From Rather to Romo: How Sportscasters Replaced Anchors As Network Faces

When Stephen A. Smith scored his record, five-year, $100 million contract, the negotiations reached the highest levels of The Walt Disney Co., including ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro, ABC News president Debra OConnell, and Disney executive chairman Bob Iger.

The vital importance Disney placed on keeping Smith within the House of Mouse emphasizes a new reality. Sports personalities—not news anchors—are the new faces of media corporations. 

Back in the 1980s and ’90s, network anchors like Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, and the late Peter Jennings embodied their respective broadcast networks. They defined quality, integrity, and gravitas.

I would argue that sports personalities like Smith, Charles Barkley, Pat McAfee, Cris Collinsworth, Troy Aikman, Tony Romo, Tom Brady, and Al Michaels personify companies like Disney/ESPN, NBC, Fox, Amazon Prime Video, and TNT. 

It’s the sports personalities who are scoring the massive salaries and making waves across politics and pop culture. Smith, for example, talks about national politics on news networks ranging from CNN and MSNBC to Fox News and NewsNation. He’s increasingly talked about as a contender for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination. Smith will even do a “Three Americans Live” show with anchors Bill O’Reilly and Chris Cuomo late this month.

Meanwhile, Mike Tirico led NBC’s spectacular coverage of the Paris Olympics, which turbocharged the global brand power of the five rings. 

I’d argue that ESPN’s raid of rival Fox to hire away Aikman and Joe Buck for Monday Night Football, and Prime’s decision to hire Kirk Herbstreit and Michaels for Thursday Night Football were some of the most pivotal hires in media, not just sports media. With Aikman and Buck, I think ESPN immediately jumped from worst to first among NFL broadcast booths. With their decades of Big Game bona fides, Herbstreit and Michaels instantly put Prime’s TNF on par with the NFL productions of legacy media rivals.

During the coming upfront market—where media giants sell the bulk of their advertising time to marketers—sports personalities, not news anchors, will take center stage. 

News Business Struggles

What about their counterparts in the glamorous world of network news? ABC News just renewed George Stephanopoulos—although the Good Morning America co-anchor had to take a pay cut, according to the New York Post. Norah O’Donnell recently stepped down as anchor of the late Walter Cronkite’s CBS Evening News after five years. MSNBC canceled Joy Reid’s 7 p.m. show in February. Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd left NBC News this year. Other veteran anchors like Hoda Kotb of NBC, Neil Cavuto of Fox News, and Jim Acosta, Don Lemon, and Chris Wallace of CNN (formerly Fox News) also split with their networks. With Lester Holt stepping down from NBC Nightly News, the era of big-time news anchors might be ending, says Joe DePaolo, managing editor at Mediate.

“Lester Holt might have been the closest to that in this current era. He leaves and Tom Llamas takes his place. Tom does yeoman’s work; he does a good job. But the stature of that job takes another hit with Lester’s departure,” DePaolo told me. “If you go back to the Jennings-Rather-Brokaw days, that was a 20- to 25-year era, with those three guys holding it down. The [anchor] position has become much more transient. CBS hasn’t been able to find anybody for the last three or four go-rounds.”

What’s going on? Sports have come to dominate attention in a manner not seen before. Despite a presidential election, which generally negatively affects ratings, sports generated 85 of the top 100 most-watched telecasts in 2024, according to Nielsen. Meanwhile, Americans’ trust in mass media has sunk to its lowest point in five decades, according to The Hill. Only 31% of respondents in a recent Gallup survey said they trust the mass media a “great deal” while 36% don’t trust the media “at all.” As the late Cronkite would say, “And that’s the way it is.”