Anchor doll

An anchor doll is any of the artificial intelligences with simulated bodies, faces, and expressions employed by media organisations to conduct interviews, solicit soundbites, and present news items in two Alastair Reynolds stories, interestingly not set in the same universe as each other:
 * Blue Remembered Earth -- soon after the protagonists trigger a diplomatic incident attempting to retrieve an item buried across a political border on the moon, one seeks comment from them.
 * Pushing Ice -- one interviews Bella Lind for CNN when the vessel she leads is found to be the only one capable of pursuing Janus. The recording of this interview survives into the far future (albeit in degraded form that needs to be reconstructed), where it is used to convince a political assembly to launch a project to locate Bella's current whereabouts and communicate with her (she is correctly believed to still be alive due to the effects of extreme time dilation).