When the TV Anchor Is Sexy, Men Forget About the Story, Study Says

It's no secret that TV networks and local stations coast to coast glam up their newscasts with fashion-model types and beauty-queen lookalikes to attract viewers and spike ratings. But now we hear that while men are certainly lured by a sexy female anchor, they're so enthralled by her looks they can't pay attention to or remember a thing she says.

This bit of sci-news came last week in a study by two Indiana University researchers who report that for male viewers, "emphasis on the sexual attractiveness of female news anchors distracts from memory formation for news content." That's academic jargon meaning that men are more drawn to the anchor's looks than to the news she's delivering.

The researchers, who published their report "Sexual Cues Emanating From the Anchorette Chair," in the journal Communication Research, made up two different versions of a short newscast featuring the same 24-year-old female anchor. In one newscast the anchor wore "a tight-fitting dark blue jacket and skirt that accented her waist-to-hip ratio," the researchers wrote. "She also wore bright red lipstick and a necklace." For the other version, she wore a loose-fitting dark blue jacket and skirt, no makeup or jewelry.

The nearly 400 participants, including women, were assigned at random to watch one version or the other. They had to fill out questionnaires about their impressions of the anchor. They also answered four multiple-choice questions about her looks and another 10 multiple-choice questions about the content of five news stories she delivered.

The male viewers who watched the plain-looking anchorwoman retained more information than those who watched the sexualized anchorwoman. The female viewers, while also drawn to good-looking anchors on TV, remember more about what the anchor says, not less.

Is this really news? Didn't we know that sexy women addle men's brains? Maybe the guys can't remember a word of the newscast, but apparently they'll forgo information for an eyeful of candy.

Sexy TV anchors have been a staple of broadcast and cable networks for decades. There's nothing mysterious about it. Visual media will always opt for sexy and young (Betty White and Meryl Streep exempted). Countless gender and age discrimination lawsuits attest to the fact that if you're plain-looking, overweight and aging, you've got no chance at the anchor chair or even the weather report.

Still, news or no news, the Indiana University report by Maria Elizabeth Grabe and Leila Samson lit up the blogosphere.

"Sit down ... wait for this ... this news is going to be mind-blowing: sexy female news anchors distract male viewers and render them unable to process the content of the news," said the snippy Frisky blog. "Holy moly, Fox News might be onto something!''

Frisky went on to hurl a put-down at the Fox News darling Megyn Kelly, 40, a lawyer whose knockout looks upstage her brains (Syracuse, Albany Law). "In other words," Frisky continued, "a channel-surfing dude might stop if he sees Megyn Kelly ... but will he actually learn anything about Egyptian youths driving a revolt against Hosni Mubarak? Probably not."

Over at the Miller-McCune site, a blogger piled on. "This paper offers one more reason why Fox News viewers are so ill-informed on so many issues," said the blogger, Tom Jacobs, who last enlightened his audience with a post called "Thinner Wife, Happier Marriage," based on yet another narrow study.

"I mean, have you seen those photos of Megyn Kelly?" Jacobs asked. Kelly was featured in a bikini in the GQ 2010 Men of the Year issue, causing something of an uproar among critics and viewers. After all, Kelly is a married woman and pregnant (which you can't see while she's seated at her anchor desk in the daily "America Live" segment of Fox News).

With Kelly in the lead, Fox offers up probably the best-looking female anchor lineup in TV news -- uniformly long-haired, streaky blonde, dressed in breast-enhancing outfits that show just enough cleavage and a whole lot of leg.

So now we know why Fox News is the top-ranked cable news channel in America.