When Illinois news anchor Dave Benton made a major on-air announcement recently, it was reportage at its most personal: Benton, 51, revealed that his doctors had told him that he has just four to six months left to live — the latest, most heartbreaking chapter in what has been an ongoing report about his yearlong battle with brain cancer. Benton, who has been with Champaign’s WCIA-3 news team for almost nine years, completed radiation treatment in February, but a new tumor grew back.
“We’ve got some serious stuff to discuss, and we are an open book, and we wanted to let you guys in on something that we’ve known for a while,” Benton’s co-anchor Jennifer Roscoe told viewers at the end of their nightly newscast on Thursday.
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“Basically my cancer is back and it’s too big for surgery and radiation,” Benton said, his voice shaky in an attempt to contain his emotion. “Doctors have told me that I may have four to six months to live.” He added that he’ll be trying a new antibody chemotherapy treatment to help slow the tumor’s growth. “As you know,” he said, “I’m a born-again Christian, I believe that I’m in God’s hands, I’m at peace. I know that he’s going to take care of the days ahead, and that the goal here is to have the best ones possible.”
Roscoe praised her coworker’s “amazing attitude” and his ability to deflect his own suffering by his noting that he is not the only one with cancer in their community. “Right now, it is about you,” she told him. “I’ve had you sitting next to me for nine years, and I’m going to hold on to every single day that I can.”
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Benton’s was easily one of the most intense on-air newscaster revelations in what has become an ongoing series of them, particularly on the national stage. In recent years, we’ve heard Robin Roberts’ disclosure that she had a rare bone-marrow disorder (which came after sharing news of her breast cancer and before she came out as a lesbian), Amy Robach’s revelation (after submitting to an on-air mammogram weeks earlier) that she would be undergoing a double mastectomy, Julie Chen’s big reveal that she’d had plastic surgery to reduce the Chinese look of her eyes, and Dan Harris’s discussion of his former drug use and panic attacks.
On local Tennessee station WMC-TV last year, meanwhile, anchor Pam McKelvy whipped off her wig at the end of a segment about her battle with breast cancer, revealing her post-chemo natural hair, which was slowly growing back. Lee Thomas, of Fox 2 News in Detroit, has been frank with viewers about his struggle with vitiligo, a pigment disorder. And in LaCrosse, Wis., anchor Jennifer Livingston opened up in 2012 about her lifelong struggle with weight after being prompted by a fat-shaming letter from a viewer.
The trend of self-revelation is not exactly brand new, noted Regina Tuma, a media psychology professor with the Fielding Graduate University in Santa Barbara, Calif.. “There is actual a long history of sharing that predates social media,” she told Yahoo Health, referring to early talk shows, including “Oprah” when it first burst onto the scene in the 1980s, as well as moments such as when Katie Couric submitted to an on-air colonoscopy in 2000. “The way anchors related clearly has changed,” she said. “We’re seeing a sort of horizontality.”
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