Answer: What passion?
Bottom line, we are a vanilla market. We have very good solid anchors, don't get me wrong, but they're all pretty much cookie-cutter.
They have been marginalized and fed toast points by the consultants and managers so much to the degree that they rarely show any emotion even on the most passionate of stories. There's nothing terribly wrong with that and nobody's suggesting one or so of the readers to actually do something radical but doesn't there come a time when you, the viewer, want some raw emotion, some degree of anger, some frustration? I miss a little bit of that from the late Pete Wilson. He was good at that without being a dick. When there was a story of particular rage and heat, Pete would show the necessary angst, but it wasn't phony or contrived--it was real, damn the teleprompter and notes.
Today's Bay Area news readers are, for the most part, just reading lines. That's not to denigrate their work, necessarily, but it does illustrate the new world of local TV news. Dammit.
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