FOX 5's Ernie Anastos on Politcal Discourse and News Today

Steve Adubato goes One-on-One with veteran news anchor, Ernie Anastos, to discuss his career, his current role on FOX 5 NY, the state of political discourse today and his mission to highlight the good news in the world.

7/18/19 #2230

Excerpt:

"Hi, I'm Steve Adubato. I'm laughing, here at the Tisch WNET Studio, because my good friend and longtime colleague, Ernie Anastos! Steve! He needs no introduction. He's the anchor at Fox 5 New York, 6 p.m. every night. Ernie tell folks... by the way, every night at 6 o'clock, what happens on Fox 5? What we try to do is we keep it positive. I mean, you know, we deal with news of the day. This is a format that I worked on with my news director Byron Harmon. And I said, "You know what? For years I've been on the air." And especially 11 o'clock. And I'd come on and say "good evening" and then proceed to tell him why it's not. Right. So I said, "You know what? Let's kind of reverse that a little bit. Okay? Let's deal with news of the day, but also bring in more positive stories. Okay? If there is a problem, let's find a solution. Let's find out what people are doing to make it better." Right. So the concept is, you know, news information, but uplifting positive, let people know what's going on that's positive. Is it harder to do that, Ernie, in the age of divisive polarization? It can be. Are you for Trump? Against Trump? Nobody wants to talk. Nobody's open to... Yeah. ...any other point of view. And there's a lot of nastiness. Well Steve, you know that. And that's just... I've known you 20 years-plus. Yeah. That's not you? Right. No it's not. But you know what? But it's reality. And you know, you deal with this every day as well. I mean there is a difficult mood out there. I'm uncomfortable many times with the fact that, you know, we have such a divisiveness. And I'm looking for ways to be able to bring people together. Hard to do. Because social media plays a major role. We have so many outlets, so many television channels. We have satellite. We've got Internet. We've got everything. And they're all clashing. And people are giving their opinions, and I'll defend, you know, the right of speech. Anywhere. Right. And I think it's good. But I think we have to be very careful with it, because we have to be responsible as journalists, but there are citizen journalists out there too. And they don't really understand it, to say, "Wait a minute? If I say something, if I give my opinion if I do something, that can influence people." And you know, I could get off on this whole thing about bullying and so forth. I'm certainly not in favor of that. In fact, I produced a videotape. Yeah. With children. See, Ernie's so good..."