Producer Kidnaps Councilman
Eisendrath, John
PRODUCER KIDNAPS COUNCILMAN VIEWERS WARNED OF KILLER SALAD BARS DETAILS AT 10:00 by John Eisendrath An eyewitness account of local TV news Robin Robinson is a beautiful, articulate woman...
...Of course, not all the exploitive stories run during sweeps months...
...TV reporters have so much to be concerned with that they spend a good part of their day worrying about everything but the story...
...Until Mark Fairchild and Janice Hart emerged victorious in the Democratic primary last March, for instance, no TV newscast had ever mentioned the fact that these followers of Lyndon LaRouche were running for lieutenant governor and secretary of state, respectively...
...It was also the only story I ever did on the CHA...
...Gutierrez was practically comatose...
...The report aired at rush hour, when the street is usually filled with buses...
...After all, she works in local TV news...
...When talk show host Oprah Winfrey, whose show is taped at WLS, was nominated for an Oscar for her performance in "The Color Purple," WLSfor which she is an important source of ratings and revenue—spent five minutes on two 10 p.m...
...In many ways, Jacobson represents the best local TV has to offer...
...While every other TV reporter played it straight, Flannery saw the planting of the bomb for what it probably was: a thinly veiled attempt to gain sympathy for Torres in light of the previous night's story...
...television that night—local as well as national—offered more than pictures: it provided quick, insightful answers to vexing questions...
...His campaign manager told me Gutierrez was running late...
...Many times reporters were instructed who they would interview and when...
...Do they provide higher ratings...
...He said he'd rather walk...
...The candidate's wife was terrified and her baby was crying...
...I produced the nightly tirades co-anchor Walter Jacobson delivers in the form of commentary...
...Which reminds me...
...While it is clear that in big cities the days of Happy Talk are over, the rising influence of local TV news is troubling...
...On the newsroom tours, the corner where Jacobson sits is the most popular stop...
...So our vans filled with transmitting equipment were set up at the locations where each candidate was scheduled to be when the show began...
...Management justifies these salaries on the basis of studies showing the beneficial effect each anchor has on ratings and, therefore, revenue...
...Far from it: most of the TV reporters I know are bright, hardworking journalists...
...In front of a number of people in the newsroom last February, Jacobson bet then-news director Jay Newman that he would be fired before sweeps began in May...
...With about three minutes to go, Gutierrez finished his interview, but before I could get to him he was back with the mayor, shaking hands in the middle of a huge crowd...
...attorney, Thompson spent hours cross-examining Webb, throwing himself into the center of the controversy in an attempt to enhance his popularity...
...Nevertheless, in terms of the product, celebrity anchors have a deleterious effect on the news...
...He was campaigning door to door with the mayor—a big coup for him, since the mayor drew well in this ward...
...By the way, is your husband a member of the Ku Klux Klan...
...In part, the problem is one of resources: for every anchorman like Bill Kurtis, WBBM could hire 20 reporters, editors, cameramen, and producers, each one at $60;000 a year...
...Rather than do the standard dirty tricks story, Flannery decided to put the incident in perspective...
...It was powerful and petty, exhilarating and embarrassing...
...While the reporters placate their crews, the producers spend the morning in the newsroom reading wire copy, monitoring the stories the network reporters are covering and pacing...
...ran a record trade deficit in the first six months of this year...
...When I returned to the newsroom and told Jacobson about the loafing city workers, he was overjoyed...
...When Cathy Crowell Webb changed her mind in April 1985 and insisted that Gary Dotson had not raped her, the Illinois Prisoner Review Board held hearings to decide whether to commute Dotson's five-year prison sentence...
...The result has been a series of editorial and stylistic fits and starts, as each news director has tried to impose a new order on the broadcast...
...Well, this tipster said, for $4,000 he'd let us run a story about the new Miss America, Susan Akin, that made Williams seem like Doris Day...
...At WBBM, our ethical questions revolved around whether we should buy stories alleging Burt Reynolds has AIDS...
...In most major cities today, it is a two-hour variety show with big stars pulling in big money...
...Almost every day school children or community groups visit the newsroom, looking as if they are touring Paramount studios...
...This was the second lesson: newspapers can't scoop TV...
...This was television...
...As a result, a TV reporter's best source is often the newspaper...
...We had bought stories from this guy before, but a temporary budget squeeze—not a fit of moral outrage—prevented us from paying for these...
...It wasn't just the video of Christa McAuliffe's parents watching their daughter die a horrible death that was so powerful...
...At stations in large cities they need a cameraman, a sound man, an editor, and a producer...
...The station sent Robinson to a television consultant, and faster than you can say quivering lips sink ratings, she was cured...
...Lest you think Norville a cigar-chomping street reporter victimized by the fetish created by one man's mid-life crisis, consider the picture that accompanies the article...
...today there are two—television has picked up where Hildy Johnson left off...
...I was too embarrassed to join in...
...There is rarely time for reporters to reflect and make their own judgments...
...Local anchors are certainly paid like celebrities...
...Recent defections by network stars underscore the new attractions of local news...
...I sat through most of the meeting, but understood little...
...He works for a station with a tradition of excellence and has at his disposal generous resources and editorial leeway...
...It's television...
...Jacobson's bitching has made him an institution in Chicago, the conscience of the common man hard on the trail of waste, fraud, and abuse...
...The biggest problem is that it is difficult to manage celebrities...
...Part of the reason for all this titillation and hype is competition...
...Even in reporting non-substantive stories that do not fall within the conventional scope of news, an act or gesture can exquisitely reveal character...
...And for all their fame, Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, and Peter Jennings influence public opinion less than local anchormen like New York's Chuck Scarborough and Chicago's Floyd Kalber...
...Some tips were so hot they insisted we pay for them...
...There were reports about finances and maintenance problems as well as approval of minutes from the previous meeting...
...Another obstacle to enterprise is technology...
...Mike Royko, a syndicated columnist for the Chicago Tribune, and Jacobson are the two best-known journalists in Chicago...
...Terror in the 26th Ward Showtime...
...That was around midnight on election night, after the results were in...
...The crew gets nothing...
...Without hesitating, I had kidnapped and terrorized two adults, probably scarred a child for life, and, truth to tell, loved every minute of it...
...Each ratings point is worth about $600,000—at local stations in New York it's $1 million...
...Never go out with a TV reporter...
...Doing my best Squeaky Fromme imitation, I wove between the mayor's bodyguards, grabbed the candidate (who grabbed his wife and baby) and, without so much as a hello, shoved them into my car...
...Bill Kurtis to Malibu to profile Larry Hagman...
...the Sun-Times can out-report WBBM every day and it won't change the newscast's advertising revenues, which are based on a comparison of WBBM's ratings with those of other TV stations...
...on the day the space shuttle exploded, we delivered the tragic news, replayed the awesome video, and ran interviews with scientists, former astronauts, and politicians, all explaining how the explosion could have occurred and what the impact on the space program would be...
...Stories not drawn from the papers came from the head of the two-person planning office who also attended the meeting...
...This system works as long as the print reporters don't miss any big stories...
...I always thought that familiarity summed up the power of television...
...As my photographer snapped pictures of the city workers directing traffic for the departing board members, I hid behind a tree, hoping no one could see me...
...I was hired to perpetuate that reputation, and I did so with gusto...
...It was...
...I started to babble...
...After all, her lips don't quiver...
...Although God declined to make His television debut on Chuck Scarborough's evening broadcast, the intrepid anchor did get the next best thing: Harry Belafonte theologizing, and members of the clergy speculating that the natural disasters were the "devil's work" and that the AIDS outbreak is God's way of punishing homosexuals...
...It's just that in television, enterprise is a matter of style as much as substance...
...More than $400 million worth of commercials air during local newscasts each year in Chicago...
...PRODUCER KIDNAPS COUNCILMAN VIEWERS WARNED OF KILLER SALAD BARS DETAILS AT 10:00 by John Eisendrath An eyewitness account of local TV news Robin Robinson is a beautiful, articulate woman who, until about a year ago, had one small defect: her upper lip quivered slightly when she talked...
...That's the problem...
...broadcast July 30, for example, no mention was made of a report that was the lead story in the next day's Tribune: that the U.S...
...As you'll recall, 1985 was a banner year for disasters...
...Though this form of hide and seek may seem childish, it's not...
...Remember Vanessa Williams, the former Miss America who lost her crown when it was discovered she had posed in the nude...
...newscast...
...In the past 13 years he has won 12 Emmy awards and the prestigious DuPont award for exemplary journalism...
...One day last May on the five o'clock show at WABC in New York, the illustrations accompanying the story took on a life of their own...
...My girlfriend is the medical reporter— recently changed to health editor—at WBBM, and I like her just the way she is...
...At WBBM, a large portion of the station's estimated $75-million-a-year gross advertising revenues comes from news programming...
...I can only hope that a wave of shame washes over every journalist who finds himself in this position...
...In May, the brass at "NBC Nightly News" debated whether to air an interview with known terrorist Abu Abbas while keeping his whereabouts a secret...
...Shoulders bare, blond hair blowing back, luscious lips parted just so, the image Norville projects is less of Athena than a seductively air-brushed Miss April...
...If reporters don't want crews to make them look and sound like they're from the Twilight Zone they had better allow for a long lunch...
...The make-up is on, the lights are hot and the script is in the TelePrompTer...
...After dismissing his wife as "my own dear companion . . . [who is] full of doubt about herself and her appearance," Stern described his dream come true: a lunch date with Norville...
...Swept away The special projects producers work on important stories for the November, February, and May "sweeps...
...But most local newscasts rarely penetrate beyond the superficial, and even the best stations produce a kind of electronic Front Page, complete with blaring headlines, extras, and shameless "scoops...
...This is especially true around elections, when television's accoutrements make covering campaigns a logistical nightmare...
...When Bob Kur was covering Lebanon for NBC news, he was once asked what went through his mind as he signed off each night from Beirut...
...One week her hair is too long, one week she doesn't weigh enough...
...In television you are measured not by your ability with words and pictures so much as by your ability to get bodies to the camera on time...
...As they watched, wide-eyed, I made calls to the governor's neighbors to find out what costume the governor's eight-year-old daughter wore (she went as a witch) and whether the governor tagged along...
...Jacobson is a cross between Howard Cosell and Sean Penn, an iconoclastic bad boy who, every weeknight, is given two minutes of air time during the ten o'clock news to wax apoplectic...
...She has been able to do something no competing news station had been able to do in almost a decade: knock WBBM from the top of the local news ratings heap...
...If you think I'm being too harsh, consider this: the single most influential local news figure is "Wheel of Fortune" hostess Vanna White...
...By the time the reporters got in, the stories were set...
...A few years ago WABC-TV in New York ran a series titled "Killer Salad Bars!' For last May's sweeps, the station produced "The Great Gameshow Comeback," which offered viewers a "look behind the scenes at how you can get on a game show, the secret to winning, and why they've become the hottest shows on TV...
...Last May, KABC, the ABC-owned station in Los Angeles, promoted a series on abuse of the elderly by running ads in the Los Angeles Times with a picture of a battered woman captioned, "Is that any way to treat your mother...
...The next day . the candidate, Manuel Torres, said that a bomb had been planted outside his campaign office...
...The annual salaries for WBBM's three coanchors reportedly are $450,000, $900,000 and $1.2 million...
...Cameras...
...Since the news is delivered live, there are no takes, no second chances...
...There is Norville from the shoulders up, seemingly naked...
...In June 1985, Bill Kurtis left his co-anchor spot on "CBS Morning News," to co-anchor the news at WBBM...
...I figured that a thorough investigation of the CHA would provide a wealth of storiesabout non-competitive contracts, maintenance problems, maybe even unsafe housing conditions...
...That's where lunch comes in...
...Jacobson says only black and white issues can be explained through television, and in a way, he is right again...
...One time, with visitors standing a few feet away, -I worked on a story about the governor flying to Chicago at state expense so he could be with his daughter for Halloween...
...The Chernobyl graphic popped up during a story about Malcolm Forbes's yacht...
...For a while the station covered politics in depth, then suddenly the focus was on the suburbs...
...Governor James Thompson, sensing a publicity coup, decided to personally conduct the hearings...
...Showing a discerning eye, he compared her to Buddha and Jesus...
...Last May, WABC-TV in New York opened one broadcast with a report about a movie producer busted for sodomy, and followed up with a report on a child rape case...
...Nor did he say whether the government is trying to fix it...
...Within a week both stories...
...In a report on the publication of the nine-year-old photos in Playboy magazine, WLS showed the couple in a variety of sexually suggestive poses, backed by the theme music from Johnson's hip cop show...
...It is difficult to convey abstract ideas and complex truths with pictures...
...But because television captures images better than arguments, Thompson's stunt backfired...
...But when the reporter, with his back to traffic, said that the buses in the story were like the ones "going by now," there was one problem: there wasn't a bus in sight...
...For most of the past year I worked as a producer at WBBM, which is known as one of the finest local news organizations in the country, having made a name for itself in the 1970s by breaking the Happy Talk mold...
...After the interview one producer went up to Jacobson to congratulate him...
...Anatoly Shcharansky showed up during a story on Pope John Paul II...
...Alternately scribbling on a notepad and typing, he could have been squeezing a high administration source for a story...
...Lunching in the Twilight Zone When I worked at WBBM, the search for great television began at 8:30 every morning...
...No loafing city worker was safe, no pothole unexplained...
...Knowing that we occupied the serious corner of the newsroom, people would tip us off to only the most significant stories...
...As the tour looked on, I vigorously worked the phone—one day asking Miss America's mother about her daughter's sordid past ("Congratulations on your daughter's victory, Mrs...
...Jacobson had been accused of libeling the tobacco company in a 1981 commentary that claimed Brown & Williamson was trying to lure youngsters to Viceroy cigarettes with ads equating smoking with "pot, wine, beer, sex, and wearing a bra...
...Akin...
...reading for 15 minutes...
...The only piece of equipment you won't find in the WBBM newsroom is a word processor, which should give you some idea of the value TV places on the written word...
...Last November, when "Dynasty II: The Colbys" premiered on ABC, WLS media critic Gary Deeb aired a "behind the scenes" look at America's newest soap opera...
...Leading up to and during each telecast we are all newsroom vigilantes...
...In an article in Chicago magazine last October, Richard Stern wrote that a chance runin with a television reporter on the street would be like "running into Zeus ." Stern lavished most of his praise on Deborah Norville, an afternoon anchor at NBC's local station, WMAQ...
...In January, Sylvia Chase quit ABC News, where she was a correspondent for the newsmagazine "20/20," to become weeknight anchor at KRONTV in San Francisco...
...Driving by the building where the meeting was to be held, I noticed two city workers taking time out from pouring concrete for a sidewalk to reserve parking spaces for the CHA board members...
...another.day ferreting out Burt's horrible secret...
...There is a clause in co-anchor Don Craig's contract, for instance, that protects him from having to do any reporting—all he has to do for his $450,000 a year is read...
...It's a quintessential Walter story," he said...
...We could use stock photos or, if none fit the story, I could send a still photographer to get the pictures we needed...
...He gave Newman two-to-one odds...
...That's why I ended up at the monthly meeting of the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) last November...
...A volcano erupted in Colombia, famine struck Ethiopia, there were more civil air crashes than any other year, hurricanes and mudslides, and the AIDS epidemic swept the country...
...She wasn't, but I worry...
...In fact, Jacobson, who admits that his sources are either retired or dead, was talking with the French consul in Chicago, trying to wangle a special visa for his baby-sitter so she could travel with his family on their upcoming trip to the Caribbean...
...Standing on a street corner in the middle of a Chicago blizzard in order to report what everyone already knows—that it's snowing—is unpleasant enough for the reporter, but at least he gets lots of money and notoriety for his suffering...
...Without exception it was, as they say in the business, great television...
...The CHA, which is in charge of the city's public housing, is a troubled agency, known for lavishing perks on its executives while doing little to improve the living conditions of Chicago's poor...
...From the Department of Sewers to the space shuttle—if there was mud, I'd find it and Jacobson would sling it...
...I was free to go after any story, local, national, or international...
...TV never reported on the LaRouche candidates because the newspapers never did...
...During the past year, WBBM has had three news directors, and each one found his authority usurped in varying degrees by the powerful anchors...
...As supplemental information, TV news is terrific, providing a catalog of the day's events...
...When word leaked to WLS last November that WBBM was planning a sweeps series on Black Catholics, the rival station immediately dispatched a reporter to do the same story...
...When he said no, Jacobson, a thin white man who stands no taller than five feet six inches, reached around McClain, a burly black man well over six feet, turned over his collar, and looked for a label...
...There is nothing worse for them than a slow news day...
...This cuts down on more than enterprise...
...Newspaper reporters often have to file stories under tough deadline pressure, but there is no deadline like a live deadline...
...This was one of the first lessons I learned about local TV: there are no sources...
...Throw a wrench in the works, however, and the bloopers come fast and furious...
...It's not that TV reporters aren't able to dig up stories of their own...
...No camera crew, no van filled with equipment...
...newscasts soberly detailing the "Oprah Phenomenon ." That's like The New York Times devoting 15 pages of any weekday edition to a story about one of its reporters who has been nominated for a Pulitzer prize...
...I should know...
...My job was special...
...Give them a disaster, a reason to go live, a way to flaunt television's power, and they will spring into action, producing, at times, not only great television but great journalism as well...
...Many a reporter in Chicago has had to introduce a story about a convention from inside a darkened and empty room in which—hours earlier— the convention was held...
...Better still, my reports were delivered by Jacobson in the form of commentary...
...Worse, the viewer came away with no sense for the gravity of the problem, since every Jacobson commentary—whether about the firing of the Chicago Bears' mascot or the attempted assassination of President Reagan—is equally grave...
...On the other side it's just another job: fires, murders, press conferences, elections...
...if WBBM was doing a series on Black Catholics, WLS would do one, too...
...That's when the WBBM news director, his assistant, and a number of the producers met to decide what stories would be covered...
...This is local TV news, that wonderful business where weathermen have names like Storm, viewers are warned of killer salad bars, and twothirds of Americans learn about the events of the day...
...The agenda they followed was in large part set by what was in that morning's Chicago Tribune, and Chicago SunTimes...
...A Chicago Sun-Times poll in February found that besides the mayor and four members of the Super Bowl Champion Chicago Bears, Oprah Winfrey, Walter Jacobson, and Bill Kurtis were the most recognizable people in town...
...When they do, their judgments can be memorable...
...Sure enough, we were scooped...
...Never take a bet like that even with odds of 100-to-1: Newman was gone by mid-April...
...For most people that wouldn't pose a problem, but Robinson is a reporter and anchor for WBBMTV, the CBS-owned station in Chicago...
...Under one news director, reporters walked and talked when they appeared on camera...
...And despite Ronald Reagan's success, television is not easy to manipulate...
...The next day WLS news director Jim Hattendorf told SunTimes reporter Robert Feder the station "went too far" in airing the pictures...
...Free from the technical constraints of TV, we were also free to interpret conflicting accounts and deliver what we viewed as the subjective truth...
...Before breaking for a commercial, "Girls in Gangs," an "exclusive WABC" investigation was promoted...
...After all, local television reporters are celebrities...
...Television is cumbersome...
...Not wanting to miss the comely White for a moment, anxious viewers have switched from WBBM's newscast to WLS, which leads into "Wheel of Fortune...
...Lights...
...Several years ago, the ABC station in Chicago, WLS-TV, did a series that asked the question that strikes fear in the heart of every Chicagoan: "Are there sharks in Lake Michigan...
...The trade deficit is considered one of the main dangers to U.S...
...This is particularly clear during sweeps months, when stations shamelessly try to find out what each other's sweeps series will be...
...Even now, available technology allows local stations to cover national and international stories as thoroughly as networks...
...Right...
...The ratings of television news programs taken during those months will be used to set what a station may charge advertisers...
...Something had to be done...
...But, with about ten minutes to go, the big problem wasn't prying Gutierrez loose from the mayor, it was getting him away from a reporter from another television station...
...Only in the car, knowing the live shot was saved, did I feel awful...
...Waiting at the airport for her to return from Dallas, I paced up and down the terminal, worried that she had been transformed into a bald, anorexic weather bunny...
...With two minutes to air time I screamed into my walkie talkie: "Unit two to base, unit two to base, I have him...
...A morning meeting rarely passed without the news director assigning a reporter to follow up a story in one of the two local papers...
...They are, for instance, forever trying to appease their crew...
...When we went on the air at 5 p.m...
...Reporters are often just a cog in this collaborative process, which is why they are sometimes referred to as "microphone stands ." Even when a reporter is coordinating the story, it takes all of his time just to shoot the video, edit, and lay the sound track for a piece that gives only the bare facts...
...After his 30-second spot on the news, I offered Gutierrez a ride back to the mayor...
...As newspapers have folded-20 years ago there were five papers in Chicago...
...That was great television," he said...
...One particularly hushed group watched Jacobson talk excitedly into the phone for about 15 minutes...
...Good night, dear viewer," said Kur, "I only hope you read The New York Times in the morning...
...I'd have to wait until 5:15...
...Like some existential bedtime story, WBBM's ten o'clock newscast probably sends viewers to sleep reassured, as if, no matter how horrible the news, they are somehow placed out of harm's way by the warm, friendly, and familiar faces of Walter and Bill and Don and Robin...
...The memory of most Chicagoans is not of Thompson comparing the two versions of Webb's story, but of the governor of the state of Illinois, a man with presidential aspirations, standing, pointer in hand, beneath a wall-size enlargement of a picture of Webb's semen-stained panties...
...To combat this, WBBM has made all sorts of cosmetic changes, from fancy new graphics to delivering the news from different parts of the newsroom...
...Hatchet Jobs...
...special assignment producers, who dream up reports about mail-order brides, singles' bars, and UFOs...
...Unfortunately, management doesn't agree...
...On the sound track a sobbing mother wondered, "Not my daughter...
...I sat a few feet from Jacobson, and people touring the newsroom would often point in my direction and say, "He works for Walter...
...Here is the difference between network and local television news...
...Today it's her voice, tomorrow her eyes (one news director told her to wear make-up that made them look smaller...
...If that's not enough to make even George Steinbrenner blanch, the sportscaster makes about $1 million a year—roughly the same as Mike Wallace...
...One day in the newsroom, for instance, Walter Jacobson interviewed Clarence McClain, a former aide to Chicago Mayor Harold Washington who was dismissed after it was discovered he had a vice record that included convictions for a number of stints as a pimp...
...Led by one of WBBM's two avuncular weathermen, the groups stop a few feet from Jacobson's desk, hoping to see Chicago's most celebrated newsman do a little muckraking...
...Then there were the stories aired last November on WNBC-TV in New York...
...The series touched on a number of ticklish questions: Do music videos corrupt American youth...
...By the time I found him it was 15 minutes before airtime...
...and producers assigned to prop up reporters by doing everything from thinking up stories and reporting them, to making sure the reporters' Adolfo dresses are pressed and their hair curlers are plugged in...
...It's less a question of journalistic competence than a matter of money...
...I looked in the backseat...
...They need editing machines and, to go live, vans filled with transmitting equipment...
...On WBBM's 10 p.m...
...Almost no story, for instance, regardless of how moving the pictures or the interviews, is considered complete unless the reporter introduces it live from the field...
...I told Gutierrez that he was a great candidate and that he would certainly win the election...
...When done deftly, these moments have the kind of spontaneity that make for memorable television...
...Understandably, tour groups always left our corner content that Walter and his team were keeping the streets safe and the politicians in line...
...This is perhaps TV's greatest flaw, as problematic for the anchor in Peoria as it is for the correspondent in Paris...
...Kurtis happens to be an incredibly hard-working journalist, constantly in the field reporting stories and working on documentaries, but he's the exception...
...Running after crooked politicians with a 20-pound camera on your shoulder gets tiring after a while...
...At WBBM, there are show producers, who decide if the city council story should go before or after the weather report...
...For the viewer, sweeps must be as depressing as they are titillating...
...As one of the show's co-anchors read a story about Chernobyl, a graphic for a story on gas prices appeared...
...True, I had just pulled him away from the mayor and, yes, I had forced him into my car against his will, but I wanted him to like me...
...It may not be pretty," went old ads for the station, "but it's real ." Almost everyone who isn't on the air in television is called a producer...
...Please, not a weather bunny Walter Jacobson is right, of course...
...I was no better...
...Thoughtful journalist's cap firmly in place, I set off for the morning meeting...
...When they do, however, the viewers can be left badly uninformed...
...No matter that Chicago is full of pressing problems that reporters could thoughtfully assess...
...It takes five people using tons of equipment an entire day to produce 90 seconds of television news...
...And though at WBBM we devoted lots of time and energy to covering every petty charge and countercharge of the other candidates'You're a cocaine dealer," "You owe three years worth of alimony payments,"--we mentioned Fairchild and Hart only once...
...Last spring, Jacobson criticized the federal government for doing little to collect on $60 billion in delinquent debt...
...In July, she was sent to a television consultant in Dallas to work on her image...
...And because crews get paid extra for not taking a lunch break, the reporter has to perform one additional task to keep his face in focus: he has to lie to the dispatcher who monitors their whereabouts...
...For $10,000, he also claimed he could provide us with confidential medical reports that showed that Burt Reynolds was dying of AIDS...
...Still, I found that instead of trying to explain the complexities of the news he tended to oversimplify...
...I wish I had such a deal...
...Back in March 1980, when the nation was wondering who shot JR, WBBM—owned by the same network (CBS) that airs "Dallas" — dispatched co-anchor...
...Last December, WLS aired nude photographs of "Miami Vice" star Don Johnson and his ex-wife, actress Melanie Griffith, on its 4 p.m...
...ran in the National Enquirer...
...When everything clicks, the news is at once high-tech and homespun, as stories from around the world are read to us by faces we recognize as friendly and caring...
...As the board members arrived, the Department of Streets and Sanitation employees spent 20 minutes removing garbage cans they had placed in the road earlier to fend off other cars...
...During the 30-minute interview, McClain talked about a number of alleged payoffs and scandals brewing in city hall, but when it was edited for the evening news to one minute and thirty seconds—almost every story on TV lasts one minute and thirty seconds—most of the time was devoted to the label bit...
...Sometimes it seemed we were operating under a new slogan: It may not be real news, but at least it's pretty...
...That Craig wangled such a cushy deal is fine with me...
...But it wasn't a Burberry...
...I worked on one of only two investigative teams at the station...
...When Jacobson was on trial last December, accused of libeling Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp., it was a media event of von Bulowesque proportions in Chicago...
...Last March, WBBM's political editor, Mike Flannery, reported that a candidate for alderman had a convicted felon on his payroll...
...While the nation got to witness Phyllis George ask Dotson and Webb to kiss and make up on the "CBS Morning News," the local Chicago stations covering the hearings left viewers with a more powerful, if equally tacky, image...
...Of course, the viewer is always left with the opposite feeling...
...In fact, local news has come so far that it threatens to eclipse the networks: a number of analysts predict that nightly network broadcasts will be eliminated within five years...
...how the papers missed the story is another matter...
...The papers covered the trial's every ebb and flow, and when the jury found Jacobson guilty, the headlines blared: "Down and Out," "Jacobson Rips Bully Lawyer," and " 'He Didn't Tell the Whole Truth': Jury Foreman Explains Jacobson Verdict ." To some, local reporters are more than mere celebrities...
...But newspapers, whose reporters understand the beats they cover far better than their local television counterparts, almost all of whom are on general assignment, provide the kind of depth and break the kind of investigative ground that viewers rarely see on the evening news...
...Nothing gets the adrenaline pumping as maddeningly, and nothing, absolutely nothing, so overwhelms you...
...the two aren't in competition with each other...
...A former U.S...
...For months newscasters reported that the Democratic candidates for those offices were running unopposed...
...This is where exhilaration and embarrassment meet: I had no idea if the CHA board was doing its job on important issues like safety and sanitation, but in eight hours, as a result of my reporting, the board was going to be vilified before millions of Chicagoans...
...Do they lead to drugs and alcohol...
...Nearing airtime, one candidate, Luis Gutierrez, was nowhere near the appointed spot, so, since the vans couldn't pack up and move in time, and since the reporter on the scene didn't have a car, I was dispatched to track Gutierrez down...
...yet the columnist is known to all as Royko, and the TV anchorman is known simply as Walter...
...Thoughtfulness forgotten, I raced to a phone booth to call a photographer...
...Television reporters need a lot more than a notepad and a pencil...
...It seems that the former Miss Mississippi's father and grandfather were indicted and later acquitted in the Ku Klux Klan-related murder of three civil rights workers during the 1960s...
...All daily news organizations, print and broadcast, devote a large portion of their product to recording the events of the day...
...With so much money at stake, it's not surprising that local TV is the heir to Chicago's Front Page tradition...
...Local newscasts are primarily reactive...
...Intellectuals and policymakers may get hot and bothered about what's in The New York Times or The Washington Post, but most Americans never read either paper...
...In imitation Bob Guccione prose, Stern wrote that the "erotic parts of me wanted to take this woman in hand ." Chicago's headline writers were equally measured, titling the story, "Lunch With A Goddess...
...He proved his point with outrageous examples, like the fact that some State Department employees are seven years late in repaying travel advances...
...Cameras...
...When McClain said he was out of money, Jacobson immediately asked if the overcoat he was wearing was a Burberry...
...During these months stations around the country pull out all the stops to give viewers unfiltered versions of what they've been getting every day: sex, violence, and celebrities...
...When the board members left the meeting, reporters from the Sun-Times and the Tribune interviewed them about an internal power struggle that flared up during the meeting and about a recent increase in public housing maintenance problems...
...It cuts down on analysis as well...
...This is what TV—live TV—can do to people...
...under another, they stood still...
...In Chicago, the newscasts during sweeps months are filled with thinly-veiled plugs for entertainment shows that appear on the same network...
...I repeat, I have him ." I felt like Captain Kirk: Beam me out of this ward, Scotty...
...A story about city workers helping CHA board members park their cars is a quintessential Walter story...
...He said nothing, however, about how this problem arose...
...McClain complained that he had been out of work since the record of his pimping became public...
...There is rarely a functional reason for this...
...No one told me what stories to report on, and I wasn't burdened with the complexities of television...
...We reported, however, that they were libertarians...
...It can be demoralizing as well...
...WNBC edited together the horrifying footage taken of these disasters, replayed it in slow motion, and aired it in a three-part series, "Is God Punishing Us...
...Lights...
...On the eve of a hotly contested city council race last March, for instance, we planned to have the two candidates involved appear live at the beginning of the five o'clock show...
...Twenty-five years ago local TV news consisted of an anchorman John Eisendrath is an editor of The Washington Monthly...
...One reporter once had to introduce a story on speeding city buses standing curbside on a street where buses, with few stops in that stretch, are known to speed...
...for her a quivering lip was as troublesome as having no lips at all...
...At the same time the NBC station in Los Angeles, KNBC TV, ran a week-long series about the dangers of music videos...
...Several of them," he said sheepishly, "showed too much ." The goddess Around mid-afternoon WBBM's tours begin...
...At least once a day reporters call in to say that an "unexpected" traffic jam has delayed them more than an hour...
...The only glamorous spot in television is in front of the camera...
...economic expansion, but it is a hard story to illustrate, and in TV, no pictures means no story...
...This can be very confusing to the viewer, frustrating to the reporters, and harmful to the broadcast— particularly since, as the editorial focus shifts, the reporters have little time to become experts in any one field...
Vol. 18 • September 1986 • No. 8
