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101 12 Bill Kurtis and the Golden Age of TV News Lech Walesa is guiding the anti-Communist Solidarity workers’ movement in Poland. He’s an international symbol of freedom, a superstar hero in Chicago’s Polish neighborhoods. In the fall of 1978, I’m scheduled for an interview with him on the same day I’m to meet with Karol Cardinal Wojtyła, the archbishop of Krakow. The archbishop is less known by Chicagoans, not in the news, and not as big a catch as Walesa. However, since the death, two weeks ago, of Pope John Paul, the cardinal’s name has been mentioned, though not prominently, as a possible successor. I’ll ask him about the selection process, and for his opinion on who will be the next pope, and why. But Walesa’s people tell us there is only a certain time when he is available. There’s too little time to interview both him and the cardinal. So, while working in Warsaw, we gather after dinner to choose: Lech Walesa or Cardinal Wojtyła? The choice is mine, and I say let’s pass on the cardinal. Walesa is more current , and front-page. We drive north to Gdansk, where Walesa is waiting for us outside a shipyard. He and I talk for thirty minutes, the crew wraps up, and we’re on our way back to Warsaw. Tomorrow, to Chicago, satisfied with what we’re bringing home to edit, thinking a job well done. That is, until the next morning when I walk into the newsroom and see commotion around the monitors, on which white smoke is puffing out of the chimney above the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican in Rome, signal to the world that the church has selected a new pope—the first non-Italian in more than four hundred years, the first Polish pope in history, Karol Jozef Wojtyła, archbishop of Krakow, now Pope John Paul II. Oh, no. NO. How could I have done it, blown my chance to speak to the man who was about to become prince of the Catholic Church? I could have been the only reporter in the world to have known what Pope John Paul II was thinking, 102 B I L L K U R T I S A N D T H E G O L D E N A G E O F T V N E W S how he was feeling on the eve of his coronation. Ay Yi Yi! Well, sometimes things break your way, sometimes they don’t. Having a scoop like that in hand and dropping it is bad news, as we say, as bad as it gets. The good news (I try not to forget) is that WBBM-TV News is about to own the market. According to the Sun-Times, “Channel 2 can securely see itself as Chicago’s most popular news operation.” In the Tribune, “It now appears that Kurtis and Jacobson could be at the beginning of . . . a news dynasty. The Channel 2 audience triumph represents a genuine watershed in Chicago TV history.” After scrambling for six years, we seem to be the proof of our pudding that in Chicago and suburbs, there’s a thirst for news that is what it’s called, and that the managers of the stations understand. Channel 7 has been wooing us both, Kurtis and me, not just to heal itself, but to wound Channel 2. I’m not privy to what the general manager of Channel 7, Phil Boyer, is saying to Bill, or how often they’re talking, but I know Boyer knows my contract’s about up, and he’s called me a dozen times to persuade me to cross town. And he’s telling the newspapers, “I’d love to have Walter at my station. I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t go after him.” Television news is a take-no-prisoners business. There’s a lot of money being made and lost in shuffling anchors. Research shows that it’s not the stations that capture viewers and ad agencies; it’s the personalities. Secret negotiations abound. Snoops are enlisted to find out what managers, lawyers, and agents are telling, or not telling, each other. Plans are pilfered, dirty tricks abound. In my case, for example, Channel 7, figuring it’s not likely to entice me away from Channel 2, is trying to wound me at 2. It’s...

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