The shocking disgrace of Huw Edwards has many victims, most of all the unknown children abused, ultimately for his gratification. The British media were right to scrutinise one of their own in the same way that they treat other prominent people. From The Sun newspaper to BBC News, they proved capable of answering Juvenal’s millennia old challenge: “Who guards the guardians?”.

The Edwards affair should put to an end the self-deluding myth that we in the UK ever had “American-style anchormen” on our screens – especially now that that elevated role is disintegrating irretrievably in the US, where it was created.

Back in the 1980s, I witnessed every plane at Munich airport being held back after a G7 summit until Dan Rather’s private jet had taken off. That was true anchor power – never matched, wanted or aspired to by any British news presenter I have known. 

Dan Rather at CBS, Peter Jennings at ABC and Tom Brokaw at NBC were the golden trio, each paid multi-millions and granted editorial control over their networks’ news output. With their base-baritone intonation, they were brilliant at their job. There was enough room for all three of them to jostle almost as presidential substitutes in America’s enormous commercial television market even when CNN came along. 

Ted Turner’s rolling news network appointed Bernard Shaw as its first anchor. He was the first African American to occupy a main chair. Shaw was treated with the same level of respect and access. But the nature of the network he had joined had begun to erode the Anchor’s importance. With news rolling 24 hours a day to an audience just a fraction the size of a nightly news bulletin, there were inevitably many other rival frontmen and women on CNN.

The path to an anchor’s throne and influence was beaten for them by Walter Cronkite and his generation. Cronkite broke the news of John Kennedy’s assassination to the nation in shirt sleeves, two-waying with CBS’s Dallas correspondent Dan Rather, in what was laying on of hands for the eventual succession. 

Shocked by the film reports from Vietnam he was introducing on the nightly news, “Uncle Walter” went on his own fact-finding mission, editorialising when he got back: “[I]t seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate . . . [I]t is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honourable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.” President Johnson is alleged to have commented: “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.” LBJ pulled out of the race for re-election a few months later.

The BBC never allowed its on-screen presenters such power or, until recently, treated them with much respect. Off-screen executives have always been in charge at the corporation, disposing of “talent” as they liked. There was never a single BBC anchor man. Lots of men read the news in the 1960s and 1970s – such as Michael Aspel, Richard Baker, Robert Dougall and Kenneth Kendall – and they were hired for their presentation skills, not for their skills as journalists. 

The BBC kept journalists and other experts on current affairs programmes away from presenting the prime-time news. Richard Dimbleby, David Attenborough, Patrick Moore and others became household names without telling the nation the news on a nightly basis. 

ITV, Britain’s other, commercial, television channel from 1955, was closer to the American model with its news. News at Ten, launched in 1967, was put together and presented by the same people with journalistic skills. But even at ITN, the news was a joint effort, not presided over by a single star and editor. Sir Alastair Burnet, who also did stints as the editor of The Economist and Daily Express, is probably the closest British TV news ever came to having an Anchor. But even he had to share presentation duties with the bibulous Reginald Bosanquet, who was more widely recognized as a national treasure. 

Since then, many journalists have occupied news presenter’s chairs on national news bulletins in the UK. Many of them, including John Humphrys and Nicholas Witchell at the BBC chose to move on from “reading the autocue”. The public was unmoved. They are better known for their other work. Trinidad-born Sir Trevor McDonald is still one of Britain’s best-known news readers. He gave up presenting the news in 2008. 

The innovations of cable, satellite, and the internet mean that audiences for network news bulletins on TV are now a small fraction of what they once were. In the UK, ratings are now mostly measured in hundreds of thousands rather than in millions – although the BBC is dominant comparatively in this country. 

In the US, the big anchors have all gone, sometimes with tarnished reputations. At CBS, Rather reported a fake document about George W Bush, Brian Williams of NBC exaggerated his dare-devil war reporting (another crisis that landed on the current CEO of BBC News, Deborah Turness, when she was working stateside, as NBC News president). Jennings, Brokaw, Barbara Walters, Diane Sawyer, Jim Lehrer are retired or dead. No equivalent has filled their shoes. Has anyone here heard of Lester Holt, NBC’s excellent anchor? Let alone David Muir at ABC and John Dickerson and Maurice duBois at CBS? None of them matter much. Fox News is number one in the ratings ahead of NBC, ABC, CBS and CNN but its reach of around 3 million only accounts for one per cent of the potential TV audience.

Trust in anchors was eroded by #MeToo scandals which took down Matt Lauer of NBC’s Today show and Charlie Rose of CBS. The best-known news presenters in America today are parody anchors, such as the comedians Jon Stewart and John Oliver and the independent ideologue Tucker Carlson. Meanwhile, the vanity of the anchor concept was demolished in the Ron Burgundy films and dissected in Apple TV’s Morning Show.

US anchor clones have also run into trouble remarkably often in countries which have installed them. Most notably in France, the married Patrick Poivre d’Arvor fathered a child with Claire Chazal, his TF1 8pm news co-anchor, and was formally charged with rape of another woman, writer Florence Porcel, at the end of 2023. 

When the BBC made Huw Edwards its main presenter with much fanfare twenty years ago, and its third highest paid personality, it was bigging up a role that never existed in the UK and which was fading to just a memory elsewhere. In practice, Edwards did not replace David Dimbleby, who carried on with Question Time and Election nights until 2017. This year, nobody much noticed or cared when BBC TV’s election night was co-presented by Clive Myrie and Laura Kuensberg. There were plenty of alternatives on ITV, Channel 4 and BBC.  

Even in his pomp, Huw Edwards was insecure under the strain of the fantasy expectations placed on him as the BBC’s anchor. That is absolutely not an excuse for his conduct. In hindsight he was over-estimated, over-promoted and over-paid. 

There are no anchormen anymore. It is time to bury the idea of them for good. 

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