News presenter
Prior to the television era, radio-news broadcasts often mixed news with opinion and each presenter strove for a distinctive style.
The term "anchorman" also was used to describe Walter Cronkite's role at the Democratic and Republican National Conventions, where he coordinated switches between news points and reporters.
CBS's long-running nighttime news broadcast 60 Minutes displays this purported superfluousness of anchors, insofar as it has no central figurehead in favor of many correspondents with similarly important roles.
In her essay, "News as Performance", Margaret Morse posits this connection between anchor persona newsroom as an interconnected identity fusing many aspects of the newsroom dynamic: For the anchor represents not merely the news per se, or a particular network or corporate conglomerate that owns the network, or television as an institution, or the public interest; rather, he represents the complex nexus of all of them.
The news anchor's position as an omnipotent arbiter of information results from their place behind a typically elevated desk, wherefrom they interact with reporters through a screen-within-screen spatial setup.
Once again, Morse outlines this relationship between the anchor and the larger context in which they operate: "[s]ince there are few other organs for inclusive and substantial discourse on social and cultural values in American life, the responsibility for interpreting the world and posing a political course of action and a social agenda falls on a very limited number of public personas, including such news personalities and the president".
[11] She levies a criticism against the anchor in this case, claiming that by decreasing the number of people responsible for delivering the news, American viewers receive a bottlenecked stream of information about their surroundings.
The choreography and performativity involved in the construction of the news broadcast dramatizes political processes, but in doing so, exposes its flattening of subjectivity and insistence upon itself as the final word of truth.
More specifically, "the news media may do 'an important social good when using the techniques of dramaturgy to make governance more interesting to people than would be the case otherwise.'
