Chapter Two

GLENDIVE

The owner of the smallest TV station in America sent me a gift.  It was a money clip made from a 1921 silver dollar.

It arrived in the early fall of 1988, a few weeks after I paid a visit to the station in Glendive, Mont., in the far eastern part of the state about 30 miles west of North Dakota.  The station, KXGN-TV, was considered the nation’s smallest TV station because it served the least-populated television market in the entire country – an area measuring some 18,000 square miles and containing just 30,300 TV households.  KXGN’s service area was ranked dead last – 212^th – in the list of U.S. TV markets identified by A.C. Nielsen Co.

In the summer of 1988, an editor of mine thought it would be clever to send a reporter up there to gather material for a feature story on how the only TV station in the nation’s 212^th-ranked market conducted its business.  I quickly volunteered, seizing possession of an assignment I felt was rightfully mine anyway.  In those days, local broadcasting – both TV and radio – was as close to a regular “beat” as I could claim to have had at this particular publication.

It was one of about a dozen such trade publications – magazines, newspapers and newsletters – that served the broadcasting industry in an era long before the immediacy of the Internet rendered such print pubs – weeklies, biweeklies and even monthlies – obsolete.  This one was a weekly called Electronic Media, a title chosen by its creators at Crain Communications Inc. (the Chicago-based, family-owned publisher of Advertising Age and other publications) for its elasticity.  Though the mag was launched primarily to cover the TV business, its title did not contain the words “TV” or “broadcasting” in the manner of some of its older competitors – titles such as Broadcasting and TV/Radio Age.

Electronic Media was so named in order to appear more modern and inclusive than its competition.  The title was devised to signal that the businesses covered by Electronic Media were not limited to traditional, over-the-air broadcasting, that EM (as it came to be nicknamed) would accommodate developments in any new “electronic” media that came along.  Of course, in those days, the only other “electronic” medium anybody in the TV business knew or cared about was cable TV, a business that was growing but had not yet made significant inroads in drawing audiences away from traditional TV stations and the Big Three networks – ABC, CBS and NBC.

Moreover, cable TV was not considered “broadcasting.”  For one thing, cable’s reach in those days was hardly “broad” enough to be on par with the old broadcast networks, which still accounted for three-quarters of all TV viewing in the United States and were available to anyone in possession of a TV set anywhere in the U.S.  For another, cable TV didn’t reach its audiences with the traditional over-the-air signals that had defined “broadcasting” since the first commercial radio stations and networks emerged in the 1920s.  Cable TV was connected to subscribers’ homes via dedicated wires – like telephones.  To get cable TV, you had to pay for it, something millions of Americans were still unwilling to do in 1988 just to watch television.

For most of the 1980s, few of those who owned and operated TV stations, or ran the New York- and L.A.-based networks, were terribly concerned about cable TV.  In those days, as in decades past, the possession of a TV- or radio-station license was like successfully laying claim to a gold mine, “a license to print money” is how more than one broadcasting exec described it to me back then.

Even Lewis Moore, the man from tiny Glendive who owned the only TV station in the nation’s smallest TV service area and who gave away silver-dollar money clips, was wealthy enough to look forward to a style of retirement at age 68 that was common among TV executives then – a life of leisure in a warm climate, in his case a house beside a golf course in Palm Desert, Calif.

His station was so small that its news department consisted of one guy, a 23-year-old who served as reporter, anchor and camera-operator.  In 1988, KXGN was primarily a CBS affiliate, but as the only station in the entire area, it carried a handful of NBC shows too.  Back then, to help get its far-flung viewers through the isolation of winter, the station aired afternoon bingo games five days a week.

A year after my story ran on the front cover of Electronic Media in August 1988, Lewis Moore sold the station for a million dollars – which wasn’t bad for a TV station whose top price for commercial time was $130 a minute and whose viewership at any given moment amounted to a couple of thousand people.

In those years long before the Internet, no other media – not cable TV, not home video, not videogames – had grown big enough to challenge over-the-air TV and radio for people’s time and attention.  All of that would soon change, but for the time being, the value of broadcast properties had nowhere to go but up.

Radio and TV stations which had been held for decades by the same owners began to change hands at a furious pace.  Each week brought news of fresh deals for individual stations and groups of stations, usually at record prices.  The frenzy fueled the rise of a new class of broadcast industry players – free-wheeling station brokers who brought potential sellers together with prospective buyers and then took percentage commissions in the millions of dollars from every deal.  In those days, station brokering was such a competitive business that one swashbuckling radio broker offered to reward me with a Rolls Royce if I ever passed him information, no matter how trivial, leading to the sale of a radio station.  I knew this guy well enough to know he wasn’t kidding.  I said no on ethical grounds, but also because, really, where was I going to park a Rolls Royce in New York City?

Everyone I met was rich.  And some of them didn’t mind at all letting you know it.  One radio station owner, Nelson Lavergne, proprietor of a Spanish-language AM station in New York, WADO, had his chauffeur drive us to lunch one day in 1986 in the station owner’s personal stretch limousine.  The distance from the radio station to our destination, the Marco Polo Club at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel on Park Avenue, was about three blocks if you walked, about seven blocks if you drove (due to the one-way directions of the nearby streets).  When the car drove up to pick us up, I noticed something unusual about it: It was probably the first stretch limo I had ever seen whose windows were not tinted for privacy.  I asked the station owner why that was.  He said, “If the windows are tinted, how is anybody going to be able to see you inside?  I want people to see me.”

One producer of TV shows had the biggest desk I have ever seen.  The desktop seemed to have been hewn from a single, immense piece of wood.  It belonged to Al Masini, the creator of “Entertainment Tonight,” whose name can still be seen in the end-credits of “ET.”  I was visiting his office on Third Avenue some time in 1990 to learn about his newest creation, a syndicated series called “Preview: The Best of the New.”   The show, hosted by Robin Leach, was styled as some sort of nightly showcase of the world’s most expensive luxury items and destinations.  It was short-lived.

I remember almost nothing about the show or that visit to Masini’s office, even though I’m sure he tried his damnedest to get me to believe that “Preview” was the greatest new TV show that had ever been produced.  I only remember that desk.  It was so expansive, perhaps five or six feet wide and something like 20 feet long, that it had to have been fashioned from a giant redwood or some fat 200 year-old oak tree.  If memory serves, Masini told me the desk, or at least the top of it, was too big to be brought up in the office building’s freight elevator, and had to be lifted and placed in his office from outside, with a crane.  Viewed from above, the desktop was shaped vaguely like a boomerang or a crescent moon.  In his spacious office, Masini had the desk positioned opposite a long wall made up entirely of mirrored, bi-fold closet doors.  The mirrored wall was long enough to capture the reflection of the entire desk and the man seated behind it – which seemed to be the purpose of this arrangement.

I was an observant young reporter back then – observant enough to recognize Mark Goodson, the game-show king, when I found myself standing beside him, completely by happenstance, on a Fifth Avenue street corner one afternoon.  I was waiting for the light to change.  He was waiting for something else.  I saw him nod his head almost imperceptibly and suddenly, a limousine shot out from a side street across Fifth Avenue, turned and rolled to a stop right in front of us.  It was a navy-blue stretch Bentley, the only one I had ever seen and possibly the grandest automobile I had ever laid eyes on.  Goodson got in it and the car drove off.  And I noticed something else about this car: Its windows were not tinted.

The captains of the broadcasting business wanted to see themselves and their companies portrayed glowingly in the trade press.  So I was constantly being invited to lunch at expensive midtown restaurants, steakhouses mostly – Smith & Wollensky, 21, Christ Cella, The Palm and Sparks, the restaurant on East 45^th Street made famous in December 1985 by the assassination of a Mafia chieftain, Paul Castellano, on the sidewalk outside by members of John Gotti’s gang.

Sometimes, they would take you to these private dining clubs hidden away on the upper floors of office buildings or secreted inside luxury hotels down corridors far away from the crowds of tourists milling about in the lobbies.  Here, the waiters and maitre d’s greeted them by name and ushered us to their regular tables.

Still other execs had private dining rooms of their own, adjacent to their offices, where waiters in white jackets trod softly on wall-to-wall carpet, entering quietly to take your order and then returning a short time later with your lunch arranged elegantly on a white China dinner plate and covered with a silver dome.  I remember one such lunch at CBS headquarters with the president of the CBS Radio Division, who schooled me in the ways of radio air personalities.  I asked him what he thought of Howard Stern, who was then in the first years of his growing notoriety as the nation’s foremost practitioner of what would soon be labeled “shock radio.”

“Children,” this executive said dismissively, frowning between bites of his lunch.  “Air talent – they’re all children.  And that’s how you have to treat them.  Like children.”

There was plenty of time for leisurely lunches in those days.  There was no Internet, which meant there were no demands for the kind of daily, minute-by-minute filing of stories that takes place today.  Electronic Media was a weekly that landed on the desks of TV executives every Monday morning, which meant you worked hardest on Thursdays and Fridays, when deadlines loomed.  The rest of the week was spent, at least in part, conducting “research,” which sometimes involved grand 2½- or three-hour lunches, frequently a gigantic steak, preceded by a martini, or maybe two, and accompanied by beer or wine.  These meals could be so gluttonous that I would return to the office on East 42^nd Street around 2:30 or 3 o’clock wanting nothing more than to stretch out somewhere and sleep.

It was the 1980s, and midtown Manhattan was filled with men (it was almost always men) in the advertising and media businesses who had been taking clients, colleagues and journalists to steak-and-martini lunches at least since the 1960s.  I was an impressionable 26 years old when I started work at Electronic Media in 1986, and I was stunned at the hold that lunch had on these people.

The midday meal had attained mythic importance for the movers and shakers of the broadcasting business.  When they weren’t going out to lunch at restaurants, they were throwing banquets for each other.  I was always attending banquets in hotel ballrooms – luncheons at the Waldorf, the Roosevelt or Marriott Marquis.  I would cover the after-lunch speeches by industry leaders or take in the entertainment.   One time it was Patti LaBelle at the Waldorf.  Another time, I was surprised to learn that Bo Diddley would perform after a radio-industry luncheon at the Marriott.  While the luncheon-goers in their suits and ties enjoyed coffee and dessert, I stood there, not 10 feet away from Diddley as he played his famous “cigar-box” guitar accompanied by a band that rocked so loudly that the ballroom’s floor and walls vibrated.

I learned early on that, as a profession, you couldn’t beat journalism for opening doors and throwing you into unexpected situations where you would find yourself in close proximity with the rich and famous, even though you, the lowly journalist, was neither.  I would have these experiences that, to me, were otherworldly.

To this day, I can still feel the dry roughness of Don King’s hand.  It was gigantic, like a bear’s paw, and I shook it at a small event I attended at an east side bar, Runyon’s, in February 1987 that was held to promote a new syndicated TV talk show about sports called “Sports Pros and Cons.”  I engaged in a brief conversation with King, who seemed to tower over me with his famous Buckwheat-inspired hairdo.  Today, I have no idea what I might have discussed with Don King, but I do know it was one of those times when I would have these almost out-of-body experiences, like I was standing off to the side watching myself, wondering how this young reporter came to this point in his life, where he walks into a bar and finds himself in conversation with one of the world’s most controversial figures – a man considered by many to be a notorious scoundrel, and to many others an inspiring, American success story.  And here he was, talking to me for some lost reason.

Another time, CBS convened a press event at the Friars Club on East 55^th Street in 1988 to promote an upcoming made-for-TV movie and I found myself in an oak-paneled reception area on the second floor, the Joe E. Lewis Room, with about two dozen reporters, a smattering of CBS executives and publicists, and the movie’s three co-stars – Milton Berle, Sid Caesar and Danny Thomas.  The movie was called “Side by Side” and these three legends of television had been persuaded to play three retirees who go into business together manufacturing a line of designer clothing for senior citizens.

Berle, then 79, was the most outgoing of the three.  He stood up in front of the group of reporters, who were seated on folding chairs, reached into an inside pocket of his jacket, and withdrew the biggest cigar I have ever seen.  He lit it theatrically and then cheerfully answered a handful of questions.  Afterward, he mingled with the reporters, entertaining small groups of them with chit-chat, throwaway lines and stories about show business.

Thomas, 74, and Caesar, 65, were less loquacious.  After the brief news conference, Thomas took a seat at a small corner table, where he sat imperiously frowning for the remainder of the event, perhaps waiting for reporters to come to him.  Few did.

Caesar, notoriously shy, positioned himself along a wall near the entrance to the room.  He was so unassuming that I forgot he was there.  At one point, while I was engaged in a conversation with a reporter friend of mine, we suddenly realized that Sid Caesar, this legend of TV’s first decade and one of the biggest stars in the entire history of television, was standing quietly right behind us.

I had first been exposed to Caesar in 1973, the year 10 sketches from his old TV show of the 1950s, “Your Show of Shows,” were packaged into a movie called “10 from Your Show of Shows” and released in theaters.  At age 13, I came away from the experience of seeing this movie mesmerized by Caesar and the all-out recklessness of his physical comedy, particularly in the sketch that spoofed another old TV show, “This is Your Life.”   Caesar played a man sitting innocently in the studio audience whose name is suddenly called (by co-star Carl Reiner in the role of the show’s host) to participate in the show and then tries desperately to escape, throwing his overcoat at Reiner and then  assaulting everyone who blocks his path.

In 1988, standing in the Friars Club chatting amiably with Sid Caesar, I was again struck by the same questions that often occurred to me in such situations: How is this possible? I would ask myself.  How am I standing here in 1988 talking with Sid Caesar, the imposing giant from that manic black-and-white TV show, “Your Show of Shows,” the guy from the 1950s who tore recklessly through a TV studio in a “This is Your Life” sketch and who drove me to convulsions with his talent for nonsensically mimicking foreign languages?

I had the same reaction another time, when I actually witnessed Caesar do his dialect routine, with Imogene Coca standing alongside him, at yet another TV industry banquet, this one a fund-raising dinner at the Pierre Hotel thrown by the Museum of Broadcasting.

It was another one of those experiences where I found myself rubbing elbows with the high and mighty of the broadcasting business, though I had nothing whatsoever in common with them.  They were there because their companies were supporters of the museum.  Their banquet tables cost their companies thousands of dollars, while my seat at this sumptuous event cost me absolutely nothing.  In a very general sense, that’s what journalism is, especially “beat” journalism in which you dedicate your efforts to covering a single subject or industry, in my case the television business.  I was invited, of course, because my hosts expected repayment in some sort of publicity – for themselves, their new shows, their museum.  But I rarely paid off.  Steak lunches, elaborate banquets, conversations with Milton Berle and Sid Caesar – these strange and serendipitous experiences never cost me a dime – either in real money or publicity.  And I never stopped being invited, which was a good thing too because I was having a good time, while learning the TV business from the inside out.

It was the 1980s and the old guys were still around.  One of them, Walter Cronkite, had relinquished his CBS anchor chair to Dan Rather in 1981, but I got an opportunity to watch Cronkite work one day a couple of years later, in a small studio at New York’s public TV station, WNET, where Cronkite was videotaping some intros and other material called “wraparounds” for a PBS documentary.  I had been invited up to the station to see him and, standing a few feet away from him while he worked, I learned about the art and effort of broadcasting.

Cronkite, then in his 70s, sat in a chair a few feet away from a large television camera, and recited some copy.  I don’t recall if he read from a TelePrompTer (a device usually positioned just under the lens of a TV camera), but if he did, it didn’t seem to draw his eyes away and distract him from his keen concentration on that camera lens.  He leaned forward in his chair and peered so intently into that lens that he literally seemed to strain physically to do it.  It was as if he wanted to dive into it bodily.  I realized that this was the method Cronkite must have adopted as anchor of “The CBS Evening News.”   He must have believed that if he could focus his unwavering gaze directly through a point at the very center of the camera lens, then viewers at home could literally make eye contact with him.  The method evidently worked since it made him the most trusted man in America in his heyday as anchor of “The CBS Evening News.”  I learned that day that broadcasting – real broadcasting – takes effort and study and work.  And I never forgot it.

The big broadcasting companies still had people on their payrolls in the 1980s who had been there since the dawn of television.  I’d meet people like Bob Wogan, who worked in affiliate relations for NBC Radio when I met him in 1986, but had worked at NBC since starting as a page in 1943.  Among his responsibilities in his long career: Babysitting J. Fred Muggs, the chimpanzee who became a star of NBC’s “Today” show in the 1950s.  Bob told me the chimp virtually lived for a time in his office and particularly enjoyed playing and napping in Bob’s wastebasket.

The TV business in those days was still traditional enough that those who had worked in it in decades past would likely still have recognized it.  CBS stationery was still printed according to a template established by Frank Stanton, formerly the long-time president and then vice chairman (under William Paley), who had last held that position in 1973.  And yet, a tiny, nearly invisible dot, decreed by Stanton and printed on the same spot on every piece of CBS letterhead, still showed typists where the salutation on every letter was to begin.

The TV networks seemed to relish their traditions, or at least they pretended to.  Such was the case in May 1987, when top executives at CBS wheeled one of the company’s most enduring symbols into a news conference.  It was Paley himself.

Accompanied by CEO Laurence Tisch and Broadcast Group President Gene Jankowski, the wheelchair-bound, 85 year-old chairman and founder of CBS was there to “help” announce the network’s new shows for the coming fall (the network’s new shows included “Wiseguy,” “Jake and the Fatman” and a new drama about the Vietnam War, “Tour of Duty”).

Paley’s presence was likely meant to show the press that CBS was united under Paley and Tisch, who had bought his way into the company and was dismantling it by selling the record and publishing divisions, among other assets.  The two apparently clashed behind the scenes, but at this news conference in a small meeting room at CBS headquarters on Sixth Avenue, the two more or less relaxed in each other’s presence for the sake of the dozen or so reporters assembled there.

Well, maybe “relaxed” isn’t the best word for it.  Basically, Paley slumped in his wheelchair while Tisch, then a vigorous 64 years old, stood nearby grinning, and occasionally addressed Paley in the patronizing way many people address an infirm, diminished grandparent.

Though Paley exercised little power at CBS by the time he died in October 1990, CBS nonetheless saluted him with a one-hour documentary of his life and times that aired in prime time with no commercials.  A few weeks after his death, I covered a memorial service for Paley at a New York City synagogue, Temple Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue.  From my seat in a pew somewhere in the middle of this spacious sanctuary, I could see the many luminaries who had gathered there.  I was interested to see Richard Nixon seated just across the middle aisle and a few feet away from Carl Bernstein, the journalist who, along with Bob Woodward, helped bring down Nixon’s presidency.  Henry Kissinger and Walter Cronkite delivered eulogies to a packed house of TV stars, broadcasting executives, socialites and Rockefellers.

And once again, I was left to wonder: What on earth am I doing here?

I was learning about the broadcasting business, and how so much of it was just smoke and mirrors.  I was shocked to be informed one day that one of the best-known slogans in the history of radio – the one for the all-news radio station in New York, 1010 WINS-AM – was essentially meaningless.  It’s the one that goes: “Give us 22 minutes and we’ll give you the world,” which was meant to promote the station’s non-stop approach to news – a “news wheel” divided every hour into thirds.

Well, guess what’s wrong with this picture.  For this slogan to make sense, 1010 WINS would have to give you 20 minutes – not 22.  For the “22 minutes” claim to be true, a standard hour would have to be a preposterous 66 minutes, though few, if any, of the millions who have heard this slogan over the years seem to have detected anything wrong with it.  I still remember the head of Westinghouse’s radio division, owner of WINS at the time, chortling when he told me the story of how someone came up with the slogan years ago, and it was decided that “22” basically sounded better than “20,” so “22” was chosen despite the fact that it was nonsense.

The accumulation of such tales would help me develop a trait that would prove indispensible in the years to come – skepticism.  Eventually, I grew to question almost everything anyone in the TV or radio business told me, although it took me a while to get to that point.  I clearly was not there yet when I flew to Chicago in September 1988 to spend the better part of a day with Paul Harvey, then 70 years old and the highest-paid radio personality of his era, whose daily five-minute programs on the ABC Radio Network had an audience of more than 20 million listeners per week.  Harvey had a craggy face and a head of reddish-orange hair combed straight back that looked like they belonged on Mount Rushmore.  But the great head of hair wasn’t his, as I learned while eating lunch with him, along with his wife Lynne (who he called “Angel” and who managed his career), at a private dining club in an office building high above Michigan Avenue.

I was sitting close enough to Harvey to observe how his toupee was lined with a kind of netting that had been plastered to his head.  By lunch time, it was becoming detached around the edge of his forehead that was closest to me.  I tried not to let this discovery distract me as Harvey waxed on and on about the greatness of America, where a ragged little boy from Tulsa – him – could grow up to become rich and famous, marry the girl of his dreams and live in harmony across the street from his son and daughter-in-law, whose household was also the picture of domestic perfection.

He told me the story of how dejected he felt as a poor boy.  “When I saw the liveried chauffeurs of the oil-rich Tulsans passing by, for the first time I felt sorry for myself, resentful of those who had so much more,” he said, his eyes half-closed as he reminisced.

But a schoolteacher named Miss Harp set him straight.  “ ‘Paul,’ she said, ‘don’t ever resent those who have more than you.  Just do all you can to preserve this wonderful land in which everybody who is willing to stay on his toes can reach for the stars.’ . . .  Miss Harp, bless her heart, had much to do with shaping my philosophy at a formative time in my life,” Harvey said.

This story might well have been true, but a more mature journalist might have at least felt a little bit doubtful about a story in which a schoolteacher’s life lesson imparted to a boy of 11 or 12 is quoted directly nearly 60 years after it happened.  When I pondered it years later, I realized the philosophy this Miss Harp supposedly articulated to the young Paul Harvey sometime in the 1920s was eerily similar to a quotation made famous by the only other radio personality then working in the 1980s who enjoyed an audience and salary on par with Harvey’s – Casey Kasem, who ended every broadcast of his “American Top 40” radio program, also heard for years on ABC Radio (up until 1988), with this admonishment to his listeners, “Keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars,” a quotation that would have made Miss Harp proud.

A few weeks after my feature story on the life of Paul Harvey ran on the cover of Electronic Media, I ran into a man who knew him well, the former president of the ABC Radio Network, Ed McLaughlin, at a radio industry convention held later that same month in Washington.  In my story, I had even quoted Ed, who gave me some harmless statement about Harvey’s talent as a writer of his own material.

“Did you see my story about Paul?” I asked McLaughlin when I encountered him in the convention’s exhibit area.

“Yep, sure did – he sure pulled one over on you,” McLaughlin said.

Crestfallen, I asked him how, and McLaughlin told me that at least part of what I had been told by Paul Harvey, who happened to be one of the most trusted men in America, was bunk.  McLaughlin listed a couple of examples, but the one that stands out in my memory was Harvey’s claim of harmonious coexistence within his family.  According to McLaughlin, the domestic life of Harvey’s son, Paul Jr., was hardly harmonious at the time, and Paul Sr. knew it.

Paul Harvey might have sugar-coated his life story, but his devotion to broadcasting tradition – in which the cleanest possible copy was read on the air in the clearest possible baritone – was absolute.  I got to watch him work too.  He was so fastidious that he wore a jacket similar to a physician’s lab coat while working in his studio, which had been specially built for him by ABC in an office building on Chicago’s Wacker Drive.  And he maintained his traditional way of delivering his self-styled newscasts until his final years (he died in February 2009 at age 90).  He was the last of his kind, but the traditions he upheld had begun to erode long before he uttered his last “Good . . . day!”

In the 1980s, broadcasting traditions – which had their roots in standards and practices in place for decades – were giving way to a much more permissible atmosphere.  The change began initially on radio with a new generation of air personalities intent on shattering taboos and bursting through the industry’s self-imposed boundaries of free expression.   Howard Stern is probably the best-known of these “pioneers” and he was clearly one of the first and also one of the most extreme.  But in the 1980s, his style of anything-goes radio, whether introduced by him or not, was widespread.

Stern had been fired by WNBC-AM in September 1985 for an accumulation of offenses, including one recurring segment called “Bestiality Dial-a-Date.”  But that same year, a morning radio team in Indianapolis came under fire from local watchdogs when it was learned that “The Bob and Tom Show,” hosted by Bob Kevoian and Tom Griswold on WFBQ-FM – a program not unlike Stern’s – was being played aloud on local school buses.

That same year, the Florida chapter of the NAACP complained about a morning show on WRBQ-FM in Tampa whose hosts Cleveland Wheeler and Terrence McKeever produced two recurring comedy bits called “Tales of Tanequah” and “Johnson the Maintenance Engineer,” whose title characters spoke in exaggerated African-American dialect.

A feature story I wrote in September 1986, with the headline “Blue radio is red hot,” included these examples of controversy on the radio, along with about a half-dozen other comedy bits and segments from around the country that had been characterized by their detractors as offensive.  The following year, the FCC announced a crackdown on so-called “shock radio.”  At a news conference in Washington, the official who made the announcement – James McKinney, chief of the FCC’s Mass Media Bureau, the unit that was supposed to oversee all of U.S. broadcasting – was asked why the commission had decided then to turn its attention to the antics of FM morning shows.  McKinney told reporters he acted after being made aware of these shocking developments in an article he read in Electronic Media.  When I learned this, from an account of the news conference in the Washington Post, I remember wondering, Why on earth is this guy learning all this from a story I wrote in a lowly trade publication?  Isn’t he already supposed to know what’s going on in the business he’s supposed to be regulating?  Apparently, he wasn’t.

Another FCC official gave me one of the most priceless quotes I ever had the opportunity to use.  He was a government attorney and I interviewed him on the phone in October 1986 about a meeting he had held recently with other FCC officials and their counterparts in the Justice Department.  They were discussing an action then being taken by the commission against a small, listener-supported radio station in Los Angeles – KPFK-FM – for airing excerpts of a sexually explicit, two character play called “Jerker,” about homosexuals who masturbated on the telephone together.

So what was the purpose of your meeting with the Justice Department? I asked this official who was then embroiled in a controversy involving a play about masturbation.

His solid-gold answer: “I wanted to make sure the right hand knows what the left hand is doing.”

Government intervention or not, the cat was out of the bag.  In the late 1980s, broadcasting came to seem like a free-for-all.  Radio personalities were putting their feet in their mouths all over the place.  Some would get fired, such as Steve White, a talk show host on WKRI-AM in Providence, R.I., who referred on the air to drug dealers in South Providence as “niggers” and “spics.”  In an unrepentant interview after his firing in December 1987, he told me the words “niggers” and “spics” were taken out of context.  He then vowed to pursue a career in politics.

Earlier that year, in September, another AM radio talk show host, Ed Tyll of WGST-AM in Atlanta, averted dismissal after he referred to a black congressman as “Buckwheat.”  But by December, Tyll was fired for “repeated violations,” according to the station’s general manager.

Tyll conceded in an interview that his material was probably too controversial for WGST, though he didn’t sound as if he had any plans to censor himself should he ever get hired elsewhere.  He felt that one of the last straws for station management was a three-hour discussion he had led recently on his show about the legal ramifications of a murder trial in Huntsville, Ala., in which a man had been charged with murder for choking a woman to death during oral sex.  “The phones rang for three days after that one,” Tyll told me.

In perhaps the most infamous racially charged radio incident of the era, Doug “The Greaseman” Tracht of WWDC-FM in predominantly black Washington, D.C., kept his job even after driving away the station’s advertisers when he suggested on the air one day in March 1986 that if a one-day holiday could result from the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., then killing four more black people would create four more holidays.  Within a few weeks, the sponsors had returned.  Why?  Because The Greaseman’s ratings had increased in the wake of the controversy.  “All the self-promotion in the world couldn’t have generated this much publicity,” one sponsor told me.

Television also seemed newly chaotic and increasingly unrestrained.  Suddenly, brawls were breaking out on Geraldo Rivera’s afternoon talk show and Morton Downey Jr.’s controversial evening talk show.   “Despite a brawl in which Geraldo Rivera’s nose was broken, officials of his talk show say there is no need to beef up security,” read the dry lead sentence of a story I wrote in November 1988.

Rivera wound up in the middle of the donnybrook and was struck in the face by a flying chair, but he was not technically a participant in the melee.  It started when one of the show’s guests, black activist Roy Innes of the Congress of Racial Equality, confronted one of the other guests, John Metzger, a 20-year-old member of a group known as the White Aryan Resistance Youth, who had called Innes an Uncle Tom.  For his part, Rivera maintained his professionalism.  “After getting off the floor in the middle of the melee,” I reported, “Mr. Rivera, his nose smashed and bleeding, turned to a camera and said, ‘Take a break.  We’ll be right back’.”

If anyone could be called a pioneer of the new confrontational talk-show style, it was Downey, whose eponymous show was so unpredictable that he himself was charged with assault in December 1987 after he appeared to slap one of his guests.  The charges were dismissed at a trial four months later.  Downey’s utterings were so outrageous that stories about him proved irresistible to a reporter with an innate sense of how a humdrum story about the TV business could be enlivened by the innocent insertion of a shocking quote from Downey’s show, such as this gem straight from the host’s mouth: “Any prisoner who sodomizes [another prisoner] ought to have his testicles cut off and fed to him!”   That quote was the second sentence of the first story I ever wrote about Downey in November 1987.

Later in the story, at a point where I perceived the piece was growing dull, I inserted another one, from the same on-air conversation about sexual predators in prisons.  “On the same program in which he offered castration as a cure for sodomy in prisons,” I wrote, “Mr. Downey, who said he once spent 61 days in jail, asked his guest, ‘Have you ever gone to bed at night with the fear that while you’re sleeping, some guy is going to jump you and bunghole you?’!”  That was probably the only time the word “bunghole” ever appeared in that particular TV industry trade mag.

I found myself gravitating toward stories about excess, controversial program contents and lapses in judgement.  One example of the latter occurred in January 1987, when a Pennsylvania official, R. Budd Dwyer, the state treasurer who was awaiting sentencing after being found guilty in a kickback scandal, placed the barrel of a .357 Magnum revolver in his mouth and pulled the trigger, blowing his brains out during a news conference in Harrisburg.  It happened to be a snow day and some small children were home watching TV when local stations in Pennsylvania interrupted the shows the kids were watching at 11:45 a.m. – shows such as “Webster” on the ABC affiliate – to air the bloody videotape of Dwyer’s suicide in its entirety, drawing complaints from parents.  One official of a Pittsburgh TV station drily offered this rationalization for airing the video.  “He was a public official, and it was a very historic event,” I quoted him as saying.

In September 1989, MTV slapped comedian Andrew Dice Clay with a “lifetime ban” for uttering an obscenity when he joked about “an unnatural sex act with a 600-pound woman” (according to my story on the ban) on the live telecast of the “MTV Music Video Awards.”

Standards were changing.  Among those who came forward to criticize TV’s newfound permissiveness: Ted Bundy, the serial killer who had confessed to more than 30 murders in which he either bludgeoned or strangled his victims.  “What scares and appalls me is what I see on cable TV – some of the movies, some of the violence that comes into homes today,” Bundy told a radio interviewer, according to an item I wrote in January 1989.  Bundy, then residing on Florida’s death row, was executed later that month.

Concerns about shock radio personalities, talk-show brawls and obscene comedians were the farthest things from my mind when I flew from New York to Billings, Mont., in August 1988.  Picking up a rental car at the airport, I headed east to Glendive, 220 miles away down an interstate highway with no speed limit.  It was hot and the sky was blue and also big, just like it was supposed to be in Montana.  I passed cows and grain elevators at 95 miles per hour until I reached Glendive, where I checked into the finest hotel in town, the Best Western Holiday Lodge, home of the Range Lounge and Disco.

I spent the next day hanging around KXGN, the TV station that was considered the nation’s smallest.  I dutifully interviewed the general manager, a man named Dan Frenzel, and Terry Kegley, the 23 year-old who worked as the station’s one-man news department.  I left after a few hours because the truth was, there wasn’t a lot going on at the nation’s smallest TV station, though I eventually made about a 50-inch story out of it.

More memorable to me was the time I spent away from the station.  I roamed around the town, shot some photos of grain elevators and visited a nearby state park, Montana’s largest, called Makoshika (it supposedly means “badlands” in the language of the Lakota Indians).  Somehow I learned of a county fair then under way about an hour’s drive north of Glendive, where a rodeo would be taking place that evening.  I arrived at dusk and found a booth made of unpainted plywood where a farmer sold sandwiches of homemade bratwurst.  I took a seat in the sparsely populated grandstand and watched some cowboys rope calves and ride bucking broncos in the dry dusty infield lit by floodlights mounted on tall poles.

I wore sneakers, a pair of green shorts and a Flintstones T-shirt.  As I surveyed my surroundings, it dawned on me that I was a grown man dressed like a boy in a world where even the smallest boys dressed like men, in dungarees, long-sleeved shirts of denim or flannel (despite the oppressive heat), cowboy boots and cowboy hats.  All alone up in that grandstand, I realized that I was as far away from the world I knew as I had ever been in my entire life.  I have long remembered that moment as one of the most sublime that I have ever experienced, and I had journalism to thank for it.  It was one of only a few such moments I ever had in the practice of my profession.

It also happened to be the last.

# # #

CBS Blackrock Building in New York City

The following photographs are from the LIFE Magazine photography archive.   Here is  a look back at some of the people and places that made CBS such a stylish and illustrious network.

Busy scene in CBS newsroom on election night - November 1952

TV entertainer, Jackie Gleason, sitting at coffee table, signing new contract with CBS while manager and executives watch - 1956

Actors John Ericson (L) and Ralph Bellamy (R) rehearsing scene for Playhouse 90 "Heritage of Anger" at CBS TV City - 1956

Composer Frank Loesser, CBS TV producer Edward R. Murrow, Samuel Goldwyn (L-R) & unident. others in Goldwyn's office during CBS crew's visit to set of filming of motion picture "Hans Christian Andersen" - 1952

CBS News correspondent Daniel Schorr working at press table (pipe in mouth) w. unident. others during Watergate hearings - June 1973

CBS President Frank Stanton sitting at his desk - 1948

Designer William Golden with his new "eye design" logo for CBS which was influence by "Shaker Design"

CBS White House correspondent Robert Pierpoint - 1965

Dr. George Gallup appearing on CBS-Television series called "America Speaks." - 1948

CBS Pres. Fred Friendly - 1967

Actor Bob Crosby working on a TV commercial at CBS TV City - 1956

Overall exterior view of new CBS Television City complex, consisting of offices and station studios - 1952

Pres. of CBS Frank Stanton - 1966

Chairman of CBS William Paley - 1966

Men working in the control room of CBS TV City - 1956

Pres. of CBS Frank Stanton - 1966

CBS newsman Walter Cronkite filing a report - 1956

Mr. Frank Sinatra during recording session at CBS - 1947

Sometime in the late 1950s, my elementary school class was loaded onto a bus for the 27 mile trip down the San Bernardino Freeway from Rowland Avenue Elementary School in West Covina, California to CBS Television City in Hollywood.

The media were already in my blood and I just may have been the most excited kid in the class. We were going to be in the audience of Art Linkletter’s House Party to watch several of my classmates appear on a legendary segment of the show  called “Kids Say the Darndest Things.”

To this day, it bothers me that I wasn’t chosen to be on the kids segment. I never learned why. I actually remember a counselor at UCLA’s psychological services center in 1969 looking at me like I was nuts when I described it as one of my “fundamental hurts.”

But the real shocker was when we pulled up in front of Television City and my entire class walked onto Linkletter’s soundstage, with the exception of Rachel, Barbara, and me.  A nice man in a bow tie who looked vaguely like Wally Cox diverted us into a small screening room  studio with wires everywhere and asked us to remain seated and quiet.

I was devastated. No Art Linkletter. No “Kids Say the Darndest Things.” No soundstage.

Then Wally returned and told us that we were going to be part of an important experiment. They wanted to see how a machine that had already been around for a while, a machine that tested whether people did or did not like television shows, would work with kids. And so they gave us each two small devices, one of which we were to hold in each hand.

“Press one button when you like the show, Wally told us, and press the other when you don’t.”  Then the lights dimmed and an episode of the not yet broadcast sit-com “Dennis the Menace” came on the screen. For 25 minutes, I watched this ridiculous show and never lifted my finger from the “don’t like” button.

I really thought it was dumb. I was mad at missing all the fun. Story over.

Well, not quite.

Almost exactly twenty years later I was sitting in a graduate seminar on methods of media research at Columbia with a brilliant young professor, Dr. Josephine Holz. And that was the day that I learned that the machine had not been just any contraption, but something called the Lazarsfeld-Stanton Program Analyzer, a pioneering device designed by two towering figures in the history of broadcasting, Drs. Frank Stanton and Paul Lazarsfeld.  It may have taken 20 years, but finally it was the other kids who had been the losers and it was me who had been actually hooked up to the machine.

Oh, and I still think Dennis the Menace was a dumb show.

Now if you want to talk about The Jetsons, that was a work of genius.

P.S. This is an old yet fascinating scholarly article about the machine.

Levy, Mark R. The Lazarsfeld-Stanton Program Analyzer: An Historical Note
The Journal of Communication, 1982 VL. 32, No. 4. PG: 30-38.