The most commonly cited source of the term “anchor” is the television news coverage of the 1952 Republican presidential conventions. The concept is not borrowed, contrary to what one might expect, from the nautical realm, but from the strongest runner of a relay team, the anchorperson, who runs the final leg of the race. In the conventional format of broadcast news, when the anchor is not personally delivering a story by directly addressing the viewing audience or speaking over symbols and visual images of the news, he or she is introducing and calling upon reporters to deliver stories from the field or announcing a commercial break. Moreover, an anchor represents the public and its need to know whenever he or she interrogates and listens to the subject of an interview. National news anchors represent their respective networks and are held accountable for the ratings success of their respective news programs in attracting viewers. In keeping with this serious representational function, the anchor’s style of delivery is typically reserved and his or her appearance is designed to convey credibility. In other words, the anchor is a television host at the top of a hierarchical chain of command with special reportorial credentials and responsibilities centered around “hard” or serious news of the day—celebrity interview and tabloid news shows have hosts, not anchors, even when they are organized similarly in format to network evening news. Journalists in other television news formats without a similar division of labor between studio and field are not, strictly speaking, anchors.

Being delegated with the daily, prestigious responsibility for presenting national news has brought public exposure that has made some network television news anchors into household names. During his tenure as anchor of the CBS Evening News, Walter Cronkite transcended the domain of broadcast news into becoming a widely admired and “most trusted” national figure, eclipsing the fame of his cohorts, including the NBC News anchor team of Chet Huntley and David Brinkley. Network anchors since the early 1980s, ABC’s Peter Jennings, CBS’s Dan Rather, and NBC’s Tom Brokaw, have become national celebrities and highly paid television stars. However, the role of the network anchor appears to be declining in cultural significance as the broadcast networks lose more of their audience to cable, satellite, and new-media forms of news on the Internet. The sheer number of anchors—for instance, the singles and pairs that CNN rotates over its 24 hours of news programming—dilutes the potential star power of individual personalities. On the other hand, online news has thus far developed as an interactive magazine format, so that even on network websites, anchors are decentered and reduced to a tiny image on the page. “Ananova,” a female virtual web persona for 24-hour news delivery at ananova.com, represents a mouthpiece in the European “newsreader” tradition, rather than the anchor as a credible news-gathering and news-presenting subject.

Aside from abortive attempts to team Barbara Walters with Harry Reasoner and Connie Chung with Dan Rather, national news presenting has been almost exclusively the preserve of white males. However, many local stations have long represented diversity in the community by employing anchor teams of one man and one woman, with each anchor of a different race, supplemented by an ethnically diverse group of male and female reporters on the sports and weather beat and in the field. Even in the local context, however, distinctions between the ways in which male and female anchors are treated are vital. The highly publicized case of Christine Craft (who was demoted in 1981 from the anchor position at KMBC-TV in Kansas City, Kansas, because focus groups found her physically unappealing and overly aggressive) illustrates the willingness of executives to dismiss women considered “too old” or “too unattractive” to fill this highly visible role. Such judgments are rarely, if ever, made in cases involving male anchors, who are seen to develop “authority” and “gravity” as their physical glamour fades.

Corporate pressure toward expanding profit margins in broadcast and cable news divisions and increasing competition between news venues for ratings are both widely regarded as having eroded the public service orientation and journalistic standards of television news, thus diminishing the credibility and prestige of the television news anchor. The network anchors suffered great embarrassment from precipitous and inaccurate reporting of the presidential election of November 2000. During the events and the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, however, the prominence and authority accorded to anchors such as Jennings, Brokaw, and Rather showed that these figures can still personally and powerfully engage the public during a national emergency.

A secondary meaning of “anchor” comes out of semiology, or the study of signs and meaning. In “The Rhetoric of the Image,” Roland Barthes uses the anchor-and-relay metaphor to describe two different functions of the caption in relation to a still image: a caption anchors the image when the former selectively elucidates the latter’s meaning; when the caption sets out meanings not found in the image itself, it acts as a relay. The television news anchor may be said to function similarly as an “anchor” in this extended sense, by presenting a selection of events as news stories and by providing a framework for the interpretation of their social and cultural meaning. That “anchoring” capability has been challenged not only by the diminishing role and prestige of the network news but also by the proliferation of American-style news formats that present opposing worldviews, such as the Islamic perspectives broadcast on the Al-Jazeera network from Qatar during the war against terrorism in Afghanistan.