Face value

INTRO: Scrolling, clicking, refreshing; all of these actions might allow you quick and constant access to the news – but how do they make you feel? There’s a reason that households always used to gather around the TV to watch the evening bulletin; it meant more than simply being kept informed. It was a ritual of cohesion, between themselves and with the nation at large. Sure, news isn’t always uplifting but hearing it delivered by a familiar face anda human voice, with all of the emotion and empathy that brings, can make all the difference to how it’s received. The best TV news anchors come to represent truth and accuracy. After all, trusting someone is always easier when they’re looking right at you – and saying it straight. Here are three presenters doing just that and riding high in the ratings as a result.

The network draw: Dana Bash, USA
News channel: CNN
Show: State of the Union
Time in current role: One year

Growing up, Dana Bash had little desire to be a journalist, despite her father’s career at ABC. “I was a rebel­lious kid and whatever my parents did I wanted to do the opposite,” she says. Things changed when she went to study in Washington and got “swept up” in the politics of the Hill. In the end, she decided to stop fighting what was in her DNA – her journalistic path had been forged.

Nonetheless, Bash’s trajectory is unusual in television. The CNN anchor, chief political correspondent and wearer of various broadcasting hats has never worked anywhere else. Starting out at CNN as a freelancer and landing a full-time graduate gig at the age of 22, Bash undertook shifts in the now-defunct tape room before working her way up the production ranks; she recently celebrated her 28th year at the channel. “CNN is embedded in me and it always will be, no matter where I go or what happens in my life,” she says.

During a tumultuous past few years in Washington, Bash has been a quick-witted, reassuring presence, making sense of the nonsensical and eschewing the ratings-chasing shout-fests into which cable news sometimes descends. And while she admits that the days of people gathering around a TV set that’s emitting the holy glow of CBS’s Walter Cronkite are long gone, she believes she still has an important role to play. “Because media are so fractured and there’s so much disin­formation out there, those of us who are committed to truth and facts have a greater responsibility,” she says.

It’s clear that Bash is referenc­ing one phenomenon in particular – Trumpism – and “the big lie”, as she calls it, that was the attempt to deny last year’s election result. But she pushes back against the notion that CNN became too partisan during the previous administration. She believes that, when checking facts, CNN often had to call out the sitting president as being wrong; in Republican camps that was – and still is – perceived as partisan.

For those expecting a straight delivery of the news, US cable’s pro­clivity for opinionated anchors might take some adjustment. But Bash says that she still approaches her job as though she was a reporter – and that means using sources. The conclusions she reaches, she says, are “reported analysis” rather than personal opin­ion. Sometimes she also knows how to cut to the chase, as she did following the first Biden-Trump presidential debate in September 2020. After her colleague Jake Tapper referred to the sparring as “a hot mess, inside a dumpster, inside a train wreck,” Bash parried with, “I’m going to say it like it is: that was a shit show.” The clip ended up going viral. Does she regret her choice of words? “I don’t regret it because there are times when you have to say what the audience is feel­ing,” she says.

Arguably the pinnacle of Bash’s career so far was being named co-anchor of Sunday politics show State of the Union at the start of this year, joining Tapper in the interviewer seat. She calls the nomination a “full-circle moment” as she once worked as a pro­ducer on the show’s forerunner. Every Sunday at breakfast time, she tackles the week’s hot-button issues, asking probing questions of everyone from secretary of state Antony Blinken to the Republican governor of Arkansas, Asa Hutchinson, who she grilled about the state’s slow vaccination rate.

Bash recognises that the “speed, pace and pressure” on a cable chan­nel such as CNN is very real. But she is also honest enough to counter that she gets an adrenaline buzz out of it and she wouldn’t be there now if she didn’t. She also says that she’s learned how to switch off from the news when she needs to, thanks to her 10-year-old son, whose father, John King – Bash’s ex-husband – is another CNN anchor.

But have things changed since Donald Trump left the White House and “the bouncing ball of crazy”, as she refers to him, stopped bouncing? Is covering Joe Biden a little bit boring? “It feels normal,” she says. “And no matter who it is and what it is, I’ll take it. And by ‘normal’ I mean that we’re now covering the issues, such as infrastruc­ture, police reform, paid family leave.”

The daily news agenda might no longer be spiralling out of control but that doesn’t mean that CNN is working its talent any less hard – and Bash’s downtime seems minimal. On top of the Sunday show and regular studio analysis, there are forays into podcasts and documentaries about influential Washington women. The latter chimes with Bash, who talks about the encouraging number of women now involved in TV news. She says that she helps nurture this “sisterhood” through mentorship. “Being a woman in TV news is still a different thing than being a man,” she says. “There are different perceptions, expectations and challenges.” And Bash is certainly setting an example when it comes to conquering them.