Life in Television
Reason, Harry
Life in Television BEFORE THE COLORS FADE by Harry Reasoner Alfred A. Knopf.207 pp. $10.95. In a breezy, amiable memoir Harry Reasoner looks back at some of the highlights in his television...
...I have often said that if I ran CBS News, I would close the Washington bureau...
...He indicates that Fred Friendly of CBS was not too sorry to have Ed Murrow leave, because of Murrow's powerful presence, and he ruefully admits that Friendly may have been right when he called Reasoner "lazy...
...One problem in television news that worries him "is that we are too much the familiars of the people we report on...
...we didn't even work together very long...
...He is reflective about the role of television in reporting news...
...He would watch news developments in the capital and "if something besides self-servers talking to each other happened down there" he would send a crew and a correspondent to cover it—not a "flattered habitue" but "some tough, informed kid...
...He recalls with satisfaction his reporting from Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957 on the school desegregalion issue: "The thing about Little Rock is that it was where television reporting came to influence, if not to maturity...
...In a breezy, amiable memoir Harry Reasoner looks back at some of the highlights in his television career...
...He dismisses the disastrous teaming with Barbara Walters with, "It didn't work...
...But it sure made an impression...
...Unpretentious about himself, he admits that while he was co-host of a show with Mary Fickett he "was sometimes a temperamental bastard...
...An entertaining book...
Vol. 45 • November 1981 • No. 11
