Barrett Media produces over 20 stories per day on the music, news, and sports media industries. Stay updated on the latest happenings by signing up to receive our newsletters straight to your inbox.
“Time on the Roundup, eight past the hour.” It’s a phrase many great CBS radio anchors have said, including Steve Kathan. “I try to approach every day as excited as I did back when I was younger and look at every day as new,” the distinguished anchor said.
His love of radio began as a child, not in news but with sports. “I think one of the first things that sticks out with me is I was in high school, and I listened to New York Knicks games on the radio, and I thought I really wanted to do sports play by play. That’s what I thought I could do.”
There was one steady force he would wake up to after listening to the late-night games. “I’d go to sleep after listening to those games and it would be on the same station in the morning when my alarm went off and on was a newscast. And it was a really good local newscast, and I got interested in that too, just by accident.”
Upon graduating from Syracuse’s Newhouse School, Kathan worked at a few local stations in both news and sports. One of his more notable moments from those days was covering a University of Bridgeport soccer game on the road. “You’d order a phone line ahead of time and you took your equipment into the phone line and voila, you had broadcast. So, this [game was in a] field and it was just a field. No bleachers, nothing. I mean, it’s a field and nothing around it. There’s no place for any fans to sit. There’s no place for anybody to broadcast from.”
Quick thinking under pressure, Kathan used some ingenuity to ensure the broadcast would go on. “I found the phone line like hanging from a pole on the side of the field and I pulled up my car to the edge of the field and hooked up my equipment and I did the game from the front seat of my car, which may never have been done before.”
Early in his career, Kathan accomplished his childhood dream of being a play-by-play announcer for the Army Football and Basketball teams. However, by this time he noticed a change in the industry. “I was realizing at the beginning that a lot of sports is going to be televised. ESPN was just starting back then. So, I really sort of honed more of a news career.”
In 1987 he joined CBS as a writer and producer. However, he did not let his anchor skills fall to the wayside. “I saw that as a way to get those [news] chops down a little bit, and I could always translate those writing and producing skills into TV if I wanted to. But I decided at one point to do a tape for my bosses and let them know that this is something I can do and something I have done and something I want to do.”
Impressed with his skills, Kathan began anchoring hourly newscasts in 1997. Today, he’s won more Murrow’s than he can keep track of (roughly 14) but he humbly believes, “As much as I’ve won a lot of Murrow’s, it’s we, the CBS team, have won a lot of Murrow’s.”
Among the awards is coverage of many elections, and hopefully this year’s election is no different for Kathan and the CBS team. What is different is the way the candidates interact with each other. “When I started covering politics as different as the parties were, it seemed to me that they usually were able to carve out some sort of middle or at least a respect of the other and we’re not there at this point in the game,” he said. “I don’t have a magic formula to get us back there and I think it’s going to take the right politician to do it. I don’t know that we have that politician right now.”
In addition to anchoring the ‘CBS World News Roundup’ Kathan previously hosted the podcast, What’s in the News. He believes the best way to cover this election is play it down the middle. “I think you try to aim for fairness over time and at least in a specific newscast, you try to make it that way if you can. You’ve always got to look at yourself critically in those situations and say, ‘what am I saying?’”
Kathan added, “You can’t have words that perhaps have a loaded meaning in terms of your script. You have to be clear in what you’re saying. You can’t be a little suspect in some of your word choices. I think they’re very important, especially now because you have critics on both sides that are ready to pounce if they see that.”
For those looking to follow in Kathan’s path, he believes many don’t have to. “I couldn’t have done it the same way I did it 40 years ago,” he said. “Those stations are small, and they don’t do news anymore. I’d start in a 2- or 4-person news department at some of these places, and they just don’t exist anymore. There’s more specialization. You’re either a news station or you’re a music station or you’re a talk station or what have you and I think that limits the opportunities because perhaps on a talk station there’s a local news element, or [if there is] it may only be in the morning. So, I couldn’t venture out and do it the same way I did it today in any way, shape or form.”
Despite the industry changes, there is still something people can do to be successful amidst this change. “Most people who want to start out in this business, they just have to learn as much as they can, get as much experience as they can and be broad in terms of what they’re learning, because you just don’t know which way things are going to take you. And you have to be prepared if there are more openings perhaps in a field, that’s what you like to do, but maybe not what you love to do. You have to get started there and maybe find your way back [to what you love] at some point.”
Kathan noted how this can be frustrating but added, “I’ve talked to [people] who are trying to start out because it’s not easy and it’s best if you can get some sort of commercial experience while you’re in school. You’ve got to talk your way into places or perhaps there’s a good internship out there. But whatever you can do, you’ve got to do.”
