Thank God he's bland. It's about time after all of these pretty-boy prima donnas. It's nice to have the anchor get out of the way instead of intently mugging and every occasion.
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.
yup....someone more in the Huntley/Brinkely vein....maybe even Cronkite.....you couldn't tell he was a liberal (well for the most part if you throw out his Tet offensive crap) nearly as much as Blather....after Rather, anyone looks good