One of history’s most iconic photos is that of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Soviet strongman Joseph Stalin meeting in Yalta in early 1945 to discuss how Europe would be divvied up after World War II.
Though no one should confuse the three men in that photo with the three men in the above photo.
(You can discuss this on the BSL Board here.)
There is a similarity, in that they have pretty much divvied up the Baltimore television sports audience over the past 15 years.
In WJZ’s (13) Mark Viviano, Bruce Cunningham of WBFF (45) and Gerry Sandusky of WBAL (11), there is more than 60 years of on-air experience as the lead newscast sportscaster in Baltimore.
And that number climbs to near 70 when you remember that Viviano, the relative newbie of the group with 15 years at Channel 13, was here for five years as the weekend guy at 11 in the early 1990s.
Roll that around your mind for a moment. In a business as cutthroat as television, where prime-time shows disappear after one airing and newscasters can get bounced from 6 p.m. to 11 p.m. in the same evening, it’s nothing short of amazing that Cunningham, Sandusky and Viviano have thrived and survived for so long with little indication of slowing down.
Actually, besides their on-air gifts, the presence of the Big Three is a testament to the quirkiness of the Baltimore television market.
As recently as 1970, over 900,000 people lived within the city limits of Baltimore and the city was the seventh-largest in the nation, with more than three times the population of, say, Charlotte.
Today, Charlotte is the 22nd largest television market and Baltimore has tumbled all the way to 26th, a good sized market to be sure, but not a ratings powerhouse.
But while large numbers of Baltimoreans have left the city for the suburbs or other cities, what has remained constant is the consistency of the on-air news talent.
Simply put, newscasters in Baltimore hardly ever leave. Oh, they may change stations here and there, a la Stan Stovall, who is at Channel 11 after breaking into the market at Channel 2, or Kai Jackson, who was a reporter/anchor at Channel 13 and now is the main anchor at Channel 45.
But, for the most part, if you grew up here, went away to college and returned in your early 30s, there’s a pretty good chance that the newscasters you saw in your teens are still on the air for your kids to know.
And that is certainly true with sportscasters. Cunningham was one of the sportscasters when WBFF launched its newscast in 1991, while Sandusky learned at the feet of one of the city’s sportscasting pioneers, Vince Bagli, before he got the full run in the early 1990s.
For that matter, had WMAR not made the asinine decision to dump sports in the last decade, there’s a decent chance that its former sports director, Scott Garceau, might still be there.
It’s quite likely that any of the Big Three could have left for a bigger market or a place in the national spotlight, the way the late John Saunders left WMAR for ESPN in the 1980s or how current “Entertainment Tonight” host Kevin Frazier left WBFF first for Cincinnati before going to Fox Sports Net and ESPN.
Indeed, after breaking the biggest story in Baltimore sports history – the relocation of the Browns to town to become the Ravens in 1995 — Viviano did leave to help found CNN’s brief attempt to challenge ESPN, only to, well, return.
In other markets, say, Washington for instance, sportscasters come and go seemingly all the time, but Sandusky, Viviano and Cunningham keep plugging along in Charm City.
And there’s no perception, at least from this side of the TV set, that there’s a yearning on the part of any of them to be bigger fish in a bigger pond.
Their success comes at a perilous time for the local sportscasters, as their time in the evening newscasts has been slashed by news directors nationwide.
The “thinking” there seems to be that viewers are more interested in hearing about Miley Cyrus’ most recent twerk or two more minutes of weather than what’s happening with a local team or athlete. Or that they can get that information from the Worldwide Leader or other places.
The presence of the Big Three has largely blocked the emergence of minority or female sportscasters in the market, though Cunningham has done a consistent job of nurturing talented women only to see them leave for bigger spotlights.
But it doesn’t appear that Baltimore sports viewers are interested in breaking up what has been a good thing for a long time.
Sports Media Analyst
Milton Kent is a veteran of Baltimore and Maryland journalism. Kent began a long association with the Baltimore Sun in 1985, serving as the Evening Sun’s Howard County reporter for 2 ½ years before joining the paper’s features department as an entertainment writer in 1988. In the following year, Kent began covering men’s and women’s college basketball for the Evening Sun, concentrating on the Maryland men’s and women’s teams. He continued covering college basketball when the writing staffs of the Evening and Morning Suns merged in 1991. From there, he covered the Orioles for three seasons before becoming one of the nation’s first fulltime sports media critics for parts of six years. In 2000, he began covering the NBA until 2004, when he launched a high school sports column, which he wrote until he left the Sun in 2008. Kent joined the staff of AOL Fanhouse, an online sports operation in 2009, covering sports media and women’s basketball, until operations ceased in 2011. He then joined the faculty at Morgan State University in the fall of 2011, where he has taught until the present day. In addition to writing for various platforms, including Sports Illustrated.com and TV Guide, Kent has hosted “Sports At Large,” a weekly commentary program airing on WYPR (88.1 FM) since 2002.