GONE: Rob Morrison (Douglas Healey)
Veteran Cindy Hsu seems to be in the lead to replace andy anchorman Rob Morrison, who was forced to quit Ch. 2 two weeks ago in a domestic abuse scandal.
Guessing who will get Morrison’s old job — he anchored the 6 a.m. and noon newscasts for the CBS station — has been Topic A around TV newsrooms in town.
Some news-business Web sites have even been running reader polls to see who should fill the job.
But insiders inside and outside the station are saying that the 46-year-old Hsu is the front-runner.
“The place is getting flooded with tapes and resumés frim out of town,” says one CBS employee. “But everyone thinks the job will get filled from the inside,”
Hsu declined comment when reached over the weekend and Ch. 2 ix remaining mum.
A poll by the New York media Web site Fisbowl yesterday named anchorman Chris Wragge as the popular choice.
But a clause Wragge’s contract requires the station to use him in prime time — and he would be unlikely to go to mornings without being bought out.
Hsu, 46, has been a weekend anchor on the station for nearly 10 years. and was a popular reporter for 10 years before that.
Veteran Cindy Hsu seems to be in the lead to replace angry anchorman Rob Morrison, who was forced to quit Ch. 2 two weeks ago in a domestic abuse scandal.
Guessing who will get Morrison’s old job — he anchored the 6 a.m. and noon newscasts for the CBS station — has been Topic A around TV newsrooms in town.
Some news-business Web sites have even been running reader polls to see who should fill the job.
But insiders are saying that the 46-year-old Hsu is the front-runner.
“The place is getting flooded with tapes and resumes from out of town,” says one CBS employee. “But everyone thinks the job will get filled from the inside.”
Hsu declined to comment when reached over the weekend and Ch. 2 is remaining mum.
A poll by the New York media Web site Fishbowl yesterday named anchorman Chris Wragge as the popular choice.
But a clause in Wragge’s contract requires the station to use him in prime time — and he would be unlikely to go to mornings without being bought out.
Hsu has been a weekend anchor on the station for nearly 10 years, and was a popular reporter for 10 years before that.
Giving Hsu Morrison’s old job would create a two-woman anchor team in the morning, something that CBS traditionally does not like to do.
But, as one TV news professional put it, “Times are changing and two women is hardly as shocking as it once was.”
Ch. 7, for instance, uses two women anchors — Diana Williams and Sade Baderinwa — in early prime time.
Still, the Morrison scandal happened so quickly, it now appears clear the station was caught by surprise and had no succession plan in place. Morrison quit the station, rather than be fired, after it became known that he’d been arrested on charges that he’d tried to choke his wife during a booze-fueled argument in their Connecticut home.
His wife, Ashley, is also an anchor. She covers business news for CBS Market Watch.