is hardly objective about the issue.

She did feel uncomfortable watching a tape of herself being critical of horse tripping when being interviewed on “20/20,” she said later. “I felt like I’d been towed across a very important line a little bit.”

Yet that unease is tempered by the knowledge that--unlike most reporters, whose work rarely has a tangible impact--she’s making a difference. “This is unprecedented in my work,” she said. “In my wildest expectations I never believed people would watch this on the air, and that they would form some opinions and care. My guess was that a lot of people would have problems with it.”

Of course, some did. Lund said her horse-tripping coverage has prompted death threats, including a call from a woman mentioning plans to make her “disappear.” About charges that her reporting is a slur on Mexican Americans? “This is not true,” she said. “The problem is they ( charros ) are the only ones doing it.”

And the problem is also that the scarcity of positive stories about Latinos casts a shadow over even the negative stories that are legitimate, making them appear, unfairly, to represent a conspiracy to smear a single ethnic group.

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ANCHORS CONT. . . . What a week. Rarely have Los Angeles news anchors displayed more versatility.

Showing they were no patsies when it came to interviewing, for example, KCBS-TV Channel 2 anchors Michael Tuck and Tritia Toyota brutally grilled Geraldo Rivera in a live encounter during Monday’s 5 p.m. newscast.

The New York-based Rivera is in town to broadcast a week of “Geraldo” episodes keyed to the May ratings sweeps. Responding to a withering barrage of questions from Tuck and Toyota, he had no choice but to recount his “girl gangbangers” hour that had aired on Channel 2 immediately prior to the 5 p.m. newscast. And just when Rivera thought he was off the hook, Toyota struck with a frightening menace, demanding that he disclose the topics of his other Los Angeles episodes.

“We have a busy week, and I think it’s a fair picture of what’s going on,” Rivera said. “At least on the dark side.”

The dark side of Channel 2 is that it has gotten rid of its old news set but, judging by this cynically self-serving cross-promotion, still retains its old set of news ethics.

Ironically, at the precise moment Tuck began introducing Rivera, Los Angeles suffered an earthquake, as if the Almighty was registering a personal protest.

KNBC-TV Channel 4 jumped on the story. Chuck Henry: “This earthquake, according to some amateurs, measured about 3.2.” Some amateurs ? “Now we understand the measurement is about 3.0,” Henry added immediately. Had the amateurs re-evaluated? Later that evening, Channel 4 reported that the quake registered a 3.2 on the Richter scale.

But first there was this bold news analysis by Paul Moyer after a story on comedian Bobcat Goldthwait’s furniture-smashing tantrum on Friday night’s episode of “The Arsenio Hall Show.” Moyer, very perplexed: “The trouble is, you don’t know if the Bobcat is serious or it’s just shtick.”

What better lead-in to the in-depth series that Monday’s 5 p.m. newscast had been continually touting. As part of its monthlong emphasis on “40ish, female and fabulous”--as if viewers are supposed to be stunned that middle-aged women aren’t gnarled trolls--here was anchor Colleen Williams’ special report on “the agony of shopping for a bathing suit.”

It was only a couple of years ago that Williams was in Saudi Arabia for Channel 4, interviewing U.S. troops shipped to the Persian Gulf. Now the level of peril had risen dramatically. “No way to get around it,” she reported. “Swimsuit shopping is traumatic.”

As the female flesh paraded in front of the camera, Williams was utterly ruthless: “On the left a good suit, on the right a bad suit.”

That was only a taste, for coming Tuesday was more about bathing suits, Williams’ shocking expose of “hot new color cuts.” But remember, kids, don’t try this at home.