News Stars Now Chase Votes, Not Ratings
By J. Max Robins, August 10, 2022
The revolving door between politics and the news media is typically entered from the Washington, DC, side. Former legislators and senior staffers of all political stripes have long found lucrative afterlives as commentators across the TV news universe. Surf between Fox News, MSNBC and CNN on any given hour of the day and witness a calvalcade of high-profile refugees from Republican and Democratic power centers.
Then there’s that high-profile handful of ex-politicos who have reached the news anchor stratosphere, such as MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, who was an aide to the late Sen. Pat Monynihan; ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos, ex-communications director in the Clinton White House; and the late Meet the Press host Tim Russert, who was Monynihan’s chief of staff and a senior aide to New York Gov. Mario Cuomo.
Familiar Faces Want Your Vote
In the current political season, however, that revolving door has been shoved hard and fast from the other side by dozens of telegenic office-seekers. What’s especially notable is how many of them have come from the relative obscurity of local TV news.
To revise former House Speaker Tip O’Neill’s famous adage that “all politics is local,” it seems these days that all politics is local news.
A recent survey in the Columbia Journalism Review by Jon Allsop, featured a list of dozens of people tk who have leapt from the anchor chair, behind the sports desk or in front of the weather map into elected office.
Scary Kari, the Gipper, the Donald and More
Among the more prominent – and more frightening – of the local news personalities who have entered the political arena is Kari Lake. After 22 years as an anchor at the Fox station in Phoenix, KSAZ, the political novice nabbed the Arizona GOP nomination for governor by campaigning as a pro-Trump, loud-and-proud Biden-election denier. Most current polls show her trailing her Democratic opponent, Arizona’s Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, by several points. I’d venture that the race is closer than it may seem, given Lake’s wide name recognition in the biggest market in the state and her more than two decades in front of the camera.
It’s easy to understand why so many shiny faces seeking office – the majority of whom tilt more hard right than left – are veterans of local newsrooms. What better way is there to build name recognition for a run for office than as a regular talent presence on a local newscast where success is predicated on projecting an amiable, trustworthy – not to mention close-up-worthy – presence?
And in this hyper-partisan, media-driven era, a brash style on-camera and on-mic beats substance every day of the week. No doubt, that’s why there are at least 31 Republicans (including former sportscaster Sarah Palin), 19 Democrats and seven independents departing the opinion-limiting confines of local news and trading that life in for one on the campaign trail.
I trace the trend from the local broadcast microphone to political megaphone all the way back to Ronald Reagan’s days as a sportscaster. Pre-Hollywood and politics, Reagan called Chicago Cubs games from a radio station in Des Moines, Iowa, where he’d have to play fast and loose with what was happening on the field when the phone line feeding him game info from the stadium would go down. Maybe you could say the Gipper was an early practitioner of “alternative facts.”
Clearly, being in front of a camera and/or a microphone has long been fertile territory for those with political ambitions. In our celebrity-obsessed culture, we have seen stars of the screen, big and small – from Sonny Bono and The Love Boat’s Fred Grandy to Arnold Schwarzenegger and one Donald “The Apprentice” Trump – go from late night punchlines to the People’s House, the Governor’s mansion and the White House.
Sadly, there is inevitably more of that kind of celebrity-driven politics in our future. We might even see a mutation of that paradigm in a kind of double-reverse. For example, Tucker Carlson’s name gets bandied about as making a 2024 White House run. In a May 2020 interview with Howard Stern, from way on the other side of the aisle, George Stephanopoulos left a little wiggle room when asked about running for the highest office in the land. Who knows: Carlson vs. Stephanopoulos? Not so far-fetched these days.
J. Max Robins (@jmaxrobins) is executive director of the Center for Communication. The former editor-in-chief of Broadcasting & Cable, he has contributed to publications, including the Wall Street Journal, Columbia Journalism Review and Forbes. Read more from J. Max Robins at www.jmaxrobins.com
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Among the more prominent – and more frightening – of the local news personalities who have entered the political arena is Kari Lake. After 22 years as an TV anchor in Phoenix, the political novice nabbed the Arizona GOP nomination for governor by campaigning as an election denier. (Photo: Flickr)
