Good morning. It’s Monday. Today we’ll look at a local news anchor who has 50 years on the job. We’ll also take a look at some of the legal threats facing Donald Trump.
A minute or so after 6 p.m., after what television people call the “opening tease,” he will say five words that he said on his first night on the job, 50 years ago: “Good evening, I’m Chuck Scarborough.”
Scarborough has done that thousands of times, anchoring, by his count, 3,000 hours of local news on WNBC — a staggering total that stretches from the city’s financial crisis of the 1970s to the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001 to the coronavirus pandemic. Eight governors have taken up residence in Albany and seven mayors have presided from City Hall while he has been at the anchor desk. Even the city’s central governing body has changed, with a City Council replacing the old Board of Estimate.
But no, he had no idea when he arrived in 1974 that he would still be at Channel 4 half a century later. “This was my fifth job in television news, fifth station,” said Scarborough, who turned 80 last year. “My average tenure in the first four was two years.”
Through blizzards and blackouts and parades and protests, he became a constant, at once commanding and reassuring. There were changing backdrops at Channel 4, including one he called “the starship set,” and there were rotating casts around him, but he survived it all. “In TV, people come and people go quickly,” Sue Simmons, his co-anchor from 1980 to 2012, said last week when I asked her about him. “It’s quite an accomplishment for him to last this long, and well deserved.”
Here are some facts that even longtime viewers might not know:
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His initials spell the name of another network, CBS — which, in 1999, broadcast a made-for-television movie based on a novel he wrote.
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He is not related to Charles Joseph Scarborough, who works in the same building and is better known as Joe Scarborough, of “Morning Joe” on MSNBC.
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He gets voice mail messages from “Morning Joe” viewers that he summarized like this: “You idiot, you don’t know what you were talking about.” Before he realized whom they were trying to reach, he thought he had “really screwed up” as he tried to figure out what he had said on Channel 4 to set them off.
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He put his life savings — $30,000 — into tax anticipation notes, a type of short-term municipal bond issued by the city, when he moved to New York in 1974.
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When bankruptcy loomed the next year, “my savings got frozen,” he said. It took time and there were complications, but he eventually cashed out the notes.
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Simmons said that she merely “talked to him like a woman who worked with him for 32 years and never could get his attention,” adding, “You work with somebody that long, they’re like family.”
For years, WNBC’s newscasts originated from Studio 6B at Rockefeller Center. Across the hall in the 1980s and ’90s was the studio where “Late Night With David Letterman” was taped, starting at 5:30 p.m.
“Oh, dear lord,” Scarborough said when I brought up Letterman. “That was a circus. I went down there one day, and he’d set up an archer, shooting arrows down that hallway. I had the script in hand, and I had to dodge the archer to go into the studio.”
There was also the day in the mid-1990s when Joey Buttafuoco arrived for an interview with Scarborough. Buttafuoco, the Long Island auto-body mechanic with a teenage girlfriend, Amy Fisher, who shot his wife in the head, had been a source of laughs for Letterman for weeks.
According to Scarborough, Buttafuoco “got out of the elevator” and walked down the hall between the two studios. Letterman saw Buttafuoco “and went and locked himself in his dressing room,” Scarborough said. Letterman apparently “thought Joey Buttafuoco was coming for him.”
Looking back at his time in New York, Scarborough could construct a wizened, seen-it-all-and-done-it-all narrative. His outlook, though, was upbeat.
“Here’s a theme of these 50 years,” he said. “The city has been knocked to its knees any number of times — by 9/11, by Covid, in 2008 when people said it was the end of the world financially. Each time it was knocked down, people were saying, That’s it, New York can’t possibly survive. And each time we would recover.”
“One lesson we really have learned is, Never count the city out,” he said. “We can take our licks, and we certainly do, but we figure it out.”
For Trump, two legal threats on the same day
Former President Donald Trump could face two of his greatest fears today: He could be given a trial date in a hush-money case. And he faces the deadline for the $454 million civil judgment in a separate case.
One case could lead to a criminal conviction, which would be a first for him (and a first for a former president).
The other case could lead to the public perception that he does not have as much cash as he has said he has.
Trump is expected to spend the morning at a hearing in the criminal case, in which he is accused of covering up a sex scandal to save his bid for the presidency in 2016. In the civil case, unless he strikes a last-minute deal, the New York attorney general, Letitia James, could soon freeze many of his bank accounts and move to seize some of his properties in New York.
Trump has been unable to find a company that will post a half-billion dollar bond for him. Trump’s lawyers said in court papers filed last week that arranging such a bond was a “practical impossibility” because 30 bond companies had turned him down. The penalty was imposed by Justice Arthur Engoron, who found that Trump had fraudulently inflated the value of his real estate properties in dealings with banks.
To line up a bond, the lawyers said, Trump would have to pledge roughly $550 million as collateral. A New York Times analysis found that he did not have that much on hand: His holdings in stocks and bonds — assets that could be sold quickly — and the cash he does have recently came to more than $350 million. He also has his real estate, but bond companies do not normally take properties as collateral.
He could seek a loan from a bank or a private equity firm. And he could see a $3 billion windfall when shares of his social media company start trading on the stock market as early as Monday. Major shareholders in a deal like the one for his company are normally barred from selling their shares for six months, but he could look for ways around that restriction.
