The Last Of the Big Name Anchors?
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Anchors love to think that if they leave a station or network, the show's ratings will tank and station/network will plummet in the ratings.
As much as big ego Anchors want to believe that, it rarely is the case and recent history proves it.
Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose, and Bill O’Reilly’s careers ended in dramatic scandal, yet their networks has seen little change in te ratings.
The Daily Beast says that this might just prove that the heyday of high paid alpha anchor appears to be finished.
Some industry insiders say good riddance to overpaid rubbish.
“The emperor has no clothes,” network news analyst Andrew Tyndall told The Daily Beast. He was not referring to Charlie Rose parading naked in front of young female underlings, but instead to the thorough debunking of a TV truism: “It’s just not true that the reason why people watch television is to watch celebrities, and the only way you get celebrities is by paying them disproportionate amounts of money over what they’re worth,” Tyndall said.
Former CBS News president Andrew Heyward largely agreed, predicting that the recent firings of Rose and other high-profile anchors, coupled with continued decent ratings for the programs and networks they left, might finally imprint a long-unheeded lesson on the brains of broadcast and cable executives; the new reality demands a more hard-headed calculus in 2018.
“Just to look at it from a crass business perspective, it’s early to assess what the ratings impact will be, but I suspect that the impact of their departures, from a strict point of view of ratings and revenue, is going to be much less than people think,” said Heyward, a visiting scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab. “Obviously, anybody is better off without having a sexual predator on the team.”
It has been four decades since CBS Evening News anchor Walter Cronkite was universally heralded as “The Most Trusted Man in America.”
“There is no iconic Walter Cronkite figure anymore,” said former CBS Executive Marcy McGinnis, citing the dominant network news anchor of the 1960s and 1970s until he yielded the throne to Dan Rather in 1981.
“There is no ‘Oh my God, we have to tune in to watch Walter!’ Nobody’s changing the channel because somebody’s gone,” added McGinnis, who served as Heyward’s second-in-command during his nine-year tenure running the news division.
“It’s a little bit old fashioned to say this, but there are so many people on TV, so many personalities, that there’s not one personality who can cause viewers to say, ‘I’m not watching this because you let him go.’”
So, the end of the high paid big ego Anchor maybe coming to an end.
It's about damn time.
