It used to be that the newsreaders were actual reporters, but now we have Kouric tarting it up, Anderson Cooper fagging it up, and such. It used to be that they did their tour of duty in whatever war was going on and actually worked their way up to the anchor desk.
Of the news readers today, who does and who does not have a background in real journalism?
Well, I stuck ‘Anderson Cooper’ into Wikipedia and got ‘After reporting from Burma, Cooper lived in Vietnam for a year and then returned to filming stories from a variety of war-torn regions around the globe, including Somalia, Bosnia and Rwanda’.
Katie Couric does.
With all that going on, I wonder how he found time to fag it up.
Brian Williams’ resume is much less impressive, although he’s been doing it for 20 years no matter how you slice it. Wikipedia says he get into broadcast after working as a broadcast industry lobbyist, then worked his way up to a gig with NBC. I remember people making fun of him years ago for saying he’d always wanted to be a news anchor - not a reporter, an anchor reading the news.
Does participation in a beauty pageant count as background in journalism? If so, then there are at least two who qualify:
Robin Meade of CNN Headline News
Gretchen Carlson of Fox News
Don’t forget Dianne Sawyer on ABC.
Of course, Dianne Sawyer worked her butt off as a journalist for the next 40 years.