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8 - Orono Weekly Times Wednesday, January 5, 2005 the CBC newsroom in Toronto. Malcom Ten is dead." Sorry, Walter, but I was there. And that's the way it was. HEAR YE. HEAR YE So Dan Rather, venerable CBS news anchorman is going to hang up his headphones in March. And you would think from the news coverage that a king was abdicating, a literary giant had gone mute or possibly a pope had passed. The man reads to us, for heaven's sake. He puts on makeup, straightens his tie, sits behind a desk and recites off a teleprompter while pretending to look us in the eye. This is not brain surgery. It is not even bricklaying. And yet Dan Rather in particular and news anchormen in general, are accorded a status in modem culture culture just slightly below that of basketball wizards and Hollywood hunks. What is it about the anchorman? Why do TV networks line up to shower them with gobs of dough, drape them in Armani and Hugo Boss and altogether treat them like demi-gods -- all for doing what our moms and dads used to do for free - namely, read us to sleep at night? Actually, I do TV news anchors a disservice. They not only have to read well, they have to look like a Ken Doll while doing it. Good looks were not a requirement in the radio business, business, where I spent my career. A radio newsman could look like Gollum as long as he had a good voice and didn't trip over his tongue. And it's no longer entirely- true that we worship at these guys'clay feet. Ted Baxter changed all that. The genial dope on the Maty Tyler Moore show who managed managed to mangle eveiy newscast that long-suffering -Murray Lewis Continued from page 4 "His message of global responsibility responsibility and humanitarianism has never been more appropriate appropriate than it is now," says Director of Education Sylvia Terpstra. "We are deeply honoured to welcome him, and we have no doubt his positive message will inspire our students, who are the leaders of today and tomorrow. Our only regret is that, due to space limitations, we cannot open the event to all students or to our community members." '5 Slaughter wrote for him, set the mold for the popular stereotype . of news anchors. He had the big hair. He had the big voice. He had the big ego. And he was major league dumb. And Ted Baxter begat Jim Dial of Murphy Brown and Bill McNeal of News-Radio and Kent Brockman of The Simpsons and, most recently Anchonnan's Ron Burgun-dy. Buffoonish blow-dried bub- bleheads to a man. There are a lot of theories about why we love to laugh at anchors. Adam McKay, the guy who co-wrote and directed the movie Anchorman says "ultimately "ultimately it's just about the hair." Well, I dunno about that. Admittedly Ted Koppel's hair is a wonder to behold. It looks like some bizarre sculpted shrub in the process of eating his face. And then there's CTV's Craig Oliver whose hair tone shimmers shimmers between green and orange. And Peter Mansbridge who is rapidly running out of anything to comb. I don't think it's the hair. I think it's the fact that news anchors are authority figures and as such, always good for a giggle. And let's face it: they ask for it. They look preposterously preposterously pompous, sitting all puffed up behind their desk with their solemn owl eyes and their chins tucked into their shirt collars to make their voices deeper. Pompous? You bet. Listen--the most famous North American newscaster of the twentieth century, Walter Cronkite, actually had the cojones to end each newscast by intoning biblically "and that's the way it is..." No Walter, that's not The Way It Is. That's the way one TV producer and a couple of cameramen plus a scriptwriter agreed to say it was, based on the people they'd talked to and the film footage they'd managed managed to slap together over the previous twenty-four hours. Luckily we don't have to work too hard at pricking anchormen's ego balloons - they do a perfectly good job of it themselves. . : Such as the radio ne wscaster who legendarily signed off a national broadcast with the words: "And that was the news from the Canadian Broadcorp- ing Castration". And my favourite: back in, 1965 when the famous Black Muslim leader Malcom X was assassinated, I happened to be in the control room during a radio broadcast in Toronto. 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