Chapter Fourteen
It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time
Thanks to Jimmy Swaggart, Barry Seal and Louisiana’s bevy of rascals, I received multiples of every broadcast journalism prize during a seven year return engagement to Baton Rouge. A Swaggart documentary earned my third Peabody medallion. The fourth Peabody was for a story that helped put Louisiana’s Insurance Commissioner in prison.
However, Swaggart had the longest shelf life in my career. As the self-proclaimed expert on Brother Jimmy’s non-sexual affairs, reporters beat a path to my doorstep for years looking for information about the televangelist. After he described me as “one of the finest investigative reporters in the world” during his February, 1988, sobbing confession of sexual peccadilloes, a journalism’s leading magazine put my face on its cover, prompting CNN to recruit me as Senior Correspondent in a newly formed 30-member Investigative unit. It was an opportunity to take my Louisiana mini-Mike Wallace imitation national.
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Special Assignment made its CNN debut in March, 1990. To mark the event, Executive Producer Pamela Hill bought me a new necktie. She said it was a good luck ritual, rather than a comment on my redneck tastes. We shopped at Barney’s, the Madison Avenue clothing store for shoppers claiming the ability to discern between Parisian designer garments and rip-offs sold on the sidewalks of New York. She selected a $125.00 Hermès, tempting me to knot it with the label exposed. I rarely paid more than twenty bucks for a tie.
The necktie was a metaphor for Pam’s uncompromising production standards. She didn’t spare the expense, which caused gnashing of teeth among the penny-pinching executives accustomed to the ways of the Chicken Noodle Network. But she had a mandate from Ted Turner to raise the cable network above its local news roots.
I got a head start on other Special Assignment correspondents by reprising a five-year-old WBRZ exposé about the hypocrisy of college athletics. Prisoners of the Game focused on the pervasive greed of colleges in pursuit of TV money. Four ten-minute segments aired concurrent with the NCAA’s 1990 Final Four basketball championship. The series revealed abuses in recruiting and educating so-called student-athletes or more accurately, athlete-students. In effect, players were low paid entertainers.
Reaction inside the network ranged from apathy to hostility. Special Assignment had caused lingering resentments by filling positions with so many people from outside CNN, and “cherry-picking” the best producers from inside. We were seen as overpaid interlopers. Pam’s production was also criticized as too arty for the minimalist approach of producers who struggled through the early days of Chicken Noodle Network budgets. However, a lot of network producers soon began copying her style.
By late fall, Special Assignment began cranking out stories every month. However, I became sidetracked in November by a freedom of press controversy that stemmed from CNN’s defiance of a federal judge’s order to delay the airing of tape-recorded telephone calls between imprisoned Panamanian Dictator Manuel Noriega and his defense team.