WMAQ-Ch. 5’s Warner Saunders remembers an evening back in the mid-1990s when he looked beside him on the anchor desk and only saw people of his own hue.
He was working as a fill-in anchor on the station’s 10 p.m. newscast. On one side of him was weathercaster Jim Tilmon. On the other side was sports- caster Jon Kelley.
“There were several calls about that,” Saunders says now. Most of them, he adds, weren’t very positive.
“The city still remains a fairly segregated city, and there’s still enough prejudice — I don’t want to use the word `racism,’ that’s another term altogether — but there’s still enough prejudice out there that we still cater to,” says Saunders, a multiple-Emmy winner who has worked in Chicago television for 30 years.
Today, Saunders is part of an interesting trend developing among Chicago’s local television newscasts:
Look at each station’s so-called principal newscast — 10 p.m. for Channel 5, WBBM-Ch. 2 and WLS-Ch. 7 and 9 p.m. for WGN-Ch. 9 and WFLD-Ch. 32. You’ll see one African-American anchor paired with one white anchor. In two cases, the weathercasters appearing on these newscasts are also members of minority groups. (As for minority sportscasters, Jim Rose and former Chicago Bear Dan Jiggetts are the only ones who qualify, and neither appears on a principal news show).
This in itself isn’t unusual. Local stations around the country are staffing their newscasts with people who reflect the racial balance of their locales.
“It is not any longer to me an odd thing, or anything that even raises half an eyebrow,” notes Marvin Kalb, director of the Shorenstein Center on Press and Politics at Harvard University.
More noteworthy, however — astonishing, even — would be a totally color-blind newscast, such as the one Saunders worked with the now-departed Kelley and Tilmon, becoming an integral part of the schedule.
There are those in the TV business locally who think it might one day happen.
Some Chicago news teams that take the air at other times of day and on weekends are already heavy on minorities, but when it comes to the primary nighttime news shows, the complexion of the anchor team is still very black and white.
At WBBM at 10 p.m., Lester Holt, an African-American, works with Linda MacLennan, who is white, while the station’s weather forecaster, Steve Baskerville, is also black. At WMAQ, Saunders’ partner is Allison Rosati, a Caucasian. WLS’s team consists of Diann Burns, an African-American, and John Drury, who is white, while at WGN, Allison Payne, a black woman, is teamed with Steve Sanders, who is white. Meanwhile, at WFLD, a white male, veteran Chicago newsman Walter Jacobson, presides over the 9 p.m. newscast along with Robin Robinson, a black woman. WFLD also has Steve Perez Schill, a Latino, as its weathercaster.
Diversity became the norm on most of Chicago’s 10 p.m. and 9 p.m. newscasts several years ago, leaving WMAQ as the last station to have two white anchors, Ron Magers and Carol Marin. The teaming of Saunders and Rosati in May 1997, after Magers and Marin left over the notorious Jerry Springer affair, brought WMAQ into compliance with the trend.
Historically, local TV news in Chicago always featured white male anchor teams, with perhaps the quintesssential pair being WLS’s Fahey Flynn and Joel Daley during the so-called “Happy Talk” era at that station in the late 1960s. The gender gap began closing in the `70s, when stations started pairing white women with men.
The racial picture was also changing, primarily in response to the social unrest of the 1960s and early ’70s. Station managers began to need minority journalists to go into trouble spots where white males may not have been welcomed.
Early reporters and anchors of color included Ben Holman, who became one of the country’s first black TV reporters when he was hired by WBBM in 1962; Harry Porterfield, who started at WBBM and is currently on WLS;; and ABC weekend anchor Carole Simpson, who in the early 1970s anchored on weekends for WMAQ.
During the 1970s and early ’80s, more minority anchors began to appear alongside white counterparts. Such personalities as Pat Harvey on WGN, Linda Yu, at WMAQ and later WLS, and Robin Robinson at WBBM and then WFLD, were given anchoring duties on newscasts in various time slots.
While station chiefs two decades ago made no bones about hiring minority journalists to cover what they considered to be “sensitive” areas, the mantra these days when discussing the addition of more newscasters of color is that it is an attempt to mirror the viewing audience.
WLS general manager Emily Barr says, “You want to reflect the diversity of your viewers, and in order to do that you need to showcase people who are of all different ages, sexes, ethnic backgrounds, racial backgrounds.
But Barr can envision a more color-blind set of criteria down the road. “I’m not opposed to (having two minority anchors) in any way,” she says.
WFLD’s news director Debra Juarez says viewers want to see people they can relate to, and believes this goal is compatible with bringing even more minority faces to the anchor desk.”If you’re trying to reach out to the community, I think it’s entirely possible,” she says, that an all-minority team on the main nighttime newscast is in the foreseeable future.
WBBM’s general manager Hank Price argues for the primacy of merit. “I would never,” he says, “make a decision based on anything other than who the best people are. Of the four people we have now (at 10 p.m.), two are African-American, (and) it just happens that they were African-American.”
In the view of WFLD’s Walter Jacobson, fit is the main consideration. “I think the chemistry is the most important thing in the minds of the managers,” he says. “Get a couple of anchors who are completely experienced and pretty good at talking to each other when they have to in a crunch.”
Harvard’s Kalb offers a more cynical view:
“I am all for merit in the newsroom, and if that merit goes with a black face, a yellow face, a white face, that’s fine with me, so long as it’s a good journalist,” says Kalb, who spent 30 years as a correspondent for CBS and NBC.
“But is it not a coincidence,” he asks, “that at every single station all over the country it is the exact same pattern repeating itself time and time again? And that pattern is consistent with the economic interests of the station, and consistent with the societal interest of the community?”
Kalb says various outlets have anchoring combinations that fit the demographics of the locale. For instance, in Boston, where the black population isn’t especially large but racial tensions are often high, one station has a white husband-and-wife team, while another has a black female and white male. In Washington, D.C., which has a large African-American population, Kalb says each station has a black and white duo.
WGN anchor Allison Payne feels it’s more important that people of color are represented on those newscasts than whether they dominate the shows numerically.
“We are what the audience see, and it isn’t that we’re just there reading,” she says. “We are expressing our opinion and we are helping to shape and mold that newscast and that message that goes out.”
As for morning and weekend newscasts, the operating principle seems to be that anything goes.
On WMAQ at 5:30 a.m., three-fourths of the news team is minority — co-anchor Art Norman and forecaster Byron Miranda are black; co-anchor Nesita Kwan is Asian-American, and traffic reporter Dawn DeSart is white.
On WLS at the same hour, anchors Hosea Sanders and Leah Hope are both black, while the station’s 11:30 a.m. newscast features two female anchors — Asian-American Linda Yu and Latino-American Sylvia Perez. WLS also has a Latino-American, Judie Garcia, anchoring Sunday mornings alongside a white male, Dick Johnson. It is one of several multiracial matchups during the various weekend newscasts.
Both Warner Saunders and Marvin Kalb say mornings and weekends are the times when station managers and news directors experiment and groom talent because ratings results aren’t as much of a priority as they are in the evening newscasts.
Agreeing that mornings and weekends have “always been the safe place where you could put minority talent” is Hosea Sanders, the weekday morning co-anchor at WLS since coming to Chicago from Los Angeles more than four years ago. When he was teamed with Leah Hope in 1997, they became one of the few ongoing African-American anchoring duos in the city.
Working the top anchor spot on the 10 p.m. news is a longtime dream of Sanders, who has been in the business almost 20 years. He doesn’t think mixing black and white personnel on that show is a conscious choice by management, but he also gets the sense that making the prime newscast all-minority isn’t a goal that is immediately embraced.
If John Drury were to leave WLS, Sanders would like a shot at his 10 o’clock slot. But if Diann Burns is also on that desk . . .
“I would hope that I wouldn’t be stopped in my career, or not be considered for an upward move, solely based on race,” Sanders says. ” `Because we’ve got a minority here already, we can’t even consider you for that.’ I would hope we’re beyond that.
“But to be honest, I’m not really optimistic.”
