And so It Goes My Adventures in Television

We Call them Twinkies. You've seen them on television acting the news, modeling and fracturing the news, while you wonder whether they've read the news--or if they've blow-dried their brains, too. I make my living as a reporter and sometime anchor woman on network television and, like almost everyone in my business, I have an overdeveloped ego and a case of galloping ambition. Some of my colleagues want to be the Anchor Man on the Mount. Others see themselves as the Ace Reporter. Because of 60 Minutes, there's a whole herd of them determined to be the Grand Inquisitor; and because of the way ratings affect our jobs, a heady number want only to be the Friendliest Anchor on the Block. At least one wants to be Jesus. Me, I just don't want to be thought of as a Twinkie.

By 1978, I was sure I'd escaped, that I was a rare breed of television journalist, that I was known for my, um, skill. After all, wasn't I in New York City, about to coanchor the NBC News magazine Weekend, and didn't everybody say Weekend was a writer's program? I must be a hell of a writer. And didn't everybody say Weekend was a program where proper use of picture counted as much as narration? I must be a visual genius. It was clear: Using nothing but my little words and pictures, I would expand the frontiers of television news. The only trouble, as I saw it, was that too many people failed to spot how special I was. They seemed to think that because I was a television anchor woman, I must be a Twinkie.

Take what happened with my neighbor. I'd just found a place to live in Greenwich Village. The day I moved in, she introduced herself and asked what I did. I told her about Weekend, how fine it was, how smart I was, and when I was done, she said, "Oh, I see. You mean you're a television anchor woman. That's nice, dear." She said I must meet a certain tenant in her building, because the tenant and I would have so much to talk about. I asked what the tenant did and was told that at the moment, the tenant was cutting hair. (A hairdresser? This woman wasn't paying attention.) I declined, explaining that I couldn't see how the tenant and I would have much to say to each other--not that I had anything against cutting hair, but I was, I hinted, into more important stuff. My hair was not a concern; I was a journalist.

I never did meet the tenant, but a year or so later, when my children and I went to the movies one day, there was a terrible commotion in our part of the theater when the credits rolled, because there on the screen, after the word editor, was the name of the tenant I had passed up meeting. The name of the movie? Hair. The tenant wasn't cutting hair. The tenant was cutting Hair. I was a Twinkie.

You can be assured that a good deal of dedication and hard work had gone into making me a self-absorbed jerk. It didn't happen overnight, but it does happen rather often in this business. It's easy to be smug, doing what I do. Television news is the candy store. They pay me to read. They pay me to see the world. They pay me to watch things happen, to go to parades, fires, conventions, wars, circuses, coronations and police stations--all in the name of journalism--and they pay me well. Walter Mitty, had he known, should have taken my job. As a matter of fact, Walter Mitty could have taken my job; I got it by accident.

•

There were no journalists in my family in Texas. They all worked for a living. I did not see The Front Page as a child; nobody I knew wanted to grow up to be Hildy Johnson, though several people I knew wanted to grow up to be Lyndon Johnson. My family read, and I cannot remember being unable to read, but reading was something you did in school or for fun; it wasn't something you got paid to do. Writing was what you did when Aunt Rose sent a birthday gift or Mrs. Scott asked for a paper about what was important in Silas Marner and you hadn't read it. (Later I read it, and the answer is, "Not much.") Travel was what you did for two weeks in August. Reading, writing and traveling were good things to do, but they weren't serious. Getting married was serious. That's what they told me.

I certainly didn't learn about journalism at college, though I did draw a few cartoons for the student magazine at Vanderbilt University. I don't think they made much of an editorial statement, though, because the only one I can remember showed an ugly woman standing in front of one of those machines that give you quarters in exchange for dollar bills and have printed across the front, Change--one Dollar. In the little balloon coming out of the ugly young woman's head, I had written, I've Spent $18 and I Havent Changed Yet. Garry Trudeau was not threatened.

We weren't given to making strong editorial statements, those of us who were freshmen at Vanderbilt in 1962. events that would change a nation were going on all over the South, but on campus in Nashville, the watchword was apathy. It was the year parodied a decade and a half later by the National Lampoon movie Animal House. There really were toga parties. Students dressed in bed sheets to get drunk and lunge at other students. Fraternities threw the parties, the same fraternities that wouldn't let Jews join because they were afraid everybody who wasn't Jewish might quit. They were probably right. Those who were not members of fraternities or sororities, or were not members of the right fraternities or sororities, we called "nubs." Anyone who wrote for the school newspaper was a Communist, we figured. Anyone who had anything to do with the school theater department was a queer, of course. The largest organization on campus was the College Republicans. The second largest was the group made up of students who gave blood once a year for four years in order to get free blood transfusions for life. I belonged. We didn't have nasty names for black people on campus. We didn't have to. At Vanderbilt in 1962, the only black people I saw on campus were raking leaves or washing dishes.

I am as nostalgic for those good old days at Vanderbilt as I am for the Cuban Missile Crisis, which also took place in 1962.

In 1964, I quit school. I was 19, an age at which I regularly found it difficult to locate my backside with both hands. There followed some years during which what happened to me can be of little interest to anyone outside my immediate family and is of interest to them only when I insist. I moved around some, married some, had two babies, worked for three radio stations, one of which hired me to read the news because I sounded black--my Texas heritage--and the black woman it had hired did not. Since it was an all-black station, the all-white management thought that sounding black was as good as being black--maybe better. In radio, I learned about keeping logs, editing audio tape, writing copy, selling air time, announcing and "running a board," which sounds one hell of a lot more sporting than it is.

Those years, many of them, coincided with what we sometimes call the Sixties and other times call the last Children's Crusade. Some people get religion. I got politics, let my hair grow, took off my shoes, put on an old Army jacket, marched, sang, lived in a commune, learned how to kill and dress deer, learned I didn't want to do that, talked revolution, walked the woods in Alaska, walked the river between Texas and Mexico and bored absolutely everybody with my answers to everything. May I never eat another bowl of brown rice as long as I live.

Yes, it was an important time in this country's history, but I was not an important part of it. Mostly, I just talked a good game. Still, I believed. Oh, did I believe. I believed until that day I found myself in Juneau, Alaska, without a job, without a husband, without an education--but with a three-year-old daughter and a two-year-old son to raise. Then I became a journalist.

It was as simple as could be: I needed the money. No dream. No vision. No ambition. I needed the money to raise my children. I'd been fired from my job at radio station Join in Juneau over what you might call a personality conflict. Mine conflicted with that of the man who owned the station. We disagreed about one or two little things, such as how his station ought to be run. He pointed out that I might be right but only one of us owned the station, so it would be real interesting to see how fast I could pack. I learned something valuable from the experience: I learned I could pack very fast. It has come in handy. Once, an editor explained to me that a journalist was just an out-of-work reporter. If that's so, then I have been--from time to time--one hell of a journalist. Never trust anyone in this business who hasn't been fired at least once. I have been fired more than once and always for cause. I am trustworthy.

The Associated Press, for instance, was exactly right to fire me. The mistake it made was hiring me in the first place, which, I believe, is how they still feel about it over there.

I was hired by the Dallas bureau of the A.P. to write for the broadcast wire stories that could be read on radio and television newscasts. It was December 1972, and A.P. had recently purchased word processors for its Dallas bureau. Some of us used them more intelligently than others. Some of us who are low-tech now were low-tech then. But only one of us wrote on her word processor a long, chatty letter to a friend in Alaska. In it, I maligned a couple of Texas newspapers, the Dallas city council, the Vietnam war and a fellow I was dating, topping it off with a little something about a mutual friend who was leaving the A.P. in Dallas. I believe I suggested that when she left, the bureau chief, whom (in fine A.P. fashion) I named, might rid himself of any discriminatory guilt by hiring a half-black chicana lesbian who could handle the A.P. stylebook.

I was no fool; I hit the keys on the word processor that would give me a printed copy of the letter--and would not send it out on the A.P. wire. The letter was mailed and I went home, unaware that I had also hit the key that put the letter on hold in the computer. The following morning, (continued on page 192)And So It Goes(continued from page 76) there was a space shot. The A.P. had invited people from member newspapers and radio and television stations to come to NASA, in Houston, so they could see how well the new word processors worked.

They saw. Something in the computer keyed my letter, which immediately was sent out over the A.P. wire in four states. I was fired only because the A.P.'s legal department said it absolutely was against the law to shoot me, no matter how good an idea it might be. Once again, I had no money, no job and two children to support, and this time, everybody was laughing but me and the Associated Press.

I got lucky. What was an embarrassment to me was funny to many other people, and some of them had jobs to offer. One ran a newspaper, one of the newspapers I had mocked in the letter. Another ran a radio station. Even U.P.I, called to talk; but the call that mattered, eventually, was the call from Dick John, news director at KHOU-TV, the CBS affiliate in Houston. He said I wrote funny. He asked if I'd ever considered working in television news. I had rarely considered watching television news, I told him. I didn't own a television. What's more, I'd recently moved to Texas from Alaska, a state that, in a way, didn't own a television. When I lived in Alaska, television news was accomplished this way: Every day, when the Northwest over-the-pole flight stopped in Anchorage to refuel, it dropped off a cassette of the CBS Evening News. The cassette was picked up, taken to the television station and broadcast that night, one day late--probably the best way to watch the stuff.

The television reporters I'd seen on the street since my return were always asking some poor soul how he felt about something. No, thank you, I was neither interested nor qualified to work for television. After all, I'd seen it. Dick John said the pay was twice what the A.P. paid; I said I believed I could learn television. Just before we hung up, he asked me was I three feet tall, with warts, and if so, how big were the warts? I told him I had had the warts burned off, but I had a face like a Moon Pie, and was that OK? He said it was, he guessed, what with lighting and all. I went to work in television news. Do they do these things on the phone anymore?

What is the lesson here? Why should a woman fired for plain stupidity be rewarded for being stupid with years and years of being well (if not over-) paid to perform interesting work? If it helps, remember, Lizzie Borden was acquitted.

•

Local television news is where you ride the elephant. I mean that. When the circus comes to town, any town, the elephants must be walked from the train to wherever the circus will perform. It's called, unoriginally but accurately, the elephant walk, and it is always scheduled early in the morning--often early on Sunday morning, so it doesn't interfere with traffic, but usually late enough in the day that the sun is up. There is a reason for this. Television needs light. Circuses know that television will cover the elephant walk every year, and every year some idiot television reporter will ride the elephant for his story--usually only once, but ride it he will, one day, because local television news is the place where you invariably wind up doing something you just know you're going to regret later, and you do regret it. After you've done it. I have ridden the elephant. Between January 1973 and November 1975, I worked as a local television-news reporter, first for KHOU and then for WCBS, the CBS-owned station in New York City.

It seemed the Associated Press had fired me at just the right time--actually, a day sooner would have been just the right time as far as the A.P. was concerned--but I'm talking about time as far as it concerned me. KHOU had hired its first woman reporter in 1971; she'd done so well she'd left Houston for a better job. KHOU thought maybe it would hire another woman.

The woman I replaced was Jessica Savitch. Blonde, beautiful and poised, Jessica had become sort of beloved in Houston. In fact, she had been one big hit and, as you would expect, one hard act to follow. I would go out on stories, fumbling tape recorders, microphone cords and light stands, muttering to myself, trying to keep in mind what little television "stuff" I knew, trying not to get in the cameraman's way, and I would approach some member of the city council to ask him what he thought about gun control (in Houston, never very much), only to be asked by the councilman, "Whar's Jessica? Whar's that cute little thang? And who're you, gal?" It was enough to depress a less dedicated journalist with fewer mouths to feed.

When I tell that story, I'm not making fun of how Texans talk, even though we talk funny. These days, people practice talking Texan, even Texans--if they want to get along in Texas.

However, what is useful in Texas is not always useful in television, as I found out years later when NBC News sent me back there for a few weeks to cover some stories. When I returned, I was asked to re-record all my narration for the stories, because on the tapes, I sounded like a Texan. I didn't know, right then, that they meant I was afflicted. It turned out it was OK with them that I was Texan, what with the card I carried that said I could read and all. What wasn't OK was sounding like a Texan. I explained to them that Iowa corn and Louisiana crayfish cause people to speak differently. A man from Boston is not to be confused with a man from North Carolina. Why, in North Carolina, you have to listen very carefully to understand anything anyone is saying to you, and still it is chancy. It's how we are, though, and good for us.

My bosses said that was nice, but it didn't have anything to do with television, though one of them confessed to having heard of Iowa. My bosses said we should all sound alike. They said we should all sound as if we'd grown up in the same place. I asked them what place that was. One executive thought his office would be appropriate, and the others soon agreed, since they hadn't been to Iowa or North Carolina, but they'd all been to his office. It became clear: People on television were meant to sound like they'd grown up in a network vice-president's office. In some cases, it may be true. If you're on television, you can't be from Texas, or Brooklyn, Oregon, Nebraska or New Jersey. Especially New Jersey. You can't be from anyplace, because the people who run television news aren't. After I understood, I practiced sounding as if I were from nowhere. Now they say I can go home again. As long as I don't talk to anybody.

Luckily, none of this mattered in Houston in 1973. Everybody else talked like me, so I didn't have to worry about my accent. That made one thing I didn't have to worry about, and just about the only one. Television was hard work. Who figured it would be such hard work? Somebody handed me a microphone, pointed a camera at me and said, "You're in television, kid. Do something." Do what? I knew nothing about television news, nothing about how it should be put together, and there is no training program for that, not at a local station and not at a network.

I learned that in television, you had to do what a print reporter did, and then you had to do things a print reporter didn't. The print reporter didn't have to read his stories out loud. He didn't have to care about light or the absence of it. He didn't worry about the planes flying overhead, tools breaking--or getting the shot. You are supposed to be there, and not somewhere else, when whatever is going to happen happens, because they can say it over for you, but they can't do it over for you--at least, they're not supposed to and you're not supposed to let them. That is called staging the news. It is another word for cheating. The print reporter doesn't have to mess with trying to match words with pictures, trying not to speak of oranges when the picture is of apples, trying to choose the best pictures, regretting the picture he forgot to make, discarding the picture not needed--all the print reporter has to worry about are the damn facts and the damn words.

I did the only thing possible, under the circumstances. I threw myself upon the mercy of the cameramen, who were also the editors of the film. They taught me, bit by bit, and I had to overcome, in addition to my ignorance, all the prejudice of a print reporter where television was concerned. Print reporters like to look down on TV and TV reporters, at least until they are offered jobs in TV. I'm not sure why this is; after all, in 1983, the year that TV gave the country Vietnam: A Television History, a 13-part series on public television and an outstanding piece of journalism, print gave the country USA Today, a newspaper for people who find television news too complex.

•

Local television news is often accused of going for the showy over the serious. Network reporters and producers like to think they are much better than local-television reporters and producers. At the network, we are sure we are the keepers of the flame and those people in local news are the bozos. We like to hint that what they lack in substance, they make up for in shallow. Consider the questions they ask. It is said that in journalism, there is no such thing as a dumb question, only dumb answers. That is wrong. I worked for local news. There are dumb questions.

Once, on assignment in Alabama, I watched a reporter for local news cover a story about a trampoline tournament. The winner was a college student who had only one leg. He'd lost his other leg a year before in an automobile accident. Came the interview. The camera stayed on the face of the student as the reporter asked the following: "Gee, fellow, you won that contest good, but I heard you used to play football and run track. Does it ever, ever bother you that you'll never be able to do any of those things again?"

That is what you call your dumb question, one more variation of the all-time dumb television-news question: "How do you feel about...?" Fill in the blank. How do you feel, Mr. Arevir, about eight of your nine children dying in that fire? How does it feel, Cindy Lou, to be the only little blind girl pitching in the major leagues? How do you feel, Mr. President, about peace?

In Chicago, a television reporter once asked a bystander how she'd felt when she saw the scaffolding start to fall. The scaffolding had had three men on it; they were working on a building under construction. All three were killed.

"I didn't feel anything," said the woman. "I didn't see the scaffolding fall."

"Well," said the reporter, "how would you have felt if you had seen it?"

In defense of us all, that reporter was fired.

A stupid question almost always means the reporter does not understand enough to ask any other kind of question. In Alaska, following the crash of an airplane in which 111 people had died, the medical examiner held a news conference. One reporter, not content with facts, wanting something "grabbing," kept at the medical examiner, demanding to know precisely what had killed the 111 people. Finally, the medical examiner, fed up with the reporter's nonsense, said, "Son, let me put it this way. The plane stopped and the people didn't."

In local television news, it's important to have a question--anyquestion--because in local television news, questions are used on the air, right along with the answers. Print reporters don't do that, but most television reporters are constantly auditioning to be television reporters someplace else, and for that, they need--or think they need--to be seen and heard frequently in their news reports. So even if they ask stupid questions, they use the stupid questions on the air. In television, local or network, there are exceptions; there are reporters who need never be ashamed of their questions, reporters like Ted Koppel, who happens to be the best interviewer on television. Most of us are not Ted Koppel, however. Most of our questions do not deserve to be heard. Sometimes this is true of the answers, too, but we're talking about questions here.

So you see, the dumb question does exist in journalism. The old rule is wrong. Or is it? When Betty Ford was First Lady, she held a news conference. What needed to be asked was asked and answered. No news was made. Everyone was ready for the thing to end--but there was one reporter who kept asking useless questions, the final useless question being "Mrs. Ford, have your children used marijuana?"

Jeez, what a dumb, dumb question. You could hear the murmurs all over the room. Everybody exchanged looks. They were right. It would have been a dumb question--if the President's wife had not answered, "Yes."

I don't remember, but I like to think that question was asked by a reporter from some local television station, God bless 'em all.

A couple of years back, I read in the New York City newspapers that a local television station was about to have a "major house cleaning." I only wish that meant somebody was going to sweep the newsroom and dust the TelePrompTer. It meant, naturally, that people were going to be fired. According to the newspapers, however, they weren't going to be fired without reason. No, sir. The station had a good reason for firing some of its on-the-air reporters: They were getting old. In the papers, somebody from the station management explained it. He said reporters who were over 35 were over the hill as far as television news was concerned.

I understood that. After 35, too many facts rattling around inside a brain will turn any mind to mush. I'm sure it can be scientifically demonstrated that nights spent in the streets, years spent at typewriters and in edit rooms, time spent haggling with politicians--and city editors--will surely cause wrinkles. The face sags. The cheerleader smile atrophies. It gets increasingly harder to lift the corners of one's mouth when reporting what the citizens of your fine city have done to one another on a given day. However, one is supposed to smile; this is written somewhere inside the head of too many station managers and news directors, and they are sure it is easier to smile if you don't know anything. (They are right.) They know this because they paid money to consultants who told them so. I cannot prove it, but I suspect that consultants pay other consultants to tell them. I know that's why you seldom see station managers and news directors on the air: They are old and dried up from the work of handing over money to television-news consultants.

This particular station didn't say whether consultants had told them to clean house. The station merely said it was firing these people in order to improve its coverage of New York City, and to further that goal, it had hired new talent from Des Moines, Oklahoma City and Green Bay. That made perfect sense. The only thing better than being under 35 is being under 35 and from out of town.

No wonder so many people who work for local television stations think they would rather work for a network. I was one of them. A network seemed saner. I didn't know any better then. Besides, going to the network was considered a step up. Network news was more serious than local news; that was understood.

Ellen Fleysher and I talked about that very thing one night about three months after I had left WCBS in New York to go to work for NBC News in Washington, D.C. At the time, we were sitting at the bar of the Park Lane Hotel on Central Park South, a well-mannered place to have a drink. Ellen had come to work at WCBS sometime during the two years that I had worked there; she still worked there as a local reporter. I, on the other hand, had "gone network." We talked about my new job, my future, the important stories I would cover, the people I would meet, the places I would see. No more five-alarm fires in the South Bronx for me. This was the real thing. The big enchilada. Network television news. I may have smirked a bit.

The bartender came over. We ordered. He paused.

"Excuse me, but aren't you Ellen Fleysher from channel two?" She said she was. He looked at me, the network journalist.

"Hey--didn't you used to be on television, too?"

•

Spring 1979. Neither Lloyd Dobyns nor I wanted to go to Palm Springs. That's why Reuven Frank sent both of us. Lloyd and I anchored Weekend, but Reuven was executive producer. As for Palm Springs--a few years earlier, NBC News had bought the rights to an interview with former President Gerald Ford, to be conducted on the eve of the publication of his memoirs. At the time the arrangement was announced, some of us in the news division felt it was wrong to put a politician--or even that contradiction in terms, a retired politician--on the payroll. The deal was made; Ford took the money; then we sort of forgot about it. Maybe we thought he would never finish the book, but he did, and in April 1979, Gerald Ford, in Palm Springs, was ready to publish and, per agreement, was ready to tell all on national television, on my network, on our show and, apparently, to Lloyd and me. Reuven explained it this way: "It's going to be dull, because Ford is not going to tell all: He's going to tell only the all he chooses to tell, but no other program at NBC wants the interview, so we've been told we want it. I haven't the heart to send either of you; that's why I'm sending both of you. Goodbye. Pack. Go. Have a nice day." Something like that.

The plane to Palm Springs was late. It was midnight when we got to our hotel, and the restaurants were closed, so we went to the hotel bar. If the restaurants had been open, we still would have gone to the bar--that's how joyful we were about our assignment. We'd been in the bar about an hour when Lloyd was called to the telephone. It was Nigel Ryan, a vice president at NBC News, a British fellow with, as it turned out, a proper dose of good manners. Ryan told Lloyd that the president of NBC News had taken a plane to China. We knew that already. Ryan told Lloyd that what we didn't know was that, just before leaving, the president of NBC News had announced the cancellation of Weekend. He'd told the press. He just hadn't told us. (This was the same president of NBC News who once said to some-one on the telephone, "Yes, I know we're in the business of communicating, but not with each other.")

Ryan was on vacation in Los Angeles. He said he'd been driving on the freeway when it occurred to him that no one had told Lloyd and me our show had been axed, that we were likely to get up and read it in the newspaper. Ryan thought that was one bloody poor way to find out, so he'd taken the first exit ramp and gone in search of a telephone, any telephone--which was why, he explained, it was so noisy on his end of the line. He was calling from the toilet of a Beverly Hills restaurant. Seemed right to us.

If ever there is a Trivial Pursuit game about television news, it's likely that one of the questions will be "Can you name all 12 television news magazines NBC has put on and taken off the air?" It broadcast its first one four months after CBS first broadcast 60 Minutes. Should it have escaped your notice, 60 Minutes is still on the air. There's a reason. News programs, like other programs, need ratings to survive, but no news program ever got good ratings when it first went on the air, with the possible exception of ABC News' Nightline, which began as a nightly update on the story of American hostages in Iran--and had the added advantage of being anchored by Ted Koppel. Usually, news programs need time to build an audience. 60 Minutes was on the air for more than seven years before it became a hit and the most profitable program on television. (The most expensive news program is cheaper to produce than the least expensive sitcom.) For CBS, patience paid off and not in pennies. Staying with 60 Minutes was good business. NBC, lacking that patience but wanting the rewards it had brought CBS, put magazine shows on the air, sat back and waited for the profits to start rolling in immediately and, when they didn't, canceled the shows, all of which were pretty good and none of which ever got ratings better than the low end of "Not bad." Some didn't do that well, but none ever was given time on the air to change that. Weekend was NBC's fourth try at a news magazine and my first.

I was in Washington, covering the House for NBC News, when it was decided that Weekend would stop being a monthly program and become weekly. That was in December 1977. Weekend had aired once a month, at 11:30 on Saturday night, since 1974. During the rest of the month, Saturday Night Live occupied that time slot. Now Weekend was moving to prime time, moving to once a week and seeking a second anchor. Lloyd Dobyns had anchored it alone, but now he would need help. I thought I ought to be that help. It was the first time I'd said to myself, "Now, there's a job I really want." Could I write well enough for Weekend, with its reputation for using the right words, not too many of them and in the right order, something Lillian Hellman said most people don't do--something almost no television program did?

I thought so and hoped my bosses would think so, too, which--to make a long story short--they eventually did.

For me, Weekend was a classroom. The program, never to be confused with 60 Minutes, had a reputation for "lighter" or "softer" stories, but, said Reuven Frank, when done right, those stories were "heavier" or "harder," because they spoke to human behavior, making their points by implication rather than direct statement. They let the viewer think, decide. What an unusual idea, I remember thinking. Reuven believed that television was a narrative medium and that understanding, if any, came out of the story, not from describing the story--or explaining the story. We were to tell the story, that's all. Reuven said that on Weekend, almost all our stories would be about people. The others would be told through people.

I had first met Reuven when he came to Washington, not long before I joined the show, and asked me to dinner--a consolation dinner, I figured, since at the time it seemed the Weekend job would go to Jessica Savitch, not to me. And since I didn't want to be consoled or patted on my head or told what a great trouper I was, I opened the dinner-table chitchat by asking him how he'd managed to keep a job at NBC News after he'd been fired from his job as president of NBC News. By the time Reuven finished answering my question--and correcting my facts (he had not been fired)--the pasta was gone, along with my resolve to spend the entire evening being openly and perfectly shitty. This white-haired fellow with a face like a Jewish sphinx, Dennis the Menace eyes, a shirt that didn't go with his suit and a tie that went with neither was the smartest person I'd ever met, and the funniest. He still is.

Pictures, I came to learn, not in small part from Reuven, were different from words; as different, he pointed out, as smells are from sounds. Words, he said, go mostly to the intelligence; pictures go more to the feelings and responses. Reuven once used the example of a plane crash to explain. What are the best pictures from a plane crash? (I know. There's nothing "best" about a plane crash, but mine is a business that is supposed to inform you of the crash, anyway.) According to Reuven, a stocking hanging from a tree, a doll with a broken face--these, in their way, tell you more than words do, more even than pictures of body bags being carried down the hill. Beyond that, good writing meant good thinking, and no combination of words and pictures could save the reporter who rushed to the scene, found the mother of the doll's owner, told the cameraman to shoot her face close up, then stuck his microphone into her face and asked her anything, anything at all. It's the act of a moral dwarf, and an example of a complete bankruptcy of ideas.

"Another thing," said Reuven, "almost nobody writes silence anymore." Well, I tried to write silence; on my first story, with a score of 34 seconds out of 15 minutes, I figured I had a chance of learning how to write nothing--nothing with words, that is. With practice, I found I liked the idea and wanted very much to learn how to write with pictures, the words of the people in the story, sounds--and the lack of sounds.

The first people I was going to tell a story through were all in Alabama, selling or about to sell Bibles. They were students who had been recruited by a publishing company, hired to spend the summer going door to door, giving their all and collecting their commissions. In training them, the company liked to get the students so hyped up, so zealous with the desire to sell and, therefore, win, that they might not notice that both the $30 down payment they took in cash and the signature on the contract came from a woman who had three kids, tar paper on her walls and no milk in her refrigerator. Students who did notice and were bothered by that sort of thing rarely lasted the summer, or if they did, they were changed by it and not for the good. Some students thrived on the competition of the "game." Some complained that the company sucked them into ordering more than they could sell, then forced the student to pay the difference. It was a story with layers, and it deserved the 15 minutes needed to tell it on the air. It was also a story that left something for the audience to do; it would be seen differently by different people.

What it didn't leave was much for me to do. The story was produced by Craig Leake, who has the kind of cherubic face and manner that cause people to tell him anything he wants to know. They just open up and talk, seeming to forget about the camera. In Alabama, they opened up and talked so much and so well that almost all the story was told through their words, combined with pictures that told the rest. There really wasn't anything left for me to say, but Craig was graceful about it; in editing the story, he managed to create a few gaps where my voice would be needed. I'm sure he did it just to be kind; it was my first magazine story and, well, it would be nice if I said something in it. So I did. In a 15-minute story, I spoke for 34 seconds. Welcome to the TV news magazine. Well, at least I wrote the 34 seconds.

If the story really didn't need me, it did need Craig Leake. On Weekend (as on 60 Minutes), the real reporter is the producer. Most of the time, TV magazine reporters don't like to dwell on that, but it's the truth. Weekend had two reporters--Lloyd and myself--but it had 30 field producers, each of whom was a journalist and in some stage of preproduction, production or post production at all times. Long stories take longer to do, because, usually, they are more complicated in subject matter. The producer goes out with the crew and they shoot the story, or most of it, then call in the reporter for a few days. The reporter does the major interviews, films his stand-uppers and catches a plane to the next story. He won't hook up again with the first story until after the producer has brought back his film, screened it and made a rough cut. By then, the reporter may have been out on five other stories.

Well, if that's all I did on Weekend, why wasn't I a Twinkie? Was I a Twinkie? I looked like one. My hair was slicked back and pinned on top of my head, my blouses were silk and frilly, my hems were even and were attached to skirts, not pants--and my shoes often matched my eye shadow or lip gloss. I did not wear glasses. I wore pearls. How was this happening? Easy. It was how Reuven Frank wanted it; it's how his bosses wanted it. They must have wanted it a lot; for years, anchor people at NBC had tried, unsuccessfully, to get the company to buy their clothes, but NBC bought our clothes, Lloyd's and mine--and we didn't ask for that or want it, particularly. We were perfectly willing to wear what we wore all the time--which was the trouble, according to NBC. Figuring, correctly, that Lloyd would wear safari jackets and tacky leisure suits while I would show up in jeans, tacky T-shirts and sneakers, NBC insisted on buying our clothes and paid somebody else to pick them out. As further evidence of trust in our sartorial sensibilities, NBC kept the clothes at NBC, thus avoiding a more-than-slight chance that we would show up to tape the program wearing parts of two or three of our new outfits at once. They were fine clothes, all right. You could do almost anything in them, except work. On that, Lloyd and I agreed.

•

Which brings me to the subject of Lloyd Dobyns. He was my partner on Weekend, later my partner on Overnight, and in between we shared offices, same opinions and reputations for having no team spirit. After so many years, I can say with absolute certainty that his reputation is deserved: Lloyd has no team spirit, none at all. It's one of his best qualities. He is Welsh, American Indian and God knows what. He has a feel for words--or a taste for lying. He neither suffers fools gladly nor sees anything worth while in abstention. He is a faithful husband who, never-theless, loves and covets all women, all ages, indiscriminately; and although he is from Virginia, he is no gentleman. That, too, is part of his act.

We know too much about each other for me to write comfortably about him, and we keep each other's secrets. Things get fogged: I've watched Lloyd's hair go from mostly brown to mostly gray and helped the process along when I could. I remember when he didn't have to wear glasses to read a TelePrompTer or to keep from falling over things. I've watched him go from leisure suits to custom-made vests, from up to down and back again, from sad to almost happy, which is as close as he can come. I've watched Lloyd cry and watched Lloyd work. He liked it when a critic described him as "ham on wry." I forgave him for telling the same critic that I was a "walking disaster." When the critic called me "brass" and him "steel," we fought about which was worse. Lloyd and I liked to fight with each other, and we were good at it; sometimes it was the way we talked to each other best. I suppose Lloyd is the least sexist man I know, since he shows no mercy to anyone, female or male. When it comes to polite conversation, Lloyd believes in shooting the wounded. However, he does know how to spell Buffalo, how to get bail in Tel Aviv, the capital of Abu Dhabi, the proper way to eat an ortolan--and he can call by first name at least two vice cops in each of the ten biggest cities in America. Best of all, in my presence, he always tells stories about me in such a way as to make me look good. How he tells them when I'm not around is not something I need to worry about or want to know--not that I really want to know how to eat an ortolan, either.

It was not love at first sight. The first time I met Lloyd Dobyns was on the set of the Today show in July 1976. During a commercial break on my first day doing the Today show, he suggested that when it came time in the program to indulge in what television refers to as "cross-talk"-- and the real world calls conversation--we talk about me. I'd been at the network less than a year; Lloyd thought it reasonable for the audience to get to know me a little bit. For example, was I married? I said I was and told him my husband's name.

"That son of a bitch?" said Lloyd. "I fired him once and I'd do it again."

We went back on the air right after that. For cross-talk, we chatted about the Federal budget.

The next time we met was when Reuven, knowing nothing of the Today episode, suggested to Lloyd that it would be smart if the two of us went out to dinner and got to know each other, since we were going to work together on Weekend.

We did what he told us to do and suspect we had a grand time, but we can't be sure, because the only record is a handful of receipts, which suggest we got along just fine. The most either of us can remember is a rambling conversation having to do with why we should get along--a conversation that rambled, apparently, over a large part of Manhattan and through a sizable number of its saloons.

Later, some people said we were alike. Other people said we were too much alike and that was a damn shame, they thought. We assumed it was a joke until the letter about the pigeons. It arrived a few days after I had reported a story about people who lived in Brooklyn and raised racing pigeons on their roofs. As I said, I reported the story, I wrote the story, I narrated and I appeared in it on several occasions. The letter began, "Dear Lloyd." It went on to tell Lloyd that his piece on racing pigeons was wonderful, "possibly the single best feature I've ever seen on television." The letter was from Charles Kuralt. I wrote him back: "Dear Lesley...."

The truth is, Lloyd and I are more different than we are alike, except for the fact that at different times and for different reasons, we both fired the same man.

Lloyd knew more than I did about writing words to pictures when I joined Weekend, but I was learning, and I choose to believe that that was what saved me from Twinkiedom. A radical concept--writing with television.

In putting together a television-news story, the usual practice is to write the words, record them, then go into the editing room and match pictures to them. The pictures are supposed to fit your words. Words first, pictures second. At Weekend, the pictures came first. That is, the film was shot, the producer arranged the pieces he chose in the order he chose to use them, the film editor assembled the pieces, then the reporter wrote and recorded the narration that would complete the story. It is a better way. Changing the words to fit the pictures makes more sense, because once the film (or tape) is in the house, you cannot change it. But it's tougher for a reporter; it makes you work harder and think more. It makes you write to the pictures and with the pictures, letting the pictures tell the story.

To explain, let me suggest an experiment. Turn on the newscast and go into the next room. Now listen to any story from beginning to end. If the story is perfectly clear to you at all times, it is a normal newscast. There is a name for this manner of telling a story. It's called radio. If it's television, you will be unable to stay in the other room and still get it all. If it's television, it will compel you to watch. At least, it should; if it doesn't, throw out your television set and get a better radio. Be sure your neighbors are watching; show them once and for all that you don't need television. Why not? It may be true. We keep trying to make it true.

Don't misunderstand. This technique works only when the pictures do tell the story. One of the most pointless pieces ever seen on television was a little something we aired on Weekend in which the reporter strolled around the Taj Mahal and the city of Agra while Bing Crosby sang Far-Away Places in the background. The reporter looked unhappy about being there--and it is proof there is such a thing as luck in this world that the reporter was Lloyd and not me. He still leaves the room if I say "Taj Mahal" a certain way.

•

Television can--and does--change people at both ends of the camera. I remember a night in San Francisco when a producer named Merle Rubine and I, working for a program called Summer Sunday, U.S.A., spent hours waiting for a keyed-up and thoroughly obnoxious Hunter S. Thompson to stop his prancing performance and sit down for the interview he'd agreed to do. Thompson was enjoying his coyness, perhaps believing it was the first time we'd ever encountered an asshole and, therefore, we would be impressed. Merle, looking up from the floor, bored and, like me, wondering why we were there, told the cameraman to turn on his camera, then go sit down. She told Hunter that the camera was rolling, it was over there, he could walk over, pick up that microphone, face that camera and talk if he wanted to, or he could take the microphone and stuff it, for all she cared; but in ten minutes, she was going to tell the cameraman to turn off his machine and we were going back across town to the Democratic Convention, which was looking, right then, like an oasis of sanity. And, she wanted to know, was there any word in what she'd said that gave him trouble?

That was one of those times it worked. Hunter Thompson, like other people who thought they didn't want to talk about something, ended up wanting to be on television more than he wanted to play his game.

And consider, what happened with the parents of Karen Ann Quinlan and the media. Peter Poor produced the story for Weekend. It was called Karen Ann Turns 25. Karen, you will recall, had been in an irreversible coma since April 1975. Her parents had gone to court to obtain the right to take her off her life-supporting respirator after doctors had determined that her brain was damaged beyond recovery. In a milestone court decision, they had won that right. The respirator was turned off. But Karen lived (in a nursing home in New Jersey, in a coma, until June 1985, when she died). Peter Poor filmed the party at the Quinlans' house: Karen Ann's 25th birthday, shared by her family, close friends--and the media. What had happened was curious. From the beginning of their story, the Quinlans had been swamped with coverage, especially from local television stations in New York City. They had made a decision to cooperate with the media, in hopes that they could make people understand the choice they'd made about their daughter, make people face the problem and think about it. As time passed, the parents adjusted to the magnifying glass that wouldn't go away. In Peter's story, you saw a family who knew by first name all the local television reporters who for four years had covered the story; in many cases, they knew the reporter's wife's or husband's name--and would ask about them. It was one of those times when people in a story came to see reporters as humans--and the other way around. In fact, when Weekend did its story, the only slightly detached person, as best I could determine, was me.

That was because I had never covered the story and had never met the Quinlans before. Besides, reporters aren't supposed to have emotions, remember? We're supposed to be objective and to choose cynicism over involvement. Of course, there is no such thing as objectivity, which is where the trouble starts. Some reporters merely reject the notion of objectivity as old-fashioned and leap into the fray, choosing sides; but a reporter who sets himself up as an avenging angel, a righter of wrongs, is just one step short of running for office. We're not supposed to change things, we're supposed to report them. On the other hand, any reporter who tells you he's objective is lying to you. "Objective" is impossible; there is no such thing as a random number and there is no such thing as a reporter who comes to a story able to forget everything he's ever heard, seen or had happen to him.

Or her. That was the problem with the abortion documentary. Technically, it wasn't a documentary; it was a special edition of Weekend, in which the entire hour was given over to one subject--the antiabortion movement and its growing political power. It was a news story. The movement had been underestimated; it had become a force of sorts in American politics--a single-issue force. This was in January 1979. Two months before, in Congressional elections, Thomas McIntyre had not been re-elected in New Hampshire, Floyd Haskell had lost the Senate race in Colorado and Dick Clark, a popular Senator, had lost in Iowa. In each case, a pro-choice stand had contributed to the defeat. In all three states, there had been a concentrated and professional lobbying effort that extended to lobbying people in churches and passing out pamphlets that said, Change Your Party to Save a Baby's Life.

It was a story about single-issue politics, and not a story about abortion or about whether abortion ought to be Federally funded, legal or performed under any circumstance. But there was one big obstacle. Reuven had assigned me and not Lloyd to report and write the one-hour special. I knew it was a bad choice, because Lloyd Dobyns had never had an abortion. I had.

Years earlier, before the 1973 Supreme Court decision made abortion legal, I'd been one of those women, young and unmarried, who had gotten pregnant, then had gotten the name of someone through a friend of a friend, along with $600 cash, and had waited, terrified, at my apartment until midnight, when a pimply faced man showed up, exchanged code words with me and came in, bringing cutting tools, bandages and sodium pentothal--but no medical license I could see. I was lucky. I did not bleed to death. I recovered. I was no longer pregnant. But I wasn't the same, either. No woman is. Ever. I'd felt it was my decision. I believed then and believe now that a woman has a right to choose. I'd been prepared for the consequences to my heart and to my opinion of myself, but not for the abject shame I apparently was supposed to feel. Not having $600 cash, I had gone to my boss and asked to borrow it. Unable to come up with a plausible lie--feeling, somehow, that the truth was called for--I'd told him why I needed the money. He had given it to me, but not until he'd had an hour of mocking me, ridiculing me for "being a dumb broad to believe some man when he said he was 'protected' "; didn't I know any better? He'd said it proved I was a slut, like all women who worked when they ought to be married and having babies, not killing babies and taking men's jobs. He said I was lucky he was such a generous boss, that he would lend me the money, but he ought to fire me. He charged me 30 percent interest, instead.

I didn't quit. I needed the job--and I needed the $600 in order to carry out my decision. But I never forgot any part of it, and so all those years later, when asked to write an hour on anything at all having to do with abortion, I balked. I didn't want to churn up my own feelings--and I didn't want to come right out and say I wasn't objective or to tell anyone why I was the wrong person to do the story. Even in 1979, women didn't admit openly that they'd had an abortion. Many still don't. I don't know of any other woman in my business who has, and in doing so now, I may run some risk to my career; but if you can't be objective, hell, at least you can be honest, which is what I'm trying to be now and what I tried to be then, on Weekend. I told no one but Lloyd what the problem was. He advised me to do the story anyway. He said that if I couldn't be fair, I wasn't worth what they paid me--never mind that I probably wasn't worth that, anyway. Lloyd was always a comfort to me.

I reported the story and worked like a demon to keep my opinions out of it. Frankly, I think I succeeded, because after the show aired, I got equal amounts of hate mail from people on both sides of the issue, each claiming I had favored the other side. Objectivity. Pure objectivity. Everywhere but inside.

Something about writing this has reminded me of Frank Reynolds. In 1970, the first time Reynolds was removed as the anchor of the evening news at ABC, he said, on his last night on the air, that he guessed he should hope his words had offended no one; but, as a matter of fact, he didn't hope that at all, because there were, in this world, people who ought to be bothered. In choosing to do the abortion special, I had bothered people; and I was one of the people I'd bothered.

•

By spring of 1979, ratings were on all our minds at Weekend, despite Reuven's warning that when the likes of us started trying to understand and explain ratings, it was usually tooth-fairy time. Weekend had been airing weekly since September 1978. You will recall that until then, it had aired on Saturday nights, replacing Saturday Night Live once a month. Probably it has not escaped your notice that by 1978, Saturday Night Live was a hit television show; certainly, it did not escape Fred Silverman's notice. Silverman was president of NBC, brought over from ABC, where he'd been known as a wonder boy, the man with the "golden gut." It does not take metal intestines to figure out that a hit show that airs three times a month will make even more money if it airs four times a month. Of course, it wouldn't look good for Fred to join NBC and, right out of the box, cancel a prestigious, critically praised, award-winning news program simply because it had such a small audienc--and was in the way. Better to promote the show to prime time, take credit for rewarding the news division, give Saturday Night Live its fourth Saturday every month--and give Weekend the chance it deserved. The Chance It Deserved. Right Silverman said he had every faith in our success as a weekly prime-time program. He said he was firmly behind us, a statement to be taken the same way one must take George McGovern's saying in 1972 that he was behind Tom Eagleton 1000 percent.

"But what," asked Silverman, "could go wrong?" I believe something was mentioned about 60 Minutes' being a commercial failure for its first seven years, and it was pointed out that 60 Minutes got to go on the air opposite Walt Disney. Silverman said it didn't matter, we shouldn't worry about things like that, and proved he wasn't worried by scheduling our first prime-time program opposite the final installment of Roots. Later, he made it possible for the truly committed viewer to find Weekend by making sure newspapers were notified of changes in the day and time the show would air each week--and notified in time to make the paper no later than the day of air, or at least the day after.

One night, I found myself going on the air to say, "Good evening. The name of this program is Weekend. Yes, we know it's Wednesday, but try to think of Weekend as a state of mind rather than a time of the week, which is how we've come to think of it around here."

Meanwhile, Fred Silverman was not laughing. Television news is not about humor--or journalism--it's about money. It always was; but as long as the news made no money, it remained a throwaway, basically something done to keep a station's or a network's license. And it might have stayed that way if John Kennedy had not been shot. During the measured, fragile days that followed, the country gathered round its TV sets, grieving as a family, joining to share the formal feeling of participating in a national catharsis. When we got up from our sets and went back to our separate tables, the habit was established. It can be argued that this is pure speculation on my part, and that may be so, but it suits my purpose here; therefore, it's true. One thing is verifiable: No television newscast made money before Kennedy was shot, but the first time one did, everything changed. Television news programs came to be considered the same way other television programs were considered, at least by management. They became one more tool used to manufacture the product.

Please remember that in television, the product is not the program; the product is the audience, and the consumer of that product is the advertiser. The advertiser does not "buy" a news program; he buys an audience. It may be said that the best news program, therefore, is the one watched by the greatest number of people. Argue the point if you like, and when you get tired, argue with the weather. Altruists do not own television stations or networks, nor do they run them. Businessmen own and run them. Journalists work for businessmen. Journalists get fired and canceled by businessmen. That is how it is.

We were a big disappointment to Fred Silverman--and real quick. A two-year commitment to Weekend's prime-time position expired after eight months. Weekend let Fred down. It had terrible ratings; it did not matter that people wrote nice things about the program, when they thought to write about it. Weekend had to go--and it couldn't go back to its old spot on Saturday night, which was taken now. Weekend would simply have to disappear. There is this to say for Fred Silverman: He let Weekend stay on the air longer than Supertrain. And so we chugged feebly along until April 1979, which was when Lloyd and I went to Palm Springs to listen to Gerald Ford and find out our show was canceled--but not in that order.

Being canceled makes you feel just terrible. I took it personally. It wasn't as bad as being fired, but that was all you could say for it. The worst part was, we couldn't keep doing Weekend. That was what canceled meant, all right. I was going to miss that show, miss the classroom. It felt as if someone had closed the school door in my face. The interview with Ford was uneventful, as Reuven had said it would be. I wished he had been wrong. It would have been sweet to go out with some flash, but the only thing that moved, the only thing that woke anybody up, was not seen on television. It came after the interview was finished and Lloyd, Ford and I were standing in Ford's yard--which probably is not what he calls it, but it was outside his back door and was covered with grass, even if it was also a golf course.

The three of us were standing there so the official Gerald Ford photographer could take pictures. While we waited, President Ford a said he'd noticed something strange when he'd read my biography, the one NBC had sent him. He said he'd been surprised that it contained the day and year of my birth; he didn't recall seeing that on any other network reporter's bio. I told him that was right; I didn't lie about my age. I lied about my height. On my tallest day, I can do no better than 5'6". I told him I'd always wanted to be tall, so I lied.

"You really lie about your height?" said President Ford. "Just how tall are you?"

"Mr. President, I am five feet, eleven inches tall."

That was when I got a little worried for us all, because that was when Gerald Ford--the man who had been leader of the free world and in control of the little red button that could kill us all by his touching it--this man, who stood well over six feet, stared down onto the top of my head from nearly a foot above it and said, "I can't see why you'd want to lie. Five feet, eleven inches, is a very nice height for a woman."

Everything seemed a little funnier after that, funny enough to get us through the day. I bought a pair of sneaker roller skates, which were available in Palm Springs but had yet to make their way to the East Coast. A sometimes mild-mannered NBC cameraman named Houston Hall joined Lloyd in helping me make my way, on skates, back to our hotel, where the desk clerk insisted I take off the skates, until Houston and Lloyd offered to kill him for the sport of it. Maybe we weren't taking cancellation so well, after all.

On the way back to New York, I thought about Reuven Frank. This had to be tougher on him than on me. He had invented Weekend; I'd only helped put it off the air. Reuven once explained that what television did uniquely was to transmit experience, to answer the question "What was it like?" And that it was a rare--and usually accidental--accomplishment. To me, the time on Weekend had been like that, the transmission of an experience, a glimpse of a different way to see television and to make it. A lucky accident for me.

Monday morning, back in New York, I wore my roller skates to work. What was the use of working in a building with shiny terrazzo floors if you couldn't skate on them? I made it through the lobby of the RCA building with only two guards chasing me and only one serious about it--the old one, happily. When the elevator doors shut behind me, I started wondering what Reuven would say to me about Weekend's being canceled. I was sure it would be something wise, something I could carry with me to whatever came next. I was right. What he said was something I can remember clearly. I got off the elevator and started down the hall to his office. He came out his door, saw me and from 30 feet away gave me lasting advice.

"Linda, how many times must I tell you? Don't roller skate on the rug."

I try to keep it in mind.

•

In 1978, I threw my television set out a second-story window. When I went to retrieve it, it sported a third-degree crack across the screen--but it still worked. That was when I knew: You cannot kill 'em. Television is forever, or at least televisions are. Lately, I have figured out something else: I am not a television. I am not forever. Especially in television. So, while I am still working in television news, what have I learned about it?

The first lesson is easy: I've learned I like my work. All things considered, mine is a good job to have. As I've said, the pay is out standing and you don't have to wear a uniform. For people like me, it's a job that makes sense, because for people like me, it is never enough merely to watch something happen. We want to watch, it, then run and tell everybody else what we saw. For a shy person, it is, if nothing else, a way to start a conversation. One day, in the White House pressroom, a group of reporters sat around, talking. The subject of Sam Donaldson came up. Donaldson is the shy fellow who covers the White House for ABC, and he is shy the way George Patton was. Somebody wondered aloud what Sam would have done if he'd been born before there was television news.

"That's easy," said one reporter. "He'd go door to door." For Sam, for me and for others like us, this job saves shoe leather; yet I'd wear out a closetful of shoes before I'd try to do my bosses' jobs, even though I greatly enjoy saying they don't know what they're doing, that group of rocket scientists we call television executives.

I do not ever want to produce the evening news. The only newscast I produced all by myself was a horror show. It happened in 1977 and lasted 42 seconds. NBC, along with the other networks, had recently begun to interrupt prime-time programing twice each night with a fast bite of news. At the time, it was called NBC News Update, and although it was brief, it was seen by more people than any other news program at NBC, simply because it was in prime time. I was working in Washington, and on that particular night, I was the reporter and producer in charge of Update. NBC must have figured I would have to work overtime to screw up a 42-second newscast. They were wrong.

It was a Sunday. Earlier that day, two jumbo jets had collided on a runway on the island of Tenerife, in the Canary Islands. Film of the tragedy had arrived at NBC after Nightly News ended but in time for Update. Without consulting anyone, I chose to devote the full 42 seconds to showing that film. Usually, we'd use four or five short items about different topics. It would have been better if I'd checked to see what prime-time program I was about to interrupt, especially since it turned out to be a made-for-TV movie called Flight to Holocaust, the Technicolor saga of a dreadful plane crash.

Update went on the air, and you couldn't tell where the movie stopped and the news began. "Tasteless" does not begin to do justice to the moment. It was awful; but by then, there was nothing to do but continue, which I did, ending my narration with a poignant line about 576 people whose vacations had ended in death. We cut to a commercial, and there, Lord help me, was Karl Malden, looking sincerely into the camera and saying that the worst thing that could happen to you on your vacation was to lose your traveler's checks. The next day, a newspaper columnist suggested I find another line of work.

For a while, I thought about going into management; it seemed to me it might be an expedient way to change what I didn't like about television news. In my fantasy, I even had dreams of being able to persuade others in management that there were better ways to gather and present the news; or maybe I could persuade others like me to go into management. If five of us do it, maybe they'll think it's a movement. Of course, if ten of us do it, they'll call it a conspiracy. I gave up the notion after the New York bureau chief's telephone was stolen--and he didn't miss it for three days. I couldn't go into management; I was still breathing.

Any changes I want to make in television news will, I guess, be limited to what I can do in my own stories and on my own show, if I ever have another one. Right now, I have what you might call a minishow--five minutes every Friday morning on the Today show. It's called T.G.I.F., and if the title doesn't tell you what it is, at least it tells you when it is. What it is is five minutes of stories that have been ignored by other newscasts during the week, stories that range from one about a child who invents a board game called Give Peace a Chance to one about France's version of The Muppet Show, which is a political satire, to one about a dwarf-throwing contest in Australia. (That one, you will not be surprised to know, had been ignored by all other shows at all other networks, including CNN.) The stories I use are not stories that will change us--they are stories about us. I get my material from NBC affiliates, overseas news services and the outtakes of other NBC News stories. Then, the T.G.I.F. videotape editor, the enormously talented Lynne Hertzog, shuffles them around into some order that makes sense and makes me shine. I enjoy it, and if nobody else wants to do it, I guess it's because nobody else sees the fun--and the benefit--of spending Wednesday evenings screening the Saudi Arabian satellite feed.

When I began doing T.G.I.F., I pointed out to Steve Friedman, executive producer of Today, that every show on which I'd been a regular--Weekend, Now, Summer Sunday, NBC News Overnight--had been canceled. That being the case, I said, I considered the Today show, on the air for 32 years, to be my greatest challenge.

I'm not sure whether such an outstanding cancellation record as mine is the result of natural talent or pure diligence. If I argue that lousy ratings are often the result of lousy television, how can I say there are exceptions? Good point. I wish now I hadn't made it. Well, how do I account for being canceled so often? Simple. I use the Bob Weir theory. Bob Weir is lead singer for the Grateful Dead, the oldest established, permanent floating rock band in America. The band goes on and on, year after year, though it has never had a hit single and seldom gets its music played on big radio stations. I asked Weir how he explained the fact that so many people said the members of the Grateful Dead could not sing and play the same song, in the same key, at the same time, nor start and finish at the same time, except by accident.

"Well," said Weir, "you can't please everybody."

Still, I like to think I'm trying. When management at NBC News told me it would like me to be a kind of television columnist, but not the kind of columnist who had opinions, I promised to try to stop thinking. When someone in management told me to stop editorializing with my eyebrows, I promised to let my hair grow long enough to cover my eyebrows--and my eyes. Surely that would prove my determination to do it their way. There are, however, lengths to which I will not go. For example, a sociologist released a study he felt showed that the nation's suicide rate rose every time a fictional character committed suicide on television. I am not a fictional character, but on the slim chance that you are what you watch, I am not going to kill myself on the air. Nor am I going to die on the air just to get ratings. It doesn't work, or if it does, it works only once. So, am I worried about my future in television? No, not since David Brinkley explained it to me years ago.

It was 1976, an election year; and during the summer of that year, NBC broadcast a weekly program about the campaign called, not unreasonably, Campaign and. the Candidates, with David Brinkley. At the time, I'd been employed by NBC News a big six months. I'd never met Brinkley, even though his office in Washington was just six doors down the hall from mine. Every so often, he'd pass me in the hall--and I let him. Brinkley gave the impression he already knew enough people, thank you.

Now we were going to co-anchor this program: Ellerbee and Brinkley. OK, Brinkley and Ellerbee. No problem. After all, I was a network correspondent, a pro. All I had to do was stay calm and not screw up.

The morning of the broadcast, I arrived early, so David and I would have plenty of time to make friends while we wrote our show together. It would have worked, too, except that I wrote in the newsroom and David wrote, or otherwise occupied his time, in his office, with the door closed. We saw each other for the first time that day as we arranged ourselves on the set, attaching gadgets to our clothes, sticking gadgets into our ears and pretending we had been introduced, so we wouldn't have to talk about the fact that we hadn't been introduced. I remember I looked at the clock, and all my cool dissolved.

"Excuse me, I know you do this every day and have done this every day, forever, but you should know it's almost my first time and I am scared shitless. Could we make that, I am scared shitless. sir?" David Brinkley finally looked at me.

"I don't know why you would worry about a thing like that. All they can do is fire you." And then we were on the air. "Good evening."

At the time, I remember thinking he sounded just like everybody else sounded when they did their Brinkley imitations. It was the last thing I remember until the program ended and several weeks passed without anyone's firing me. It took a while to sink in. David was right. They couldn't eat me. They couldn't put me in reporter jail. They couldn't, finally, make me do anything I didn't want to do. All they could do was fire me--and I have two months' worth of canned food at home.

I'm happy to report I'm still here--and so is the canned food.

And so it goes.