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When Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa announced that he and his wife were splitting up last month, one of the first journalists on the story was Mirthala Salinas, the anchor for the Spanish language Telemundo channel.
Sharing the news with her viewers she deadpanned it, as though reporting
a forest fire in Topanga canyon threatening some celebrity homes. What Salinas failed to mention, though, was that she was the other woman, and that they had been in an adulterous relationship for the past two years.
News of the affair sizzled across SoCal, as Southern California is known on the news channels, as the mayor confirmed it and pleaded for privacy "for his children". It was a rare occasion in which the Anglo community was paying attention to what was going on in the parallel universe of LA's Spanish speakers. The Los Angeles Times even put the story on its front page - with a lot of tut-tutting at the inappropriateness of it all.
"There really is no question that this is unacceptable," clucked Kelly McBride, a self-appointed media watchdog. "You can't sleep with your sources."
The world of the news anchor, born of the idea that the news is a public trust, is in free fall. Today's news presenters like the much-criticised Katie Couric of CBS News and the idolised Anderson Cooper of CNN, are the creation of the media campaigns that old Hollywood studios once used to manufacture their stars.
Dan Rather complained that the decision to bring in Katie Couric as his replacement to anchor The CBS Evening News represented a desire "to dumb it down, tart it up".
The old world that Rather represents is long gone. With his prematurely grey head of hair and steel blue eyes, the newest star, Anderson Cooper, gazes from the cover of June's issue of Vanity Fair. No bad dye jobs for the man People magazine has named one of the "sexiest men alive".
What CNN is doing, says the media critic Neal Gabler, is to turn the news into a backdrop for its handsome young star. Whether he is in Baghdad, London or Sri Lanka "these are locations for the movies in which Cooper plays, effectively foregrounding the anchor while backgrounding the news", says Gabler.
Young people find news a turnoff, the thinking goes, but they love celebrities, and Cooper is fast being made into an international celebrity. He pops up on Oprah, the The Daily Show, and Jay Leno's Tonight Show.
There are billboards in virtually every city where he looks out soulfully while advertising the channel's signature Anderson Cooper 360 Degrees show. There is even an "Anderson for President" poster on sale as well as online gossip sites charting his every move.
Then there is the added frisson of the sexual orientation of the pinup newsman who has just turned 40. He won't talk about it, but everyone seems to have an opinion as to whether he is actually America's first gay anchor.
What is certain is that Cooper reflects the rapidly changing world of US television news in which the highly paid anchors are really aggressively marketed stars, who may or may not have a background in journalism.
Take Lauren Jones, the star of Fox's upcoming reality TV show Anchorwoman. The busty bikini model's previous assignment was as "eye candy" for the World Wrestling Entertainment channel where she conducted backstage interviews and made eye-popping announcements in the testosterone-charged ring.
She has a total lack of journalism experience, but has been assigned to a local Texas TV station to report the news. The juiciest of her on-air clashes with the station's journalists will then be broadcast nationally as the reality TV show.
Jones has been reporting for KYTX for about a week now and the station's competitors are already up in arms "What they're doing is making a mockery of every legitimate local news station in the country," said Brad Streit, of KLTV-TV.
The reality is that they are terrified by their own plummeting ratings and are probably scouring the cable channels for their own eye candy. In the old days the news networks saw their role as keeping a sharp check on the rich and powerful and their anchors had enough gravitas and credibility to be trusted by the nation.
Walter Cronkite was famously the conscience of the nation. Those who followed him - Tom Brokaw, Rather and the late Peter Jennings - were newsmen who had earned their spot in front of the teleprompter by covering wars and White House scandals.
The network news shows still attract a bigger audience than any other regularly scheduled programme on TV. And when a big story breaks, Americans turn in droves to their nightly news anchors. However, the big newscasts actually lost about 40 per cent of their audience between 1981 and 2001.
Where it all went wrong is much debated, but the news channels are acutely aware that almost nobody young is watching the news networks any more.
And with the death of the old-style news anchor comes the rise of the celebrity anchor. TV executives hope the new stars of news start bringing the viewers back.
- INDEPENDENT
