As you may or may not know, a US TV presenter (journalist?), Katie Couric, is takeover the anchor job on the CBS Evening News in September. This is seen as something of a big thing in the states, since she’s a woman, and they’ve not actually had a solo female network news anchor in the States until now.
But more interesting is the role that comes with being a news anchor in the States. You also become Managing Editor on the programme. In otherwords, your job isn’t just to read off an autoqueue.
The same seems to be the case in France, where I’m told the main TF1 news presenter is very proud of his Breton roots, and unfailingly manages to get lots of references to Brittany into his bulletins.
In the UK, it’s very different. Each news programme has its own editor, and while some of our presenters are very powerful – Jeremy Paxman and Jon Snow for example – they don’t actually get to determine the news order. And that seems right to me. Whilst I wouldn’t accuse these presenters as no longer being practising journalists, I’m sure that they’d agree that the demands of studio presenting means that there’s less time to go out and about on stories. (Although Jon Snow is, for example, currently in the Middle East during the latest crisis).
I don’t think I’d feel comfortable having someone who’s paid “to read out loud for a living”, as I once heard newsreading caustically described as, determining the agenda. It also seems a little unfair on the long-working staff members working behind the scenes of the big-money news presenter if their boss, and the direction of their programme becomes at the mercy of whatever big-name signing your network has just made.