I was going to write today about Fox “News” being the “most trusted” source of information—linking the cable network’s success and that of the so-called tea-partiers to Huey P. Long, Ross Perot and the Ku Klux Klan. That will have to be Monday’s topic.  

My wife, Annette, points out that I failed to answer a question raised in my previous post: “How did I become an investigative reporter”? Given past transgressions, readers may wonder how I had the audacity to begin casting stones at others. I have asked the same question many times.

Anyway, when I left off yesterday, I was checking out of a halfway house in the first week of February—jobless, wifeless and broke. Louisiana radio station executives were not lining up to hire me and I didn’t have bus fare to leave the state. Indeed, my reputation preceded me when I launched a job search. I was known as a reporter who sometimes delivered the news in unknown tongues while under the influence of liquid spirits.

 Following four weeks of rejections, I was about to abandon broadcasting to train as a clerk in a convenience store. However, I was rescued from a career of dispensing cash to hooded customers armed with weapons. A man named, Lew Carter, saved my career. He was the manager of WXOK, then Baton Rouge’s only station soley and souly programmed for a black audience. WXOK was under pressure from the FCC to supplement its cash-for-trash format with news and public affairs. Lew needed someone to set-up by a news department and he offered me the job—with a restriction.

“Can you stay sober,” he asked. What the hell was I going to say? I assured him that my drinking days were over. It was the same broken promise I made many times before to my wife, children, parents and bosses. At least I was now sober for awhile. But “one day at a time” had been hammered into my head. In March, 1971, I debuted as WXOK’s only white on-air personality. Fortunately, I fulfilled my promise to Lew by staying sober.

Nine months later, the rumor of my sobriety reached the manager of WJBO, the guy who fired me as News Director and talk show host following a drunken two a.m. call telling him what to do with his radio station. My successor at WJBO had resigned to become Governor J. Bennett Johnston’s Press Secretary. So I was rehired to fill my old job, only to learn a few days later that there would be no Governor Johnston. In a political upset, he was defeated by Edwin Edwards.

WJBO now had two News Directors and hosts of the daily talk show. The station improvised. I was given a new title of Director of Special Projects. I relinquished my job doing the talk show—happily. Three years of the Larry King type gig was enough for me. But the show had taught me interviewing skills that would form the foundation of my investigative reporting career.

As WJBO’s Director of Special Projects, I began searching for projects that were special. In the first few months of 1972, I produced documentaries about Angola penitentiary, and poverty in Baton Rouge—a report with particular emphasis on the myth of welfare Cadillacs. I also followed leads that provided enterprise stories for our daily newscasts, including a few reports that were quite substantive. That’s when serendipity intervened.

A lawyer friend suggested I look into Small Business Administration loans handled by a bank with close ties to U.S. Senator Russell Long. I never tied Long to wrongdoing. However, I uncovered a scheme in which bank officers paid a $100-thousand bribe to a Louisiana state official, who arranged the deposit of millions of dollars into non-interest bearing accounts. In the course of my investigation, I followed an extensive paper trail, had back alley meetings with a secret source, tracked a former bank executive to Central America, and eventually elicited a startling confession from the bank’s President. The story won the Radio Television News Directors International Award for Investigative Reporting.

By coincidence, the bank bribery story aired within hours of an event in Washington D.C.—the burglary of the Democratic National Headquarters in the Watergate office building. In the following months as I accepted accolades for the bank story and other disclosures, the Watergate scandal made investigative reporting an honorable business. And in March, 1973—just fifteen months after I stopped drinking—I was hired as the chief muckraker for Miami, Florida’s NBC television station. Thus began a thirty year career with stops in Miami, Boston, New York City, CNN in Atlanta and  far beyond any professional achievements I hoped for when Lew Carter rescued me from a possible future of clerking in a convenience store.

My success as an investigative reporter is closely connected to my sobriety. An underlying principle of the 12-step program that has kept me sober for 39 years is self-honesty—learning the truth about myself, which is still in process. Uncovering “truth” is also a principle of investigative reporting. Indeed, the only purpose.

I hope that answers the question of how I became a muckraker.