{"id":3188,"date":"2014-04-23T20:00:26","date_gmt":"2014-04-24T01:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.robertfeder.com\/?p=3188"},"modified":"2014-04-23T20:11:10","modified_gmt":"2014-04-24T01:11:10","slug":"when-another-anchor-sailed-home-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/robertfeder.dailyherald.com\/2014\/04\/23\/when-another-anchor-sailed-home-again\/","title":{"rendered":"When another anchor sailed home"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Bill<\/a>

<\/a> Bill Kurtis and Diane Sawyer (1982)<\/p><\/div>\n

Zoraida Sambolin isn\u2019t the first Chicago news anchor to come home<\/a> after bailing out of a network morning news show. Three decades earlier, Bill Kurtis did the same thing.<\/p>\n

To the delight of Sambolin\u2019s fans, WMAQ-Channel 5 announced Wednesday that the Chicago native was returning<\/a> to co-anchor \u201cNBC 5 News Today\u201d after two years in New York as host of CNN\u2019s \u201cEarly Start.\u201d She stepped down last December after anchoring the two-hour weekday morning news show first with Ashleigh Banfield and later with John Berman.<\/p>\n

Her comeback evoked memories of Kurtis, who reclaimed his old job as the news kingpin of WBBM-Channel 2 in 1985 after three years as anchor of the \u201cCBS Morning News,\u201d where he was paired first with Diane Sawyer and later with Phyllis George. (Steve Deshler, a veteran of WLS-Channel 7, was the show\u2019s weatherman.)<\/p>\n

Kurtis, who\u2019d gone to New York with high hopes, returned disappointed and disillusioned. In a Chicago magazine cover story, he famously decried everything from the cockroaches of Manhattan to the trivialities of morning television: \u201cMany thought the program represented an excessive compromise with commercial demands, and a drift away from the CBS News they had known,\u201d he wrote. \u201cI found it difficult to wrestle every morning with my journalistic conscience, knowing that each interview would be followed by the question: \u2018Would Ed Murrow have done this?\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n

His return to CBS 2 should have been a slam dunk, but station bosses bungled it spectacularly. To make room for Kurtis, they demoted Harry Porterfield, the only black anchor on their Monday-through-Friday lineup, while retaining two other white anchors (Walter Jacobson and Don Craig) on weekdays. The miscalculation prompted Porterfield to bolt for ABC 7 and triggered a 10-month black viewer boycott led by the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson\u2019s Operation PUSH.<\/p>\n

Today, Porterfield, 85, is back at CBS 2, where he anchors the 11 a.m. weekday newscast with Roseanne Tellez. Kurtis, 73, ended his fourth run at CBS 2 in 2013 after anchoring the 6 p.m. weekday newscast with Jacobson for two and half years.<\/p>\n

\"WBBM\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Zoraida Sambolin isn\u2019t the first Chicago news anchor to come home after bailing out of a network morning news show. Three decades earlier, Bill Kurtis did the same thing. To the delight of Sambolin\u2019s fans, WMAQ-Channel 5 announced Wednesday that the Chicago native was returning to co-anchor \u201cNBC 5 News Today\u201d after two years in... Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/robertfeder.dailyherald.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3188"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/robertfeder.dailyherald.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/robertfeder.dailyherald.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/robertfeder.dailyherald.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/robertfeder.dailyherald.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3188"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/robertfeder.dailyherald.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3188\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3198,"href":"https:\/\/robertfeder.dailyherald.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3188\/revisions\/3198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/robertfeder.dailyherald.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/robertfeder.dailyherald.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/robertfeder.dailyherald.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}