(More from the mcarp archives… the prophetic genius and brilliance are his;
the ones/zeros, pixels, pictures and subheads and pull-quotes are mine.)

This is the very last of the mcarp essays, written over a decade ago by former broadcast journalist Michael Carpenter. I got his permission to share these, because they are not easy to find, and like most brutally honest musings, they deserve to be read.

After this essay, I’ll share a little about why this cuts so close to home for me.

I was a junkie.

An adrenalin junkie, that is. I was hooked on it.

I can’t speak for every TV news reporter in America, but I can speak for myself. I grew up in a household where there was a lot of suspense, drama, and anxiety. Mom and Dad drank a lot. They fought. They had affairs. After they split up, my mother drank even more, and disappeared for days at a time.

I’m not telling you this so you’ll feel sorry for me. I’m telling you this because it set me up for my career in television news. I couldn’t have been a reporter without it.

Living in that kind of environment produces the same physical sensation as parachuting from an airplane, or skiing down an expert slope. Except that you have it all the time, and it’s only noticeable when it’s absent. When you don’t have it, it feels like something’s wrong — like life is empty and meaningless.

A freshman anchor I once knew left the business after her first contract ran out, saying, “This is not a business for adults.”

Having grown up in the kind of environment she did, which is to say a fairly healthy one, TV news made no sense to her. Having grown up in the kind of environment I did, which is to say one filled with irrational demands and wildly inconsistent expectations, TV news made perfect sense to me. Well, maybe not perfect sense. But I was comfortable for many years with the notion that truth could change from day to day, and even hour to hour. One of my news directors had a name for it: “functional reality.”

I got the buzz living in the constant craziness of home, and I didn’t really have it again until I immersed myself in the constant craziness of television. It was no wonder I spent so many hours at work, and so rarely took a vacation — as sick and depressed and miserable as it eventually made me, the newsroom was the closest thing to a family I’d found since I’d left home.

Punch Drunk

I’m not the only newsperson I know from what is sometimes called the ‘alcoholic family of origin.’ And once you know what to look for, it’s easy to spot fellow travelers.

They’re the ones who, when the boss comes in drunk and raving, don’t bat an eye. They’re the ones who, when they’re reprimanded for something with which they were not involved, and over which they had no control, shrug it off as if it were nothing. (Even before I was familiar with the term ‘triangulation,’ I understood that principle. I was surprised to learn there was a name for it.)

They’re the ones who, when insulted or mistreated by abusive or chemically-dependent bosses, not only shrug it off, but make make excuses for them.

I once worked for a news director who frequently referred to his assistant news director as ‘bitch,’ and other sexist, demeaning terms. He insulted her and ridiculed her in front of the staff. A reporter asked her one day why she put up with it.

“You don’t understand,” she said. “He and I just have a very special relationship.”

“Yeah,” the reporter replied. “He treats you like shit, and you take it.”

Confronted for the first time by the undeniable reality of their years-long ‘partnership,’ she burst into tears. The reporter got fired.

It’s just my opinion, but I think most news people are hooked on adrenalin, and addicted to doubt and uncertainty. They judge their surroundings and relationships by whether they induce the familiar physical effects of an adrenalin rush: tightness in the chest, dry mouth, accelerated pulse. And if they don’t feel that, they think something’s wrong.

Noise and Narcissism

I think that’s why so many screamers and tantrum-throwers thrive and get ahead in this business. Their ‘intensity’ can give everyone around them an adrenalin buzz, even if there’s nothing happening to justify it.

Of course, nothing will keep that rush going like a steady stream of murders, accidents, fires and catastrophes. I don’t think you can blame consultants alone for the business’s infatuation with tragedy and violence. I think that if a group of TV reporters were allowed to operate their own newsroom, unguided and unrestrained by any management, most would instinctively gravitate toward ‘death and destruction’ reporting. That’s where the rush is.

And absent a real train wreck to keep the pulse punding, a lot of people in this business seem willing to create a metaphorical one — either in their own lives, or in their coworkers’. If newsgathering is job number one, leading a drama-filled life is job number two, and rumor-mongering is job number two and a half.

It’s worth the price of a six-month subscription to peruse the Newsblues web site, on which TV news staffers are encouraged to post anonymous rants and raves about their workplaces. A significant percentage are about the soap opera aspects of their coworkers’ lives.

You can also occasionally find complaints from anchors themselves on news-themed web sites to the effect that “I’m afraid people are talking about my personal life.” Which can be translated to, “I’m afraid people are not talking about my personal life, so let me get the ball rolling.”

And off the Internet, you’ll hear a lot more about that in the typical end-of-day shoptalk than you will hear, for example, about who’s on the take from contractors down at city hall.

My personal life? “Dull and boring,” as one coworker dismissed it. “You and your Moon Pies.”

Not that I didn’t try, you understand. I just wasn’t very good at it.

I get it.

This essay in particular had a very profound impact on how I viewed my job. There were so many things in hindsight that were wrong with the way news is produced and arranged, and it isn’t all about bias or lack of experience or agendas.

It has everything to do with the unprofessional way most newsrooms are managed.

In the business world, you can’t get away with the things that news managers do. To be fair, some news managers cross the line and get spanked, yanked or tanked as necessary. But it’s the little things that just don’t happen as often in other sectors. I was blessed to work for better-than-average news managers, but even then I had head-scratcher moments.

One glaring piece missing in newsrooms is any sort of program for professional leadership. My brother was fortunate to work for an NBC-owned station when GE was in charge, and he got the full benefit of the GE Management Training program. I don’t know of any broadcast ownership that commits a dime to it, and if it exists, it’s at a small scale. (Maybe Belo. Maybe.)

Most of the business world seems to understand that when you start getting higher up the chain, it’s about finding, motivating and mentoring people. You are a manager of people above all else. Not a manager of equipment or widgets.

In news, the managers of people are not promoted because they are motivators or have natural ability to lead. They are promoted because they came from the ranks of producer. The job of a producer has more to do with creation of a product and less to do with managing people. Unless you count yelling at people.

I don’t know of any stations (other than the NBC/GE combo, which no longer exists) that gave management training to producers who aspired for more. Producers became Executive Producers, who became Assistant News Directors, who became News Directors. And at no point along the way was there any development of the skills the rest of the business world takes for granted. If you A) Got the job done and B) Didn’t get us sued for harassment, then you got to move up.

In an ideal world, you break the cycle of dysfunctional leadership with positive examples. In newsrooms, it just doesn’t happen.

Opportunity Costs

The other epiphany had to do with the toll the industry takes on your life. Not measured in what you visibly lose, but in what you never attempt because of the nature of news.

It’s preached constantly that you are so lucky to be working, and only a fraction of those who dream of being in a newsroom ever make it. Competition is fierce, and pay reflects that in the form of depressed compensation. Your job is more than that, though… it is a calling of the highest order.

At least that’s what you are expected to believe.

The world will indeed end if you balk at the ten and eleven hour days. You’re there for greater purpose! If they need you for a six o’clock live shot 45 miles away, no problem! Can do!

After a while, you stop trying to plan social engagements during the week. Date night with the spouse, dinner with friends, Wednesday night church, softball leagues. They all disappear from your vocabulary, because you simply get tired of canceling things.

In that environment, you don’t recognize the odd position you are in. You’ve surrounded yourself with a peer group that places an inordinate amount of their self-esteem and identity into their employment. They cease being people, and instead are TV People. And when you are suddenly aware of what you’ve become, it’s both jolting and revolting. Even worse, everyone around you thinks you have either gone crazy, or are now a bad apple, newsroom poison, or a morale assassin.

There are many people who are perfectly happy in that environment. At this point, I am not sure they have ever known life any other way. I might as well show them a hypercube.

Only now, with audiences shrinking and staffing imploding to match, I am suddenly being asked for advice by those seeking life after journalism. And everything mcarp wrote above still applies to this day; I am just as much a psychological counselor as an employment one.

©2012 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

(More from the mcarp archives… the prophetic genius and brilliance are his;
the ones/zeros, pixels, pictures and subheads and pull-quotes are mine.)

This is the next to last of the mcarp essays, written over a decade ago by former broadcast journalist Michael Carpenter. I got his permission to share these, because they are not easy to find, and like most brutally honest musings, they deserve to be read. What he wrote about then is still true today – especially the rather bone-headed things one could hear regularly in a newsroom.

Today’s anchor/personality is placed even higher on the pedestal, because in some cases all you have to differentiate your news product from the competition is the personality involved. Brain is optional.

“Not all the stupid ideas around here are mine.”

— Assignment Editor

“Just because it’s not interesting to you, and it’s not interesting to anybody else, doesn’t mean it’s not interesting.”

— Executive Producer

“Little did he know that murder… was on the menu.”

— Reporter’s script, describing moments leading up to the fatal shooting of a police officer in a fast food restaurant.

“You know, we really need that much-needed rain.”

— Anchor, responding to meteorologist’s forecast of ‘much-needed rain.’

“Police say they’re having trouble cutting these protesters’ chains because they’re made out of kryptonite.”

— Reporter on the scene of an anti-abortion protest, where demonstrators had chained themselves to a hand railing with the popular brand of bicycle lock. Lex Luthor was not implicated in the subsequent investigation.

“Well, governor… what did you think of the turnout?”

— Question shouted from across the street at Oklahoma governor David Walters, as he emerged from a memorial service for his teenage son. Sean Walters was the victim of suicide, which the governor had blamed on intense and unfair media scrutiny.

“Listen carefully: I’m telling you we could all be called to testify about this conversation in court.”

— News director, in response to a reporter’s question:
“Are you telling me you want me to fabricate a source for this rumor?”

“I had a psychic dream about you last night, and it was very negative. How do you explain that?”

— The same news director, to a job applicant who was not hired.

“Good evening. I’m Rick Whitmire. Wait… no, I’m not.”

— Me. But this wasn’t my fault. The other guy’s name was typed in the prompter. How was I supposed to know my name if it wasn’t in the prompter?

“Well, it’s just as accurate as it was when we were going to run it last night.”

— Producer, arguing in favor of broadcasting a report even after it was discovered to be erroneous.

“Fear is a powerful motivating tool.”

— Station manager, describing station’s marketing philosophy.

(originally published by Michael Carpenter, republished with permission.)

Addendum:

Granted, mcarp worked in a different time. Such a collection of statements could only travel as far as an email, and who wanted to spill those beans?

Publishing quotes like that online was scandalous for its day, and as you can see, the only guilty party Carpenter fingered was himself.

But how shocking would that be in an age where an anchor at a major cable network can say things like this on the air, and still be taken seriously by anyone?

Rick Sanchez asks what “nine meters” means in English

Rick Sanchez thinks Iceland is too cold to have volcanoes

Rick Sanchez thinks Hawaii is in the Southern Hemisphere

©2012 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

(More from the mcarp archives… the prophetic genius and brilliance are his;
the ones/zeros, pixels, pictures and subheads and pull-quotes are mine.)

…and good-looking white kids are having to do without.

There are no white people left anchoring TV news anymore.

To be honest, I haven’t checked every TV station in America to confirm it, but I’m sure it’s true. Because every time I turn around, I hear some white person griping that they were ‘cheated’ out of some glamorous, overpaid, underworked anchor job because the station ‘had to get a minority.’

This has happened so often that I have to assume that every on-air job in the industry has now been handed to non-white talent.

The complaint, posted to some Internet chat board, usually looks something like this:

my agent says I was suppose to get a anchor job in a top ten... but they had to give it to a minority... I'm really tired of this... I've been here eieghteen months, and I hate reporting... I should be anchoring right now... it's not fair... they shouldnt hire anchors because of race...

No, they should hire anchors for some higher quality.

Like looks, for example.

Personally, I’m of the opinion that no one is ‘suppose’ to be an anchor. That’s like saying you’re ‘suppose’ to win the lottery. Or that you’re ‘suppose’ to find a bag with a million dollars in it lying on the street.

And strangely enough, you never hear someone complain a minority ‘stole’ a photographer’s job, or a producer’s job. It’s always the cush anchor jobs that are being unfairly handed out to blacks, Hispanics, and Asians when there are so many stunning, beautiful white people doing without.

Being a news anchor is a lot like being one of The Backstreet Boys, anyway. You look great, get a lot of money for displaying a modicum of talent, and everyone else looks at you and wonders why it’s happening.

The rest of us, black and white alike, just have to go on working for a living.

(originally published by Michael Carpenter, republished with permission.)

©2012 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

(More from the mcarp archives… the prophetic genius and brilliance are his;
the ones/zeros, pixels, pictures and subheads and pull-quotes are mine.)

“News writing is English with its shirt sleeves rolled up.”

I don’t know who said that originally, but it was in my high school journalism textbook, and it stuck with me.

The best news writing, I was always told, was simple, direct, and unadorned. Think of Hemingway, or Ernie Pyle’s war dispatches.

The first news director I ever worked for had two exercises he insisted reporters practice. One was to look at notes, then turn them face down, and write from memory. That encouraged conversational writing. The other was to look at every word in a sentence, especially adjectives and adverbs, and try saying the sentence aloud without them. If the meaning remained the same, the word was unecessary. That encouraged concise, accurate writing.

The Modifiers Strike Back

But three or four news directors later, the trend had begun to go in the opposite direction. I worked for a guy who used what I called the ‘grease gun’ approach: he’d pick up his mental ‘grease gun’ of adjectives and adverbs — most of them ridiculously hyperbolic — and start injecting them into sentences. Accidents became ‘tragic.’ Increases became ‘alarming.’ Developments became ‘shocking.’

The trite writing I had worked so hard to avoid was now not only desirable, it was mandatory.

The purpose of newswriting was no longer to inform, nor even to entertain; it was to scare the bejeezus out of the viewers. Then, we could hold ourselves up as the only thing standing between them and their families, and the certain, violent chaos we were warning them lurked right outside the door.

Cold Comfort?

I still hear from people about the story I did, on assignment, about the fatal risks homeless people faced sleeping out in the autumn chill, on a night when the temperature was in the low fifties.

“But there is something else on the street tonight,” I wrote — or at least something very near to that. “Its name is death, and it waits in every alley, in every open doorway, in every vacant warehouse.”

Although it was crap — certainly no one was going to die of exposure in that kind of weather — I like to think it was a loftier level of crap. I had created an ominous, scary scenario without using a single overblown adjective. I had stuck to the plain, direct writing style of Hemingway and Pyle.

Ernie, not Gomer

Eventually, though, as I began to work with ever-younger producers and editors — people who assumed Pyle was that ‘gawwwwlll-leeeeeeeeee’ guy from Mayberry — even that kind of writing wasn’t enough. They suspected that what I was writing might simply be the truth — that I was taking the easy way out and just reporting what was actually happening.

They needed to see some ‘shockings’, and ‘devastatings’, and ‘terrifyings’ from me — sort of proof of good faith effort on my part that I was sincerely trying to sensationalize the news.

Dressed Down for not Dressing Up

The weekend news team of which I was a part was once scolded by our consultant for not ‘winning the lead’ of a six pm newscast. We had failed, the consultant said, because our chief competitor (who regularly inflated even the most trivial of stories to Hindenberg-esque proportions) had started its newscast with the line, “It’s a mother’s worst nightmare!”

I don’t remember what the ‘worst nightmare’ was — for the consultant’s purposes, it didn’t matter — but I remember that I went back into our own computer script archive, and discovered that we had diligently employed the ‘worst nightmare’ cliche ourselves about fifteen times in the previous twelve months.

We’d had a ‘mother’s worst nightmare,’ a ‘police officer’s worst nightmare’, a ‘firefighter’s worst nightmare’ — hell, we’d even had a ‘state budget official’s worst nightmare,’ whatever that was.

But we hadn’t ‘lost the lead’ because our story was weak. We had failed because we hadn’t used a cliche.

News writing used to be English with its shirt sleeves rolled up.

Now, it’s English dressed up in a Hallowe’en costume.

(originally published by Michael Carpenter, republished with permission.)

©2012 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

(More from the mcarp archives… the prophetic genius and brilliance are his;
the ones/zeros, pixels, pictures and subheads and pull-quotes are mine.)

It was seven or eight minutes to air, and a thick tower of black smoke had just plumed high above the east side of the city. We could see it from a camera, installed in our transmission tower, 600 feet up.

“That’s our new lead,” the producer announced. “Just ad lib something off the top. We’ll roll the breaking news animation, and then take the tower camera live.”

“What’s burning?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he replied.

“Is the fire department there yet?”

“I don’t know.”

“Ambulances? Anybody hurt?”

“I don’t know.”

“Has anyone here called the fire department?”

“I don’t know.”

“Police?”

“I don’t know.”

“Okay,” I replied, somewhat confused. “What am I supposed to say about it?”

He looked at me and shrugged. “We’ll just have to go with what we know.”

(originally published by Michael Carpenter, republished with permission.)

©2012 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

(More from the mcarp archives… the prophetic genius and brilliance are his;
the ones/zeros, pixels, pictures and subheads and pull-quotes are mine.)

Greetings from Satellite City, TX

What do they call those noisemakers Tibetan monks swing around their heads… the ones that make that hroowwwwnnngggggg hrooowwwnnngggggg noise?

We all have our unanswered questions about Waco… and that’s mine.

I have nothing to say about black helicopters, or the second amendment, or whether David Koresh was a kook or a prophet. I have nothing to say about how it ended. I wasn’t there, as it turned out, on the final day.

But one evening in late March, 1993, stuck in Waco, and stuck for a way to advance the Branch Davidian standoff story for my own station, I picked up the Gideon Bible out of my room at the Days Inn, and took it with me down to Satellite City, the media encampment at the perimeter of the standoff.

I sat in a Chevy Astro van with that Bible in one hand, and a Pearl longneck in the other, and, with the van’s dome light for illumination, began reading the Book of the Revelation — specifically, the passages about the Seven Seals which were so crucial to the Davidians’ understanding of their leader, David Koresh.

“And when the Lamb broke one of the seven seals I saw it, and I heard one of the four living creatures say, as if in a voice of thunder, ‘Come.’”

Up on the hill, the Davidians’ Mt. Carmel compound stood illuminated against the night sky. An FBI helicopter swooped overhead, sailing down the hillside, sweeping the fields with a spotlight.

“And when the Lamb broke the second seal, I heard the second living creature say, ‘Come.’ And another horse came out — a fiery-red one; and power was given to its rider to take peace from the earth, and to cause men to kill one another; and a great sword was given to him.”

Across the road, a television news crew from Houston had turned their satellite truck into a landbound party barge, complete with barbecue, lanterns, and boom box. Gloria Estefan sang from the stereo.

Meanwhile, from the hilltop, the occasional rumbling of tanks, and the sound effects of the FBI’s ‘psychological warfare’ campaign drifted down to mingle with the dance music and constant chugging of satellite truck generators.

“When the Lamb broke the third seal, I heard the third living creature say, ‘Come.’ I looked, and a black horse appeared, its rider carrying a balance in his hand.”

In fact, crews who had been parked at Satellite City more than a month had turned it into a ‘home away from home’. The media pool had searched for tents that could serve as temporary shelter, and had come up with a row of candy-striped county fair pavilions, that were lined up along the side of the road. Talk about your media circus.

Lines in the sand

CNN crews had surrounded its installation with a foot-high picket fence, and had stuck a pink flamingo lawn ornament in the ground outside its trailer door.

There were other reporters who found so many amenities of resort living available in Satellite City, they never left the place. You’d see them following around other, working reporters who’d come in from town, trying to beg, borrow, or steal snippets of information. Or, they’d sit in their own trailers and watch Charles Jaco’s CNN reports, and plagiarize that material for the folks back home.

It occurred to me that night — with beer in one hand and Bible in the other — that, as surreal as this scene looked from my vantage point, it must look even stranger from the bullet-riddled house on the hill. Inside, the followers of David Koresh had convinced themselves the world was coming to an end. For them, in fact, it was.

“When the Lamb broke the fourth seal I heard the voice of the fourth living creature say, ‘Come.’ I looked and a pale-colored horse appeared. Its rider’s name was Death, and Hades came close behind him; and authority was given to them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with the sword or with famine or pestilence or by means of the wild beasts of the earth.”

There they were, surrounded, on a hilltop in rural Texas, by helicopters and tanks and spotlights and loudspeakers blasting the hroowwwwnnngggggg hrooowwwnnngggggg of Tibetan soundmakers — whatever they’re called.

“When the Lamb broke the fifth seal, I saw at the foot of the altar the souls of those whose lives had been sacrificed because of the word of God and of the testimony which they had given.”

But what, amidst the tanks and helicopters and bizarre sound effects and bodies that surrounded them, did they make of that little camp down at the foot of the hill? The row of brightly-lit satellite trucks and festival tents, and the strains of Miami Sound Machine faintly drifting up the hill?

What the hell kind of apocalypse was this, anyway?

Nobody at the foot of the hill seemed to care.

“When the Lamb broke the sixth seal I looked, and there was a great earthquake, and the sun became as dark as sackcloth, and the whole disc of the moon became like blood.”

Crossing the line, never to return

Unable to focus on Revelation, I walked across the road to the Houston satellite truck. Someone noticed I seemed a little distracted. He asked why, and I told him. “Who cares?” he replied, pausing to swallow a mouthful of barbecue. “They’re all nuts up there, anyway.”

“When the Lamb broke the seventh seal, there was silence in Heaven for about half an hour. Then I saw the seven angels who are in the presence of God, and seven trumpets were given to them.”

On that spring evening in 1993, the axis of my reality shifted just a little bit. Nothing looked quite the same for years afterward. And TV news never looked the same again.

(originally published by Michael Carpenter, republished with permission.)

©2012 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

The ordinary viewer is just so… ordinary.

“You know what your problem is?” My news director was putting the question to me — not in an accusatory or critical tone, but with the demeanor of a doctor telling his patient he has a terminal illness. “You have no style and no class.”

That was actually part of an employee evaluation I was given. (And here’s a bit of free career advice: if, during your first evaluation, you’re given an assessment like that, don’t think things will get better if you just hang around another 17 years.)

When I was recruited for my first TV news job, just five years earlier, I had gone to work in a newsroom full of people from working class families just like mine. Some were liberal and some were conservative, some Protestant, some Catholic, some Jewish.

But no one was there with the sense that the circumstances of their birth, or the fact that they were on TV, entitled them to some special place in the social order.

But five years later, Ronald Reagan was president, and the Ewings of Dallas were America’s TV family. And the term “working class,” at least in my profession, had become pejorative.

And although it is no longer my profession, the profession’s attitude seems the same.

Before Joe the Plumber

Have you ever heard of “Joe Sixpack?” He’s the ‘typical viewer’ for whom television news managers program their product. He is, by most accounts, an overweight, undershirt-wearing, lowlife who plops down in his ratty, squeaky, vinyl-upholstered easy chair at six pm, rips a Bud out of the plastic six-pack ring, and props his feet up for the news. Every morning, in newsrooms across the nation, executives and producers meet and talk about what Joe Sixpack will want to see on the news that evening.

Want to see a picture of him? Go look in the mirror. Because, unless you’re a doctor, lawyer, stock broker, or someone similarly situated, you are Joe Sixpack.

TV news personalities, in their need to separate those with “style and class” from those without it, have informally divided their public into two groups. The first group consists of the aforementioned doctors, lawyers, stock brokers, plus a few charismatic politicians — and, of course, TV news personalities.

The other group is ‘trailer park trash,’ consisting of everyone else.

But the grim reality for these provincial news celebrities is this: the affluent, fashionable folk with whom they want to associate, and be associated, don’t watch television news.They’re all tuned to the Discovery Channel, or Crossfire. The local TV news constituency is the very mechanics, convenience store clerks, letter carriers, plumbers, insurance salesmen, and the like whom one of my coworkers once dismissed with a single word, or rather, sound effect: “Ew.”

Dual Citizenship?

For the TV news reporter, the quandary is this: how to produce a news product for the mass of citizens who actually watch the newscast, and buy the products advertised — while simultaneously nudging the rich and trendy with a wink and a smile, as if to say, “Don’t pay any attention to that. Really, we’re just like you.”

One afternoon at an upscale shopping mall in the city where I lived, two gang members got into some kind of friendly scuffle outside the Swiss Army shop, and one of them accidentally shot the other in the butt with a small handgun.

We didn’t make any bones about it in our live coverage: the story was not that a black teenager had been shot. The story was that a lot of upscale white bystanders, whom our anchor described as being from the city’s ‘select neighborhoods,’ could have been shot.

Years later, we interrupted programming to report on a shooting in a similarly exclusive mall — 250 miles away. One indignant caller demanded to know why we thought anyone in our audience cared what happened in the Dallas Galleria. One news executive shrugged and said, “Everyone I know shops there.”

You Might Be Surprised…

A pipe bomb exploded one evening in a suburban, semi-rural community east of the city. The teenager who had assembled it was seriously hurt. Our reporter on the scene — born and raised in one of those ‘select neighborhoods’ — began her live report by saying, “You know, you might be surprised. There are actually some pretty nice homes out here.”

In fact, though, TV reporters generally aren’t like the affluent upper classes from whom they seek acceptance. They may have been raised in those kinds of homes, but in the competitive, cost-conscious world of modern TV news, they’re paid far less than they would be making if they’d actually become doctors, lawyers, or stock brokers.

So, they try to make up for it by just toadying and name-dropping (“Omigawd! Do you have any idea how hard it is to get a Rolex repaired in this city?”), and leveraging their tenuous status as celebrities for the chance to stand on the fringe of sophisticated society. They’d rather be the lapdog of the establishment than the watchdog.

But frankly, the glamour of exclaiming “Just take a look!” in front of a nightly procession of car wrecks, house fires, and drive-by shootings is often lost on people who have spent ten hours performing open heart surgery, or made new case law, or gotten in on the ground floor of an IPO that tripled in value in eight hours.

Life Without Apology

The guy who first tagged me with the ‘no style and no class’ criticism eventually got fired. His boss — chief enforcer of what the company described as the ‘aura of affluence’ — was escorted from the building under armed guard one day, along with most of his family, while auditors pored over the fat leaseback deals and inflated expense reports he’d written for himself at the owner’s expense. That’s how he’d gotten his ‘aura of affluence.’

I’m more than two years out of the business myself, now. I decided to go do something else for a living — something that didn’t require me to start every day by apologizing for having ‘no style and no class.’

I’m not dramatically wealthier than I was, but getting off the ‘best car/best restaurants/best neighborhoods’ merry-go-round left me financially more independent than I ever was as a reporter.

But there’s another kind of independence that’s even more valuable. That’s the freedom to be your own person, choose your own friends, form your own values, and not portray a semifictional character created by a boss, or a consultant, or your coworkers — or even by yourself — to please someone else.

(originally published by Michael Carpenter, republished with permission.)

©2012 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

“But I gave him a fighting chance.”

- Former television news director (1978)

I never understood why anyone wanted to be a news director, anyway. Talk about a thankless job. Now, it’s gotten to where some of the big companies won’t even let their ND’s go to the RTNDA convention once a year and least pretend for a week they’re doing something besides signing their own names to consultants’ faxes.

I worked for 17 news directors over 25 years, which gives you some clue about the average job tenure of news directors. Some of them were solid leaders or solid journalists, or sometimes both. And about a fourth were people I wouldn’t have hired to mow my lawn. Of course, then again, the guy who mows my lawn doesn’t need a focus group to tell him how to do it.

One ND was an alcoholic. One was a drug addict. One was both an alcoholic and a drug addict. Another made management decisions based on ‘psychic dreams.’ And the nuttier they were, the longer they seemed to hang on. It was the rational ones, with a grasp on reality, that usually cratered most quickly.

Remains of the Day

A bunch of us were sitting one evening at a local media hangout, rehashing the day. It was the usual shop talk: two-hour drives to stories that had fallen through, items that didn’t make slot, who was in and who was out in our competitors’ newsrooms.

During a brief lull in the conversation, our news director — working on his third or fourth margarita — offered how his day had gone.

“Well, I had to kill the kids’ hamster this morning.”

The rest of the table, not surprisingly, fell silent.

“He had gotten out of his cage and chewed a hole in my fishing waders. So, he had to die.

“I gave him a fighting chance, though. I put him in the middle of the garage floor, and turned the schnauzers loose. I figured if he made it under the lawn mower, well… survival of the fittest, you know.

“But he didn’t. Too bad.”

So, our news director had amused himself before coming to work by watching his dogs tear his children’s pet to pieces.

Setting His Sights

The ratings were not being good to this guy. The network had jumped from third to first place, but our local news was still mired in third. A complete reworking of the product — new set, new name, new promos and graphics — had made no impact at all. He had brought in a new, glamorous ‘pretty boy’ anchor from another city, whom the viewers had greeted with howls of laughter.

(“We didn’t hire him just for his pretty face!” the promos announced, as an attractive young woman followed him with her eyes, licking her lips as he walked by.)

And as the ratings chugged along in the basement, his demeanor worsened.

One day, he brought a rifle to work, and propped it against his desk.

“What’s that for?” a slightly nervous employee asked.

“I cracked the stock over the weekend,” he replied. “I’m taking it by the shop after work to get it fixed.”

But the next day, the rifle was back. And the day after that. And the day after that.

Finally, as the days stretched into weeks, we just got used to seeing the gun propped up against the desk, or laid across the top, and we quit asking about it.

He ended up getting fired at the station Christmas party — which is a story in and of itself. Thank God he didn’t have the gun with him then.

While the rest of the staff was in Studio One, getting wasted on punch and margaritas after the late news had wrapped, he was going on a rampage through the station. He tore excutives’ nameplates off their office doors, and tossed them in the toilet. He ripped pictures off the walls, and smashed them over his knees. On his way out the front door, he pulled the pole lamp down in front of the terrified night receptionist, and used it to to chop down the station Christmas tree.

But you know what? As news directors go, he was one of the better ones.

I had to work for a few who were really nuts.

(originally published by Michael Carpenter, republished with permission.)

©2012 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

“You mean it’s not in Wisconsin?”

The phone rang, and an intern picked it up. She listened for a moment, then put her hand over the receiver and looked at me.

“Where is Mount Everest?” she asked.

What am I, the World Book? “Tell ‘em it’s in Wisconsin,” I replied.

“Nuh-uhhh,” a coworker interrupted. “Mount Everest is in Colorado.”

“Mount Everest isn’t in Colorado,” a third responded. “Pike’s Peak is in Colorado. Mount Everest is in Alaska.”

The intern turned back to me. “Where is it, really?”

Then I realized I didn’t know for sure which country it was in. So, I weaseled. “It’s in the Himalayas.”

“No, it’s not,” replied the coworker who had placed it in Alaska. “The Himalayas are in New York, and I know Mount Everest isn’t in New York.”

(originally published by Michael Carpenter, republished with permission.)

©2012 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

“This is a cleansing moment of clarity.”

— Howard Beale, “Network!” (1976)

Network!, in case you’ve never seen it, is the movie that gave us the expression, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!”

The gist of the plot is that low-rated network anchorman Howard Beale suddenly comes unhinged before his TV audience, and as his apparent mental deterioration advances, his bosses and coworkers try to exploit it for ratings gain.

And for me, seeing Network! it was kind of like getting saved.

I had been a television reporter for less than a year, but I was already sensing something was not quite right about the way things were. I just couldn’t quite put my finger on it — and no one seemed to notice it but me.

So, naturally, I thought it was me. And so, for that matter, did everyone else. My ‘attitude problem’ was starting to get me into trouble.

And then, out of the clear blue, along comes Howard Beale with the explanation:

“You’re beginning to believe the illusions we’re spinning here. You’re beginning to think that the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal.

“You do whatever the tube tells you. You dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube. You even think like the tube. This is mass madness. You maniacs.

“In God’s name, you people are the real thing! We are the illusion! So, turn off your television sets. Turn them off now. Turn them off right now. Turn them off and leave them off. Turn them off right in the middle of this sentence I am speaking to you now. Turn them off!”

When the lights came up at the end of the movie, there seemed to be about three of us in the theater who ‘got it.’

The others were looking at each other with quizzical stares: ‘What the hell was that about?’

But no matter. At least I knew at last I wasn’t alone.

Up the Rabbit Hole

Beale’s rants made perfect sense to me. He was the first person in the business, real or unreal (as if in television news, there were a difference), who did make sense to me — the first person who saw it the way I saw it.

There was a hitch, though: Howard Beale was going crazy.

“I am imbued, Max. I am imbued with some special spirit. It’s not a religious feeling at all. It is a shocking eruption of great electrical energy. I feel vivid and flashing as if suddenly I had been plugged into some great electro-magnetic field.

“I feel connected to all living things, to flowers, birds, to all the animals of the world and even to some great unseen living force, what I think the Hindus call prana.

“It is not a breakdown. I have never felt more orderly in my life! It is a shattering and beautiful sensation! It is the exalted flow of the space-time continuum, save that it is spaceless and timeless and of such loveliness! I feel on the verge of some great ultimate truth. And you will not take me off the air for now or for any other spaceless time!”

Yeah, that’s crazy, all right. Or is it?

I don’t know what author Paddy Chayefsky wanted us to think when he put those words in Beale’s mouth.

But personally, I don’t think Howard Beale was going crazy; I think he was going sane.

He said it himself: “I just ran out of bullshit.”

Psychiatrist David Viscott, in his self-help bestseller Emotional Resilience, wrote about real-life cases not unlike Beale’s:

“Eventually, there comes a day of awakening and reckoning. Your epiphany is both inevitable and totally unexpected.

“In the moment of your illumination, you finally see yourself as you are and are forced to surrender to the truth lest your false illusions forever obscure your best self.

“Until you reach such a day, you often live a self-deceptive way of life. You try to convince yourself that what you have chosen is what you really want.”

I do know exactly how that feels. I’ve been there myself.

Inside the Looking Glass

Ever see one of those promos where the news anchor dashes to the News ActionCopter — off, presumably, to cover The Big Story?

But as soon as he gets in the copter, they turn off the camera. He climbs back out and returns to his office. The pilot shuts down the engine, and the rotors coast to a stop. There is no ‘Big Story.’ It’s just a promo — an ad that pretends the anchor is taking off to chase down the news. (One of my favorites is one in which the anchor jumps into the copter, looks at the pilot and dramatically points at the sky. Like, where the hell else are they going to go?)

The purpose of these ads is to persuade viewers that anchors are out there every day, in dramatic hot pursuit of the news. Even if they aren’t.

Or the promo where the anchor and some anonymous behind-the-scenes staffer look at a script together? The anchor points to some word on the script, gesturing as broadly as a vaudeville performer so you’ll be sure to notice. Then they look at each other, nod, and dart off in opposite directions.

At one station in New York, they hired actors to play the newsroom staff, because the real producers and editors weren’t as glamorous as the station wanted viewers to think they were.

That scene in Broadcast News — in which news producer Holly Hunter feeds interview questions through a headset to affable but dimwitted anchorman William Hurt — is a lot closer to reality.

But I’m not telling you anything you haven’t figured out for yourself: TV news is, for the most part, just an ongoing advertisement for itself. An entertainment program, loosely based on the day’s events.

That ‘News ActionCenter’ is no more real than the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. That’s why they call it a newsset.

Row upon row of monitors cover the walls, but many are just transparencies in cardboard cutouts. Fake.

A sweeping vista of the city skyline ties it all together, supported by pillars of impossibly blue plastic marble or stapled-on brushed aluminum. Fake.

If you could go in the studio, and walk behind the backdrops, you’d see that it’s all just laminated plywood and painted two-by-fours, with extension cords and power strips scattered everywhere. Fake.

The spontaneous question and answer session between anchor and reporter at the end of a live shot? Scripted. Fake.

A reporter walks down the road, talking to the camera and sometimes pausing reflectively, as if looking for a word. Where is he walking to? Nowhere. It’s fake. What’s the word he’s looking for? The one he memorized, along with the pause. That’s fake, too.

You would assume, I suppose, that there is some ‘jumping off point’ at which TV news leaves behind the fakery and melodrama for reality. I think there was, at one time. But eventually, I got to where I couldn’t find it.

“You’re beginning to believe the illusions we’re spinning here. You’re beginning to think that the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal.”

The Awakening

And I told myself for years that the phoniness and fakery and false sincerity and exaggerated drama were just part of the cost of doing business. The other guys were doing it, too, and doing it more flagrantly than we were. We had to stay competitive. But somewhere in the back of my mind, it kept nagging at me.

I knew it was crap to say ‘reports are coming in at this hour,’ when the ‘reports’ had come in the form of a single anonymous, unverified telephone tip, or a snatch of a conversation picked up off a police scanner.

I knew it was misleading to hyperbolize every trivial complaint or allegation with adjectives like ‘shocking,’ ‘outraged,’ and ‘dramatic.’ (It also meant that when really serious stories came along, we had no words left to adequately describe them. We’d used them all up overstating fender bender car wrecks, broken tree branches, kids getting into fistfights at school, shoplifted cigarettes, and the like.)

I knew it was ridiculous to dress up in heavy parka, scarf, earmuffs and wool hat in 55-degree weather and stand on the side of a central Oklahoma highway and talk about the ‘scary road conditions’ that were ‘paralyzing traffic’ — in Amarillo, Texas.

There was a newscaster in my home town who, according to local reports, briefly became a house painter after his career publicly and spectacularly flamed out.

And when I first heard that, I thought, ‘Wow. What a way end up.’

In retrospect, it seems like not such a bad thing at all.

The paint, after all, is real. The brush is real. The house is real. If you paint houses, you actually paint houses. You don’t apply a few strokes for a camera, then leave while an assistant finishes up, and a promotion team crafts an advertisement describing what a caring and conscientious painter you are.

In fact, I considered becoming a maintenance man at an apartment complex for much the same reason. I had opportunities to do other things (and as it turned out, I took one), but the idea of doing simple, honest work that really was what it appeared to be was appealing after 25 years of often pretending to be doing something I wasn’t, and creating carefully-worded portrayals of a world that really didn’t exist.

And I would like to think that, even though he was a fictional character, Howard Beale eventually had to confront the same reality — that he had been living in a dramatic, exciting, but basically unreal world, and had been trying to fool people into believing that his false world, and not their own, was real.

“In God’s name, you people are the real thing.

“We are the illusion.

“So turn off your television sets. Turn them off now. Turn them off right now.

“Turn them off and leave them off. Turn them off right in the middle of this sentence I am speaking to you now.

“Turn them off!”

I turned off my television in February of 1999, and it hasn’t been on since.

(originally published by Michael Carpenter, republished with permission.)

©2012 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.