The big newscasts and the Black anchors who deliver them

Ebony, August, 2007 by Kevin Chappell

AS BOMBS EXPLODED outside his window, Bernard Shaw was as cool as the other side of the pillow. Reporting live from the ninth floor of a Baghdad hotel at the start of the Gulf Wars in 1991, CNN's top anchor, a Black man, was so good at bringing the action from the frontline to the home front that he erased decades of doubt with hours of heroics. In the middle of the desert, in the middle of a war, he not only helped give birth to the cable news industry, but also put to rest the unspoken notion that African-American anchors could not handle tough stories.

Fast-forward 10 years. September 11, 2001. Terrorists hijack American airplanes. This time it was CNN's senior anchor Leon Harris on the air. But in an exclusive interview with EBONY magazine, Harris says that, unlike Shaw, he wasn't given the chance to show his skills. "Shortly after the plane hit, they asked me to toss it to Aaron Brown [a White anchor]," Harris recalls. "Then, the chairman of the company came down and said to me..., 'Sit here and just be our back-up and cut-in guy.' I was like, 'Thanks a lot. I have the most experience and you just want to use me for three minutes an hour...?' It was a bit of a punch in the stomach and a slap in the face."

What happened within the broadcast news industry during the decade between the first and second Gulf wars--between Shaw returning home from overseas a star and Harris driving home from the CNN Atlanta headquarters "sick and tired of cursing out the steering wheel"--could have more to do with timing than talent.

In an industry that seems to recognize the importance of diversity--having hired and promoted several high-profile African-Americans in recent years--Blacks continue to rarely get the big stories, the prime-time slots, or headline their own shows.

While the raw numbers of Black anchors may have increased with the proliferation of 24-hour news outlets and the explosion of prime-time news shows, the percentage of Black anchors has been stagnant, and the presence of African-Americans in TV newsrooms has declined.

RUNNING IN PLACE

While CNN has the most Black news anchors with eight, the other cable networks don't fair as well. MSNBC has only one Black--Alison Stewart--while the Fox News Channel, with its motto "Fair and Balanced," is not balanced at all, having no Black anchors to host a regular time slot. And none of the national cable stations has any Blacks in prime-time slots.

Within the Big Three networks, Blacks have faired slightly better. Russ Mitchell co-hosts CBS' The Early Show, while Lester Holt co-anchors the weekend editions of NBC's Today Show and Nightly News, Al Roker holds down the weatherman position at Today, and Robin Roberts co-anchors ABC's Good Morning America.

According to a study by Bali State University and the Radio Television News Directors Association (RTNDA), between 1990 and 2006, the percentage of African-Americans in the broadcast news workforce dropped from 10.1 percent to 9.5 percent. In fact, there are now fewer Blacks in newsrooms than Hispanics, who, not counting Spanish language stations, rose from 4.2 percent of the workforce in 1995 to 9.6 percent in 2006.

In a 2005 Ball State/RTNDA study, "Running in Place," a survey of 1,624 television stations found that only 13.4 percent of news anchors, 7.5 percent of sports anchors, and 4.1 percent of weathercasters were Black. There was little change from when the study was first conducted in 1996. "We ask about ethnicity by position every three years...," says study coordinator Bob Papper, professor of communications at Bali State, in releasing his findings. "If there's a surprise, it's how little has changed in that time."

THE 'BLACK' SLOT

With no increase in the percentage of anchors, insiders say, that most times a Black journalist is only moved into the anchor chair to replace another Black. This can be seen in recent moves at the national level. Mitchell was brought in to replace Rene Syler at CBS. Roker came on permanently at the Today Show around the same time Bryant Gumbel departed. Weatherman Tony Perkins was reportedly all-but-forced-out of Good Morning America after ABC moved Roberts into the co-anchor position.

The practice of treating anchor chairs like musical chairs keeps Blacks uncertain about their future, and unable to make a Shaw-like move to the status of household name, according to media watchers. As it is in the children's game, African-Americans many times find themselves waiting for the fall of a fellow Black anchor--waiting for the music to start--in hopes of getting a seat in the anchor chair.

Keith Woods, dean of faculty at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, says one measure of an African-American's overall standing within the anchor ranks is tenure, being around long enough to have some say. "And at the moment there is nothing to suggest that is increasing," he says. "There are senior Black journalists who are leaving the industry through a number of doors. In newspapers, it's buyouts and layoffs. In broadcast, [journalists] are hitting some point and switching careers altogether, including public relations and other fields."