New York's Anchorman Signs Off For The Final Time

Chances are, if you lived in New York City or the surrounding region that is generally known as “the Tri-State area” in the years since the late 1970s, you knew the name Ernie Anastos. He was a fixture as a news anchor at four of New York City’s flagship network television stations — WABC, WCBS, WWOR, and WNYW — earning more than thirty Emmy Awards along the way.

Anastos died earlier this week after being hospitalized with pneumonia. He was 82 years old. He was, as The New York Times once put it with characteristic economy, “the ubiquitous anchorman.”

But what Ernie Anastos really was, in a way that is becoming increasingly rare in local television news, was a star.

Not a celebrity in the tabloid sense, though New York certainly claimed him as one of its own. A star in the older, more specific sense: someone whose presence on screen created an immediate and visceral sense of trust in the viewer. Someone you wanted to watch not just because they were delivering information, but because of who they appeared to be while delivering it. The charismatic anchor — the kind of figure who could hold a market’s attention across multiple decades and multiple stations — is a vanishing archetype in American local television. The economics of the business have made that kind of long-term investment in a single personality increasingly difficult to justify.

Ernie Anastos was perhaps one of the last great examples in the role.

His initial tenure at the anchor desk in NYC was at WABC-TV, beginning in 1978, at the height of that station’s dominance as “Eyewitness News.” Over the next eleven years, he would be one of the key figures in what was perhaps the most talent-laden station ever assembled in the nation’s biggest market.

He would go on to anchor at WCBS beginning in 1989, remaining there until the mid-1990s before eventually landing at WNYW, the Fox O&O, in 2005 — where he would spend the next fourteen years, his longest tenure at any station in the market. Along the way, he became the owner of a group of radio stations in Upstate New York and New England, under the banner of the Anastos Media Group. Up until becoming ill a few months ago, he was still on the air, producing and hosting positive news features for WABC Radio.

Ernie even found time to write a few children’s books, including the story of a young boy who realizes his dream of becoming a TV reporter. His first big scoop is covering the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. The book’s title? “Ernie and The Big Newz.”

What strikes us, looking back at his career, is how much the skills that made Anastos exceptional on television overlap with those that make for a successful politician. This is not a coincidence. Both the charismatic anchor and the effective political figure are, at their core, practitioners of the same art: projecting warmth, authority, and approachability to strangers at scale.

Consider what his colleagues said about Anastos in the hours after his death was announced. That he “paired well with every co-anchor they ever put him with.” That he was “always positive” and “never cynical.” That he “knew everybody, and everybody loved him.” That you couldn’t walk into a Greek diner anywhere in New York for a generation without seeing his photograph on the wall.

Having worked with him for a few years in the early 1990s, we found out firsthand that Anastos understood, in a way that precious few broadcasters of any era have, that the relationship between an anchor and an audience is fundamentally a relationship between a person and a constituency. It must be tended to, maintained, and renewed. It requires showing up at community events. It requires remembering names. It requires — and this is where many talented journalists fall short — a genuine pleasure in the company of others that reads as authentic across the distance of an electronic screen.

You cannot fake that quality for forty-plus years, especially in the mega-media metropolis that is New York City. Anastos had it, and New Yorkers knew it.

Local television news is no longer producing many anchors in the mold of Ernie Anastos. The current economic pressures of the business have pushed stations toward shorter (and cheaper) contracts, more rotating in the anchor chairs, and a de-emphasis on the kind of community embeddedness that defined his career. That loss extends beyond simple nostalgia. The charismatic local anchor would at some point be referred to with the shorthand of “the command anchor.” That term identified the style of what an anchor could be in those critical moments of live, breaking news coverage, helping guide the viewer through the most shocking and unsettling of events. Ernie Anastos did just that, time and time again over the years. But just as deftly, he also presented those smaller, more human moments which truly endeared him to the audience.

That is the genuine “X factor” for a TV anchor that so many have never fully grasped.

Anastos’s final public post, published on March 3rd on his social media page, showed him standing in front of the iconic “Superman” Globe at the old Daily News Building in Manhattan. His caption read simply: “Now more than ever we need to promote and protect the truth.” It was, as it turned out, fitting last words from a man who spent his life making people believe that someone on the other side of the screen was looking out for them.

In that, he was among the best we’ve ever seen.

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