Channel 5's Warner Saunders From Activist to Anchor

By: Norine L. SmithMinorities who want broadcast news jobs face a tough market, said Warner Saunders of WMAQ- TV, Channel 5, but some aspiring black journalists don't deserve them, he added.

"I get black interns in here who are the laziest people in town," said Saunders, who co-anchors Channel 5's 4.30 p.m. news. "They have an opportunity to be in this place and do absolutely nothing about it."

"I have people come to me and say about these interns, 'Why don't you take them under your wing and talk to them?' One, I am not their daddy. And secondly, I you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make them drink. ... They are the ones who should be coming to me."
The few black interns who have worked hard have "zoomed in the business," he said. "I do not think that being lazy and being unmotivated is a racial characteristic. It is a cultural characteristic that has (been) passed on from their parents and from misguided black leadership.

"My argument with minorities is the same as the Japanese argument," he said. "We don't work hard enough. I think that if minorities worked harder and bitched less about the issues of racism and simply work and say 'I refuse to accept failure,' then I think you'll see a lot more people busting what is called the glass ceiling."

When Saunders, 57, was young and trying to get into the business, he turned to famed black disc jockey Daddy-O Daylie. "I look up to him as a father," Saunders said.

During the riots following the April 4, 1968 assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the management of WLS-TV, Channel 7 asked Daylie to quickly put together a special public affairs program for the black community.

"The rumors were, on the day of Dr. King's funeral, [blacks] were going to riot," recalled Daylie, 71, then a disc jockey at WMAQ radio. Daylie asked Saunders, then executive director of the Better Boys Foundation, to be his co-host. The producer was Vernon Jarrett, now a Chicago Sun-Times columnist.

Saunders recalled that when he started, there were just a few blacks on the air in Chicago. He taught himself broadcasting by studying tape recordings he made at home.

The program, "For Blacks Only," was supposed to be a special, Daylie said, but it got such high ratings that Channel 7 kept it going for 11 years. Saunders co-hosted the program until 1972 when he was hired by WBBM-TV, Channel 2 as director of community affairs and host of "Common Ground."

He joined Channel 5 in 1982 as a sports reporter and became a news anchor in 1990. He has won 14 Chicago Emmy Awards most recently in 1989 for a series of public-affairs shows on race relations. Saunders also co-hosts the morning news program "Chicago Alive."

He and his wife, Sadako, live in Streeterville with their son, Warner, Jr.

While he believes racism limits minorities chances in the news business, he said it is impossible to prove.

"How do I know that a person doesn't hire me for something, or does not ... because of race?" he asked. He said he doesn't know if he has ever been discriminated against.

Even in dealing with hostile sources, he never knows if they are hostile because of racism, he said. He recalled that once while covering a story a white person spat on him.

"Whether he was doing that because of race, I didn't take the time to find out. Now, was that a racial spit? Or was that just spit where 'you were a stupid idiot.'"

"I get to the point where I don't even think that a person saying to you, 'Nigger, get out of here,' may necessarily be racist."