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Old Newspaper Article Comparing TV News Broadcasters and Actors

Good find!

The intervening 15 years haven't changed things much. Television news has trended ever more towards an entertainment factor at the expense of more serious news coverage.
 
umfan said:
Good find!

The intervening 15 years haven't changed things much. Television news has trended ever more towards an entertainment factor at the expense of more serious news coverage.
Click to expand...

Yes - that's true - but the anchor as actor scenario has a long history. Over the years of radio dominance (30s and 40s) there were many news broadcasters who played a part - generally by delivering the news in a dramatic exaggerated fashion. Walter Winchell was probably the best known, with his fast excited delivery and telegraph sound effects - "Good Evening Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea..." A more recent example is Paul Harvey, who just died a couple of years ago.

Another example is George Putnam - the Los Angeles anchor in the 60s and 70s who was the inspiration for Ted Baxter on the Mary Tyler Moore sitcom. George talked in a pompous dramatic voice and talked in the present tense..."Communist forces in South Vietnam invade Da Nang, but the ARVN fight them tooth and nail and inflict heavy casualties...". To prove his dramatic chops, George would play newscasters in films - the most recent being Independence Day in 96, when he was in his late 80s.
 
Only 15? Decades longer than that. John Cameron Swayze had been a Broadway actor in the 1920s and early '30s before going into journalism in Kansas City, including at least some time as a news anchor on an experimental TV station there. He anchored NBC's evening newscast, Camel/Plymouth News Caravan, from 1949 to 1956.
 
The first line of this article reminds me: I've often said there's a need for certification if we're to expect credibility from our news people. That's what doctors, teachers, and lawyers have that we don't ask of journalists. Sure there are journalism schools, but the graduates don't have to meet certain standards or criteria. This is not to say that having such criteria would improve things. But it's a start.
 
Another example would be Lowell Thomas, who came into radio by way of his lectures on his world-wide travel adventures. Abe Schechter, an NBC news writer whose job was to gather stories for Thomas's broadcasts, called him "a million-dollar voice without a nickel's worth of news."

John Cameron Swayze, like Tony Marvin who left his job as Arthur Godfrey's wingman to host Mutual's nightly radio news roundup, was a news reader; a general-purpose announcer rather than a reporter. Though later known as journalists, Mike Wallace and Chet Huntley also came to news from an announcing background. On the other hand, John Charles Daly, who had a distinguished career as a radio reporter, is probably better remembered now as a game show host!
 
JeffM said:
Though later known as journalists, Mike Wallace and Chet Huntley also came to news from an announcing background.
Click to expand...

Which may explain why the Brits should to call their anchors "presenters." That seems a fairer description of what they do.
 
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