Deanne Lane is ready for her close-up … at 5 and 10
By Matthew Halverson
Photograph by Frank Di Piazza
There’s been a mistake. All of that business about Karen Foss’ longtime second-chair, Deanne Lane, replacing St. Louis’ TV news queen behind the anchor desk at KSDK? Not true. Lane would like to make that very clear: She. Is. Not. Replacing La Foss. She’s just, you know, slipping into the chair that for 27 years happened to belong to the woman so revered in St. Louis media that her sudden departure brought co-anchor Mike Bush to tears on the air and had insiders whispering that she’d be back on another station. “You can’t replace her,” Lane says. “She set the standard in this market.”
Lane can downplay the teleprompter transition all she wants, but the fact is, she’s going to have a couple million people watching her settle in—and comparing her to you know who. “It’s going to be an adjustment,” she says.
A “trial by media firestorm” is more like it. She wasn’t on the job more than a week before the “Shawn Hornbeck returns” story broke (“We were shocked,” she says of the discovery) and she got the assignment to cover his appearance on the Oprah Winfrey Show in Chicago—where she was summarily denied access to the set. “I just wanted to take notes,” the 24-year KSDK vet says with a laugh.
Snubbed by the big O? The same woman who built that school for kids in Africa? It can’t be. “It was ... very interesting,” Lane says without elaborating, but it’s hard to miss the indignation in her voice. There’s a lesson here: Being the successor to St. Louis news royalty doesn’t make it any easier to tangle with the queen of the known universe.
