Ernie Anastos, the charismatic New York City television anchor who spent 11 years with WABC’s Eyewitness News and another 15 with Fox’s WNYW, died Wednesday. He was 82.
Anastos started out at WABC in 1978 and finished up at WNYW in 2019. In between, he had two stints at WCBS-TV and one at WWOR, and he collected more than 30 local Emmy awards and nominations along the way.
WABC reported the news of his death, citing people close to his family.
Born on July 12, 1943, in Nashua, New Hampshire, Anastos graduated from Northeastern University with a degree in sociology. He began as a reporter for the Boston radio stations WRKO and WROR, then landed his first TV job at WPRI in Providence, Rhode Island.
Anastos joined WABC as a reporter in June 1978 and would serve as an Eyewitness News anchor (though briefly replaced by Tom Snyder) through May 1989.
He quit to join WCBS the next month and stayed there through 1995, when he chose to focus on his Anastos Media Group company, which owned radio and TV stations in upstate New York and New England. He also hosted the Lifetime program Our Home.
After a stay at WWOR from 1997-2001, he returned to WCBS as the lead anchor at 5 p.m., 6 p.m. and 11 p.m. and was on duty during the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
In 2005, he moved to WNYW with a five-year, $10 million contract and worked there through 2019, when he enrolled in Harvard Business School to take leadership and management courses.
While bantering with the weatherperson on the air in 2010, the clean-cut Anastos may have inadvertently used an obscenity when he said, “Keep plucking that chicken.” He apologized the next day and later remarked, “It certainly was an unusual chapter in my life and career.”
He wrote children’s books including Twixt: Teens Yesterday and Today and Ernie and the Big Newz and hosted the nationally syndicated radio show Positively America.
In 2017, then-New York Mayor Bill de Blasio proclaimed March 21 to be Ernie Anastos Day in the city.
