Here's a thought: why do we actually NEED anchors? I mean, what do they actually DO? They sit there and read a bit. It's always seemed to me that this takes up valuable camera time on the nightly broadcast. There's a slow pan in as the dramatic music plays, a slow pan out as we go to commercial, wherein the newsreader (the BBC term) makes some notes on some paper at his desk ("MEMO: 1. Stop at market for prosciutto; 2. Call Kinko's re: price quote for forging documents; 3. Make appt. for hair re-lacquering"), and some showoff footage of people working at desks in the background, making phone calls to show that it's a Real Working Newsroom ("Hi Mom! Can you see me? Nope, just playing FreeCell.") That's got to eat up 3 or 4 minutes of what is already a very short broadcast.
The newsreader is an anachronism, a leftover from the old days when we didn't have instant video via satellite from all over the globe. The guy would have to sit there and READ the news, because there weren't any pictures. Maybe a bit of film, if you were lucky.
Fire the talking heads, ditch the studio. Throw a graphic up at the front of the broadcast and bang, go straight into the news. It needs narration? Fine. Hire somebody with a pleasant voice (Hugh Hewitt springs to mind) to sit at a microphone and talk over the video.
That would save the beleaguered MSM, already losing money faster than a kosher deli in Damascus, a bag full of money per broadcast, AND they'd be able to, I don't know, cram a bit more actual NEWS in there.
It's all in the name of entertainment. We can't handle "just news". We've become a society that needs to be entertained every waking moment.
Games on our phones, DVD's in our cars, it never ends.
Your post is spot-on. For acquiring reliable, untainted news, America is chosing new media (internet, talk-radio) and has moved on, leaving the old behind. People can see right through the shallow stage trickery as mentioned in your post. Overt, unashamed, bias is the deadly germ that invaded the body of the MSM years ago and has now reached a level of fatal malignancy. As their audience (market share) continues to dwindle, the news divisions of the networks are dying out with each announced layoff of personnel (which is occurring with greater and greater frequency). I think that re-tooling a news broadcast using your suggestions would definitely make it more watchable. It would almost certainly make them more profitable.
This has also contributed heavily to the demise of the Democrats, since they hitched their wagons to the MSM years ago. The two entities are so entwined (and have been for so long) that it is difficult to determine who is the parasite and who is the host organism; anything that would affect the one (for good or bad) would automatically affect the other in the same way.
The business model for the anchor is the party political apparatchik sitting there giving us our daily re-education indoctrination in the current party line over the wired speaker that you can't turn off.