On my blog today, I’m taking an “easier softer way,” a phrase that is familiar to my friends in our society of ex-drunks. I travel to Georgia this weekend to attend the funeral of my brother-in-law. He was quite ill for several years and his death was not unexpected. Even so, my wife, Annette, faces the pain of losing a sibling.

To fulfill my goal of four posts a week, I steal an excerpt from my book today. I wrote earlier about March being the twenty year anniversary of the biggest art heist in history, which reminded me that the month marks other anniversaries for me. I joined the Air Force in March 1953, took my first broadcasting job nine years later in mid-March, and reported my first investigative story in March, 1972.

The title ”investigative reporter” was never a career goal. I wanted to be a rock and roll disc jockey when I took my first broadcasting job in Sonora, California—a tiny town in the foothill’s of the Sierra Mountains. Actually, I was hired as an announcer/ad salesman by KVML Radio, which proclaimed itself as The Voice of the Motherlode.

Selling KVML ads required more skill than my previous jobs that included hawking Bibles, books, bouncing chairs and Fuller Brushes. Merchants were reluctant to advertise on a station they couldn’t find on the radio dial. The tiny 250-watt station reached about as far as two tin cans connected by string. Nor did folks listen to KVML after finally finding it on the dial. Fully automated, the station featured toe-paralzing  elevator music. The liveliest tune was The Stripper, which the owner considered dropping because of its suggestive title.

Repetitive music was intermittently interrupted by too few commercials and too many public service announcements. ABC News ran at the top of the hour, local newscasts at noon and six, and Paul Harvey commentary twice a day. The only other break from tedium was Don McNeil’s Breakfast Hour, network radio’s last variety show. Since automation replaced disc jockeys, my dreams of being a record-spinning star were dashed.

Though automated, FCC regulations required that someone man the station during broadcasting hours to monitor equipment, maintain logs and handle other trivial chores. KVML was too small to be a network affiliate. Our national news programming was picked-up via KGO in San Francisco.

My shift was sign-on to noon. I spent the time writing and recording commercials, and scheduling sales appointments. Afternoons were devoted to soliciting new accounts. Driving around the county, I kept the dial on KVML as far as the signal reached, listening to the joyful sound of my voice delivering commercials that I recorded earlier in the day. Advertisers fell into categories of small, tiny and miniscule. It was not unusual to spend two hours selling fifty-dollars worth of radio spots to a Dairy Queen to earn a seven-dollar commission.

Although my disc jockey dreams were on hold, KVML satisfied a childhood fantasy of being a play-by-play sports announcer. As a kid, I spent many hours giving vivid accounts of my own athletic feats of running for game-winning touchdowns, hitting home runs and winning championship prizefights―all in the confines of my bedroom. Announcing imaginary feats prepared me to do a pretty good job as a football and basketball play-by-play broadcaster for the Sonora High School Wildcats. 

But even before the opening kick-off of football season, a career-altering event took place. The station’s newsman quit. He was the only fulltime employee besides me. The departure caused a crisis. Two sponsored newscasts were vital to the station’s financial survival. The owner didn’t do on-air work, meaning that I was the lone remaining Voice of the Mother Lode. “Have you ever done news reporting?” he asked. I hadn’t done anything in a radio station before. It made no difference. I was appointed “News Director.”

Putting together a newscast was a complete mystery to me. I always figured somebody handed announcers a script and they read it. My ignorance was compounded by another problem. United Press International had repossessed KVML’s wire machine, our only source of state and regional news. Finding material to fill two newscasts seemed an impossible task.

I knew it was inappropriate to make up stories, though later events in the national media disabused me of the belief that it never happened. The second option was to blatantly plagiarize Sonora’s eight-page Union-Democrat. But it wasn’t available until late afternoon, which didn’t help me with the noon newscast. The final alternative was to go out and find stories. This was problematic since I didn’t know where real reporters found news. My predecesaor once took me around the police beat. He also left behind a list of news sources. Thus began my journalism career.

My beat covered the Sheriff’s office, the Police Department and the California Highway Patrol. I jotted down names of everybody arrested, and reported details of assaults, burglaries, thefts and fender-bending traffic accidents. The town’s two funeral parlors furnished names of the newly departed, along with a list of survivors that included the immediate family, nephews, nieces, dogs, cats and livestock. On slow days, I hoped a lot of people died. The boss banned the use of “in lieu of flowers.” He didn’t want to alienate Sonora’s biggest florist, who was a regular KVML advertiser.

But regardless of the number of funeral notices, traffic accidents and crime reports, coming up with ten minutes of news each day was an awesome challenge. I filled  newscasts with public service announcements and news releases. Most were read verbatim. Steadily, though, my judgment and writing skills improved. A Broadcast News Stylebook had been left behind by UPI when the wire machine was repossessed. It became my first journalism textbook. I learned the old radio adage, “Tell’em what you’re going to tell’em, tell’em, and tell’em what you told ‘em.”

I soon went beyond the bare-bones stories written by the man I replaced. For weeks, he repeated the same story word-for-word. “KVML talked to Mr. Momyer at Pickering Lumber Company today and he said there is no change in the strike.” End of story. Pickering was the county’s biggest employer and labor strife at its plant crippled the local economy.

I believed listeners deserved a more comprehensive report. In a burst of journalistic creativity, I wrote, “KVML talked to Frank Momyer at Pickering Lumber Company and he said there is no change in the strike.” Using his first name was my initial enterprise report. Encouraged by my sudden creativity, I added a new line. “KVML also talked to representatives of the Sawmill Workers Union, and they report no change in the strike.”

In a matter of weeks, I was reporting underlying issues that caused the labor discord, as well as the obstacles to settling the dispute. To my surprise, an addiction to newsgathering took hold. I grabbed the Union Democrat each day to see what I missed. Significant omissions were stories of government meetings and court proceedings. So I added the courthouse and City Hall to my news beat. To spice newscasts, I acquired a portable tape recorder to do interviews and provide tape-delayed, on-the-scene reports. Concurrent with major national stories, I conducted man-on-the-street interviews.

As I became more comfortable in my role as the Voice of the Mother Lode, the newscasts began sounding almost professional. I covered meetings of the City Council, County Board of Supervisors, School Boards and other government entities. Trips to the courthouse taught me how to track criminal and civil cases, read docket sheets and gather information from interrogatories, affidavits, and depositions. I learned judicial procedures and protocols, and the rudiments of real-estate title searches. Working at a station with out a wire service machine was  turning me into a reasonably competent newsman.

Indeed, the skills I learned in Sonora were the most important component of my investigative reporting career, forming the foundation of my success as a journalist. All news is local. And Tuolumne County’s issues and government record-keeping were not much different than Baton Rouge, Miami, Boston and other metropolitan areas.

As the Voice of the Mother Lode, I was also introduced to live remote broadcasts. In addition to play-by-play and occasional in-store promotions for advertisers, I did live reports of events like the annual county fair. Every politician in a hundred mile radius came there to solicit votes and to be interviewed on KVML. The highlight of the fair was the crowning of Miss Tuolumne County. We carried the pageant live, including a marathon talent show that seemed to feature every child who took tap dance lessons, played a musical instrument, sang a song, or otherwise had an inclination to go on stage. A formidable challenge was describing juggling acts. “Now it’s up, now it’s down. Oops, now it’s on the floor.”

In addition to on-the-job training as a reporter, I took flying lessons by taking advantage of a  broadcasting benefit called “bartering.” Radio stations swapped ads for merchandise and services from advertisers, who were unlikely to spend hard cash. In lieu of a pay raise, I was allowed to barter flying lessons at Columbia Airport, the nation’s only air field offering stagecoach service. Columbia is a restored Gold Rush settlement. Visitors arriving by air could arrange a stagecoach ride into town.

Flight instructor, Lennart Strand, rarely advertised. Hence, he accumulated a decade worth of radio spots in our trade deal by giving me lessons and taking me as a passenger in my capacity as an “airborne reporter.” I taped eyewitness accounts while soaring above fires, ground searches for lost hunters and other mishaps in adjacent national forests and parks.

Noteworthy were my attempts to track the legendary Abominable Snowman. Every so often, a hunter, hiker or resident claimed to have sighted a six-foot tall, howling beast scampering through the woods. Like the Loch Ness monster stories, the reports coincided with the beginning of the tourist season. As KVML’s intrepid journalist, I taped stories from two thousand feet, intoning something to the effect, “I don’t see any sign of the creature, but in this heavily forested area he could easily be hiding.”

Twenty air miles from Columbia airport across the Stanislaus River canyon is a county made famous by Mark Twain’s short story, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” The annual Jumping Frog Jubilee attracts “thoroughbred” frogs and their owners from across the country. Before the 1963 jubilee, I climbed into the PA-11 and made the short hop to a grass airstrip at the Calaveras County fairgrounds. It would have been just as easy to drive. But that didn’t have the exhilarating effect of landing my plane and taxiing up to frog jumping headquarters, where I recorded interviews with promoters and competitors. The result was a three-minute feature for my newscast.

For the hell of it, I sent the tape to an ABC radio show called Weekend West. The five-minute program ran each Saturday. Surprisingly, I got a response from ABC programming executive, Ted Toll. “Very nice handling of the frogs,” he wrote. “I’ve got it tentatively spotted for 9:30 network airing Sat., the 18^th.”  The letter caused my knees to get weak and my bladder to contract. Not only did he like the piece, the network was paying me twenty-five dollars. It was my biggest broadcasting thrill to date.

My memoir, Odyssey of a Derelict Gunslinger, is available at amazon.com and independent bookstores. It offers much more than $19.99 worth of laughs. It is an account of my illustrious (I choose the adjectives) career. 

Most people outside the journalism business are unfamiliar with Frank Magid, although they see the damage he inflicted on the nation anytime they watch local television news. Magid was “news doctor”— a consultant hired by TV stations and networks to add spice to newscasts. And more importantly, help build ratings. He died this week at the age of 78.  

Frank Magid and Associates conceived a format known as  ”Action News,” adapted by some stations as “Eye Witness News,” and often called “Eye Witless News.” It is a superficial conglomeration of crime, fires, accidents and feature stories designed to be “viewer friendly”—especially for folks who relish blood and guts. “If it bleeds, it leads” was a mantra in a lot of newsrooms. Despite an overload of tragedies, news anchors were encouraged to smile a lot and engage in superficial chit-chat.

Unrehearsed chatter had its moments. During my investigative reporting tenure at a Boston station, our well-respected anchorwoman—who I will call Natalie—was delighted to learn she was pregnant with her first child. The sometimes airhead co-anchor—who I will call Tom—wanted to reveal the pregnancy on the late evening newscast. She said, “No. Do not mention this on the air.” He seemed to acquiesce. But a characteristic of many anchors is that they don’t know what’s coming out of their mouths next. On this particular night, the final story happened to be a feature about the birth of chimps at the local zoo, prompting Tom to turn to Natalie and ask, “Does this remind you of something you wanted to tell viewers?” She said nothing, but the look on her face was priceless.

The Boston gaffe was minor compared to stuff that periodically pops up now on You Tube. Television news has become far more trite in the days since I worked in Boston for a station then described in the New York Times as “the nations best local station.” The demise of quality is due in large part to the adoption of a formula devised by Frank Magid and Associates, as well as other consulting firms.

The reliance on news consultants is not limited to local stations. I vividly recall my foreboding while sitting in a meeting at CNN, listening to a network executive parrot a consulting firm’s advice to keep stories brief, visual and “viewer friendly.” It was a re-run of a meeting I attended years before at the Boston station.

Admittedly, I have a prejudice toward news consultants, such as Frank Magid and Associates. The format advocated by these firms does not bode well for in-depth investigative reporting. As CNN’s Senior Investigative Correspondent, I fought battles with the newsroom over the length and substance of reports. Boring was the most frequent adjective attached to many segments produced by our Special Assignment Unit. Which leads me to a premise that is not widely embraced by the money-changers who control much of the news media.

I believe viewers are often secondary when it comes to investigative reporting. The role of muckraking is to ”keep the bastards honest.”  A fear of being exposed by intrepid journalists accomplishes that goal to some measure. However, the present state of television news is such that politicians, bureaucrats and all-around scoundrels consider the majority of TV reporters to be lightweights incapable of finding restrooms in courthouses. The lack of concern over being exposed is understandable. Most television stations long ago abandoned the idea that investigative reporting is an obligation instead of a luxury. 

Frank Magid and Associates, and other media consultants are not solely to blame for the sorry quality of contemporary TV news. The proliferation of cable channels gives viewers the choice of watching reruns of bad situation comedies rather than tolerating bad news programs. Even worse is the fact that large numbers of broadcast outlets are owned by conglomerates. The loyalty of big corporations is to stockholders—viewers be damned.

Before closing this diatribe, I must offer a confession. A Magid consultant gave me advice that improved the quality of my muckraking. He pointed out that some one-hour investigative documentaries I producer were too complicated for the average viewer to comprehend without a scorecard. He suggested that I consistently remind viewers what the story was all about, suggesting that every five minutes or so during the narrative, I give a simple review of what I had reported and where I was going with the story. 

The timely advice was a reminder of the first important lesson I learned as radio reporter many years before. ”Tell’em what you’re going to tell’em, tell’em, and tell’em what you told’em.” 

I was then producing a complex exposé titled, The Best Insurance Commissioner Money Can Buy. The documentary helped send the Louisiana Insurance Commissioner and several insurance company executives to prison. And thanks in large part to Magid, the report was so comprehensible that it won me a fourth Peabody medallion. So thanks, Frank. 

But as I morbidly told a friend after learning of Magid’s death, I hope the format of final services was different from the format of the nation’s local newscasts he helped shape. It would be an injustice to limit eulogies to two minutes or less—except for uncontrollable sobbing—out of fear that mourners would switch to another funeral.