by Lisa Napoli
“We’d chase people down the street,” he said with pride. “We’d do anything to get a story.”
As he’d hoped, the viewers lapped it up like a soap opera or a Knicks game. This was no humdrum newscast. The newscast became a nightly event, and every second of airtime had to pay off.1
The mob! Methodone! Mayhem! The police blotter, animated by Mad Dog Kavanau. Television news had never moved with such alacrity.
His obsession with the crime rampant in Gotham reflected the harsh reality of the time. The undercurrent of fear that was the hallmark of 1970s New York had compelled Kavanau and several others on his staff to pack heat. You could never be too cautious or too prepared.
“Ted’s idea of continuity was to put a rape next to a murder next to a robbery—an entire violence section,” observed Bill Jorgensen, the station’s star anchor, with whom “Mad Man” Kavanau was forever at odds.
Technological limitations aided and abetted Kavanau’s creative flair. Since reporting live from the field was still, without planning and vast resources, but a dream, he resorted to skits filmed on location, “like-live,” that illustrated in technicolor what newspapers could only convey in humdrum text and black and white. When ruffians unleashed a spate of robberies of shtreimel, large, expensive fur hats worn by Hasidic men, Kavanau rented the garb from Eve’s Costumers, suited up reporter Steve Bauman, wired him with a hidden microphone, and sent him into Williamsburg, a neighborhood in Brooklyn populated predominantly by Orthodox Jews. The crew hid nearby in the unmarked news van and filmed Bauman as he glided down the street to the joyful strains of Fiddler on the Roof, waiting for a would-be thief to appear.
Suddenly, a young Puerto Rican kid—a would-be shtreimel-snatcher?—approached and implored, “Rabbi, Rabbi, I’ve got to talk with you.”
“Yes, my son.”
“I fell in love with this Jewish girl, but her parents don’t approve.”
Relieved not to have been the victim of a mugging for his sacred chapeau, the rabbi shared paternal wisdom.
“You must persist, son. Love will conquer all.”
When sightings of the hulking, mythical ape-like creature Bigfoot dominated headlines, Kavanau returned to Eve’s, this time renting a gorilla costume and donning it himself. Standing in Central Park, Bauman explained to the camera that the creature had been spotted there. On cue, the camera panned thirty yards in the distance, revealing a large, hairy figure sneaking for cover from tree to tree. The intrepid newsman approached the beast without a shred of fear and, pointing his microphone into his face, posed the question, “Bigfoot, what brings you to New York?”
The faux giant replied sweetly, addressing the believers in the audience, “There’s one person in New York who believes in me.” This A-number-one menace, as imagined by Ted Kavanau, could speak!
* * *
To the blood, gore, and theatrical, add: Reviews of schlocky restaurants by a “Masked Gourmet,” clad in top hat and tails. Juicy bits by a young gossip columnist named Rona Barrett. A consumer reporter who crusaded against fraud and abuse—all under the rubric “Action News.” A righteous undercurrent swept through many a Kavanau opus. During a sweltering summer heat, Kavanau dispatched an older staffer out onto the streets with a hidden camera crew as he searched for a Good Samaritan who might offer a drop of water.
Thus he endeared his station to the audience, which included the likes of Mafia boss Joe Colombo, who was grateful to Kavanau for not propagating what he saw as anti-Italian bias by the media. “If you ever need help with anything, give me a call,” he’d said.
The effete, urbane intellectual was not his intended audience; the working-class New Yorker was, and he attracted them readily, rendering WNEW the number one local station in Gotham. So devoted was he to his craft, Kavanau never took a vacation, much less a day off. Indeed, he wished to live in the newsroom. And since that wasn’t allowed, he’d tried to enlist his colleagues to chip in for a crash pad near work—the next best thing in his Ben Hecht Front Page fantasy of nonstop, in-your-face, madcap news.
For his thousand percent devotion, the staff loved Mad Dog, and they simultaneously hated him, too. He meanwhile confessed a love/hate relationship with the medium in which he dwelled and all who worked in it. Broadcast news did not equal print journalism. Newspaper reporters, he knew, were expected to dig, to deeply understand the beats they covered. A television newsman, on the other hand, dwelled in shorthand and vagary. He might be gifted socially and verbally, but when you got down to it, most of his stories were cribbed from print and brought to life with pictures and sound. Television reporters, he believed, “don’t know anything. If you sat them down and tested them, you’d find a massive amount of ignorance.” Success in television required tenacity and performance, not necessarily intellect. The footage that wound up on the cutting-room floor to protect a reporter from “looking imbecilic” on the air showed the true nature of the person—and of the medium.
“Never a friendly question” was one of his mantras. So was “There are two sides to every story. How many did you get?” Though he was staunchly conservative politically, he’d crusade on behalf of the almighty First Amendment—for all. Once, he got into a brawl defending Vietnam War protestors’ right to speak out against the conflict, though he didn’t agree with their position. The creeping liberal bias apparent in network newscasts distressed him not because he disagreed, but because it meant the omission of other points of view.
To offer a sense of balance, he brought in his friend the professor, Martin Abend, as a commentator. Abend was rabidly pro-gun, pro-war, pro–death penalty; he’d recently sparked an uproar when he’d said the United States had always been a white country and that it would be dangerous to allow in more blacks.
The mere suggestion that this radical conservative would share the station’s airtime lit the newsroom on fire. Enlisting a liberal commentator for balance didn’t appease the staff. All but one employee signed a petition. Star anchor Jorgensen threatened to quit.
Still, Kavanau claimed an important ally. Gabe Pressman, the most revered television newsman in the city—an ace reporter who’d jumped over from a network affiliate for the chance to work in Mad Dog’s shop—confessed that while he found Abend’s ideas repugnant, he had to admit that Kavanau was right. There was a liberal bias in television.
Ultimately, Kavanau’s righteousness did him in. Rather than agree to upper management’s insistence that he read, approve, and tape Abend’s commentaries, Kavanau quit. The day he did, the latest ratings book hit. His newscast had achieved its highest numbers ever.
For a while, Kavanau bounced around other newsrooms, including a brief stint as a news consultant. He was less inclined toward theoretical meetings and more toward practice. In Minneapolis, he asked the news director to anoint him reporter for a day. From the local paper, he ripped an ad for a porno theater and went in search of the manager to ask how much business it generated. Next, he stopped off at a shelter for abused women and interviewed a resident about how smut had ruined her life. Finally, he visited the paper’s publisher and asked, as the cameras rolled, “How do you feel about pornography?” After his predictable response that it was a terrible scourge, Kavanau held up a copy of the newspaper ad. The man steamed in the face of his outed hypocrisy. The television staff could see how to take a thread of an idea and inventively string together a compelling story.
Despite other gigs and opportunities, this once–star newsman now found himself out of work. He took up residence in the dusty basement of his friend Abend’s home in Brooklyn, walking over the Williamsburg Bridge to midtown Manhattan in order to save subway fare, hanging around the ITNA offices in the hopes that Reese might send him out on a story, when the budget allowed such a luxury. A fierce warrior of a newsman with no platform—the worst sort of clipped wings for a man who’d lived to have a voice.
* * *
Another of Reese’s ITNA cohort was also an industry veteran experiencing a juncture in his ow
n long, storied broadcasting career—although that career had taken a decidedly different turn out of the Bronx. Nearly twenty years before, Kavanau had attended DeWitt Clinton High School and City College, Daniel Schorr had attended those schools, too. He’d always known he wished to be a newsman.
Like any serious journalist, he set his sights on working for the New York Times, and in the most rarefied of jobs, as a foreign correspondent. Editors at the paper advised the ambitious young man to send himself overseas and file freelance reports for whatever news outlets he could. Off he went to Holland, where he contributed stories to whoever would take them, from the Christian Science Monitor to the English-language service of Dutch radio. Emboldened by his experience, he returned to the Times a few years later, hat in hand, seeking a staff job. This time the response was: maybe.
On February 1, 1953, devastating storms swept the North Sea. In the Netherlands alone, several thousand people drowned—leaving a third of the country underwater. Schorr flew on rescue missions with army helicopters as they plucked survivors from trees and filed dramatic reports for CBS radio. In the aftermath, he received a telegram from the venerable broadcaster Edward R. Murrow that would have sent any young journalist over the moon:
WOULD YOU AT ALL CONSIDER JOINING THE STAFF OF CBS NEWS WITH AN INITIAL ASSIGNMENT IN WASHINGTON. STOP.
While it was immensely flattering to receive this invitation, for Schorr, it was the equivalent of catching the attention of the second-prettiest girl in the class. He sent a telegram to his Times contact, explaining the Murrow overture, and quickly got a reply:
SUGGEST YOU TAKE THE OTHER OFFER. STOP.
Rebuffed by one of the most prestigious news organizations in the world, wooed by another, Schorr accepted the consolation prize and headed to the nation’s capital as a diplomatic correspondent.2
Becoming one of the vaunted second-generation of “Murrow’s boys” and studying at the feet of the man considered the master of broadcast news was a fine second-best for this “immigrant from the world of words.” The voice and presence of Murrow, his integrity, his reverence for news, propelled him.
In time, he was sent to the Soviet Union, where he was given a camera and a clunky recording deck, allowing him to file reports for the emerging division of CBS television—the medium, Schorr began to observe, whether he liked it or not, was becoming America’s “giant classroom.” Ejected from the country for refusing to kowtow to censors, the newsman next found himself stationed in Berlin. Tipped off in the middle of the night that a wall was to be erected around the eastern part of the city, he and his producer, Av Westin, corralled a news crew to film the giant barbed wire coils being dropped around the city. Armored cars and tanks from the east rumbled at intersections where barricades had yet to rise. It wasn’t until days later that his colleagues received the pictures, which had been shipped via plane for the long ride to New York, then ferried by motorcycle courier from the airport to CBS headquarters in midtown. Even the mighty CBS then was constricted by the limits of intercontinental communications.
Though he still considered himself a journalist “in television” rather than one “of television,” he confessed to enjoying the “ego reward” that came when strangers recognized him. Like other serious reporters, he had been loath to embrace TV. The glamour of traveling first-class and unquestioned expense accounts helped to offset the frustrations and limitations of the medium that had now become his bread and butter.
“I chafed at the straightjacket of the conventional TV news story—a brief introduction, voice-over silent film, a snippet of somebody speaking a brief conclusion,” he said. “Any story on a controversial subject that is packed into so small a container tends to burst on an interested party like a hand grenade.”
Television, in his estimation, was a “lumbering King Kong that altered the landscape by weight and force, brushing aside complexities and seizing upon a few concrete images”—which made covering a story as important and complex as Watergate a particular challenge.
“What’s the visual?” his producers would counter when he enthusiastically revealed the latest twist and turn of the unfolding scandal. Without pictures, it was tough to justify much airtime.
Far worse than the limitations of the medium in which he dwelled was his discovery that the great democracy into which he’d been born, and the vaunted network that employed him, were rife with imperfection. When his superiors complied with a White House demand not to provide critical “instant analysis” after a presidential speech, Schorr balked, as he did when told to read the names of commercial sponsors, a task he believed impugned his journalistic integrity. Ordered by network brass not to speak in public after criticizing them for what he felt was a soft stance on President Nixon, he felt as if he were back in Russia. Fissures emerged in the house of Murrow when CBS buckled to public demand and aired a rerun of I Love Lucy instead of an important hearing regarding Vietnam. News president Fred Friendly angrily resigned. A scathing report Schorr delivered on pollution in the fishing industry led to an internal inquiry—after Bumble Bee Seafoods pulled their ads—and schooled him in the power of the sponsor.
“TV exists on ratings,” he observed. “The only real standards on TV is in what sells and what doesn’t sell.”
The worst was yet to come. After refusing to reveal who’d leaked an explosive congressional report on illegal CIA and FBI activities, he’d graduated from newsman to news maker, a true cause célèbre. Reporters leapt to defend his right to protect his sources. TV comics and political cartoonists riffed on the situation. Hollywood came calling, offering him a variety of roles as a newsman. He even ranked a crossword-puzzle clue in the New York Times—the vaunted institution that had unwittingly launched him into fame. He marveled that the brouhaha obscured the contents of the report. All the while, ratings soared.
Unsure now whether he was a “refugee or exile” from TV, he set about investigating what he saw as the decline of CBS—of broadcast journalism, of civilization—in a book he titled Clearing the Air. Freed from daily deadlines, he wished to understand more about the relationship between the $2-billion-a-year world of prime-time television and its “brash little appendage of news.” “The reality that television presents, however imperfect, has become, for all practical purposes, the only important reality,” he wrote. Television, he concluded, “was a magic electronic circle, a séance. A force like nuclear energy, its effects could be beneficent, destructive and incalculable.”
Reduced to a mere mortal in the “humdrum real world,” now he labored, like Kavanau, as a newsman without an affiliation. A syndicated column he’d been hired to write was failing. A stranger’s greeting—“Hey, didn’t you used to be Daniel Schorr?”—stung. Occasionally, he’d pick up work as a moderator or narrator, file a freelance report for $75 for National Public Radio, or do a turn on the speaking circuit, where he found being “journalist Daniel Schorr” didn’t have nearly as much heft as “Daniel Schorr of CBS.” Despite his misgivings about Reese and his past connections to that rogue Coors-owned news service, Schorr agreed to contribute commentaries to the ITNA. Having four letters after his name offered some validation, even if it was with an “invisible” outfit whose initials spelled little in the way of prestige.
* * *
If the growing cluster of pins on the map in Donald Andersson’s office wasn’t enough—signifying 465 cable systems now carrying channel 17 to twenty-seven states—the mail continued to cinch it. When it was dumped out each day on the conference room table, stacks were made, one for everything postmarked Atlanta, another, from everywhere else. Fan mail for Bill Tush and the wrestlers, and orders for merchandise—now comprising a quarter of the station’s revenue—streamed in from Juneau to Honolulu, from Bangor to the Virgin Islands’ St. Croix. Ted would rush to the mail room, straight out of a scene from Miracle on 34th Street. “The postmarks tell the tale,” he’d exclaim, as he rooted through the pile for more uncanceled stamps.
So did the growing c
overage. A story in TV Guide posed the question those who already had cable didn’t need to ask: “Why are they watching a Georgia station in Nebraska?” The answer was simple: because they could. Most people didn’t understand how it worked, nor did they need to, really. All they knew was what came out of their televisions—and that now there was more to see. The ad guys commissioned the art department to work up a cartoon illustration of lightning bolts radiating upward from a receiving station on the ground to an orb in the sky, which then showered bolts back down, like rain. It wasn’t quite so simple, of course, but, then again, it was. It was a miracle—TV from Atlanta without being there.
As the seventies marched on, the networks anxiously monitored the public acceptance of HBO and the “Super Station that Serves the Nation” with mounting terror. The government, in whose hands their fortunes rested, kept relaxing the rules that allowed this parallel medium of cable to continue its expansion—these rogue newcomers swashbuckling away decades of an entrenched system and eating into the traditional television audience. Hollywood was keenly tuned in, too, as were the sports leagues and the phone company. Advertisers were also flummoxed. It had never occurred to any of them that one day a brash man in the southeast would wish to air games, and movies, and television reruns, beyond his appointed region—nor that technology would enable him to.
As the old guard argued that the new guard did a disservice to the industry, the new guard argued that the old guard did a disservice to the audience. The arguments all traced back to money and power and fear as technology accelerated and collapsed time and space, destroying television’s status quo.
