$100,000 Anchorman

Last week, just 16 hours after he retired as chief of the Los Angeles police department, Tom Reddin ran a Norelco over his afternoon stubble, popped in his contact lenses, tucked a microphone into the front of his gold shirt and took over as evening news anchorman of station KTLA-TV.

He asked the audience to "bear with me while I falter and stumble at times," then talked his way into the lead item. Like most of the rest of the 60-minute program, it was about his arrival at KTLA. He ran footage of tributes from HEW Secretary Robert Finch, Senator George Murphy ("Tom is the only real threat to John Wayne") and Mayor Sam Yorty ("We didn't want to lose him") He traded compliments with KTLA Sportscaster Tom Harmon.

Finally, he worked his way into an awkward five-minute overview of the world that he had been writing for three days. It positioned him somewhat to the right of his reputation as a liberal policeman but slightly to the left of the conservative attitude maintained by the station's majority stockholder, Gene Autry. Reddin's prime target was the dissidents: "I am fed up with the militant, regardless of color or political persuasion, who is constantly on the attack. The promoters of urban guerrilla warfare are as much the enemy of our society as the soldier on a foreign battlefield."

Electronic Addiction. At the end of the premiere, Station Manager Doug Finley found Rookie Reddin "so good" that he cried ("Well, maybe not cried, but I certainly lumped up"). Reddin was more straight-shooting. Before the show he had quipped: "I believe each man should start at the top of his chosen profession." Afterwards he said, "You know, it's not as easy as it looks." Despite two weeks of video-taped dry runs, he did not transmit the Cronkite-like "casualness" that he had promised. His normally easy Irish smile switched on when it should have been turned off, and during his patriotic peroration his thin, reedy voice cracked like the Liberty Bell.

But on opening night at least, KTLA got what it was paying $100,000 a year for: a fourfold increase in the ratings. In a town addicted to electronic news (the supper-hour local report runs two hours on one station), KTLA had fallen into fifth place after a rival station wooed away its top announcer, George Putnam, an archconservative who never fails to put America first. The salary that won George was $300,000 (Walter Cronkite earns something over $200,000). Even if Reddin does not improve over his shaky shakedown, he has an escalator contract guaranteeing him $150,000 a year within five years.

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