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40 40 5 New to TV: From JFK to Muhammad Ali The moment I arrived at WBBM in the latter part of 1963, I began nagging John Madigan, as I had nagged Jack Mabley, and P. K. Wrigley before him. The conversation went something like this: “When will you assign me to be a reporter?” I asked, and asked again. “Not yet, Walter. You just got here. Hold on, okay?” “But I left the newspaper, remember, when you told me you were looking for a reporter.” “I do remember that,” he said, looking at me with what I took to be a certain fondness, but was not. “I also remember telling you I wanted a reporter who’d start as a writer. Now you’re here, so do what I say, and you’ll work your way up. It’s not that I want to hurt your feelings,” he said, his Irish bubbling up at my persistence, “but you’re new at this game. You’re a nobody, a little nobody. Remember that.” He was right about my being little, no doubt about it. I was five-foot-seven, 135 pounds. And a “nobody?” He was right about that, too. So I did it his way— slapped my mouth, drooped to my desk in a corner of the newsroom (the “somebodies ” got to sit in the center of the room), and wrote news for broadcast editors to judge, and for dressed-up, made-up, oh-so-envied anchors to read. As impatient and self-assured as I was, and as angry as I was at Madigan, I considered the wisdom of minding my manners. I set myself to keeping quiet, writing and producing broadcast news, and, despite Madigan’s scolding, working on what it takes to become a television reporter as fast as I wanted to be one. And I was understanding more about how different from each other television and newspapers really are. Each has its own set of rules for covering and disseminating news and attracting the widest possible audience. Television news is in pictures; newspaper news is in words. Television is surface; newspaper is depth. TV condenses news, newspapers expand it. TV targets emotions; newspapers thought. Television N E W T O T V 41 is instant; newspapers come out many hours or a whole day after the fact. The news on TV is simple and easy to grasp; in the papers, it’s often elusive. There also are differences in news-gathering techniques. For instance, to cover city hall for Chicago’s American, all I needed was a pencil, a notepad, enough speed to beat the competition to a telephone, and whatever it cost to use it. For Channel 2, where, six months after being hired I did become a reporter, I had to coordinate a three-man television crew (light, sound, and camera), set up in a quiet place with minimal visual distractions, then find an alderman or city official with enough ego and thirst for exposure to want to be interviewed, or enough fear of the consequences of refusing to be. And I needed to ask a relevant question that was answerable before the camera ran out of film, or a battery went dead, or someone knocked over a lamp or a sloppy spittoon, or before an el train outside a window scratched and screeched around a curve, all the while having to think about what I’d need to do when the interview was finished. How would I get the film to the developer, then to the studio and into the hands of an editor before a broadcast ran out of time? The logistics at city hall were easy, the mayor’s office being hardly a mile away from the Channel 2 studios on McClurg Court, a block from the lakefront at Ontario Street. The Illinois General Assembly, on the other hand, is in Springfield, some 175 miles away. Not easy. Follow me: It’s a sticky summer afternoon, the assembly is haggling over a proposal to bail out the long-suffering Chicago public schools. The clock reads 5:30. The politicians are still at it. The rush hour is snarling traffic most of the way to Chicago. My cameraman, Don Norling, an old hand, estimates we’ll need an hour to wrap up the equipment and pack the car before heading home. Can we make it in time for the ten o’clock broadcast, in which the executive producer is holding the...

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