Warrior Pose (7 page)

Then I read the stories I had typed up.
Be sure to pause
, I told myself,
relax into it, be confident
. I glanced up at the camera as often as I could, keeping my right index finger on the script line so I could find my place when I glanced back down. The whole thing was still a lark, but I was already on fire. This was a way to make a difference. To be somebody. All my life I thought I never wanted a career. But now this was all I wanted. Every cell of my body was screaming that I had to have this job.

Back in the newsroom, Michaels asked a final question. “I've interviewed ten people for this job. They are all journalism graduates. Some of them even have reporting experience. You don't. Why should I hire you?”

I stared straight into his eyes, hoping to make my gaze as piercing as his. “Because I'm relentless. I'll work harder and longer than anyone you've ever met. I'll make you proud and I'll never let you down.” I meant every word of it. I belonged there. I just knew it.

“Thank you very much, young man.” Michaels suddenly turned formal and even more distant. “Give me your phone number. I'll be in touch.”

And that was it. I drove home to my cabin, wondering if he and the general manager were chuckling at the rube in work boots who typed with two fingers and had no idea what newswires or police scanners were. I doubted I would ever hear from Michaels. I stuffed my travel gear into a backpack and went to bed, prepared to head for Canada first thing in the morning.

I was tired and groggy when the phone rang before sunrise. “Get in here now and grab a camera! There's a guest at a hunting lodge
ninety miles north of here who's gone berserk. He's holed up in a room with his rifle and has already shot someone in the parking lot. I'm sending you to the scene.” Michaels threw all this at me so fast I barely understood a word. He hung up before I could ask a question.

I pulled on my blue jeans and the only dress shirt I owned, laced up my boots, jumped into my van, and drove faster than lightning into town. Michaels was at the back door of the studio waiting for me with a handful of wire reports, a Bolex camera, extra film, and a notepad with directions scribbled on the first page.

“Thanks for the job,” I said as I grabbed all the stuff and threw it on the seat next to me.

“My number is on the pad,” he barked, all business. “Find a phone and call me once you're on the scene. And make me proud.”

I sped north on Highway 101 as fast as my old van could go, furiously glancing in every mirror for any sign of the highway patrol. When I arrived at the scene, the lodge was surrounded by more than a dozen law enforcement vehicles. There were police officers, sheriff deputies, and highway patrolmen swarming everywhere with walkie-talkies, guns, and rifles. Cops manning a blockade at the lodge entrance ordered me to keep going. It immediately brought up all my memories of being manhandled at protest rallies. But this was different. I was here this time to report the news, not make it. I needed to be bold, show them I had the authority of the news station behind me. I sucked in a deep breath and slammed on my brakes right in front of them, rolled the window down, stuck the camera out, and shouted, “I'm a reporter from KVIQ-TV!”

It was unbelievable. In an instant, I was an accepted part of the scene. I was allowed to park right there and move as close to the lodge as possible, ducking behind police cars and periodically poking my head up to film the action. The County Sheriff agreed to an interview, giving me about the same three minutes Don Michaels allowed me when I played reporter with him. Within a few hours, the sniper surrendered. I was the only TV journalist there, filming as he walked from the hotel into the parking lot, hands held high, and followed orders to lie facedown on the asphalt as officers swarmed in to make the arrest.

I jumped into my van and blasted back down the highway. I rolled into the parking lot with my gas tank on empty, ran into the station, loaded the film in the processor, and grabbed some script paper. I furiously pecked away at my story and then, with Michaels' help, recorded my report on a bulky eight-track cartridge, editing the film to go with my words. I finished less than two minutes before we went on the air and ran everything into the Control Room just in time. It was an initiation by fire, but I made my first real deadline. I was transfixed, and in that moment the news business became my whole life.

I soon turned myself into an investigative reporter, using pictures and words to peel back the veneer of society and expose corrupt business and political practices. I caught drug detectives falsifying evidence, local council members taking bribes, timber companies illegally cutting down virgin timber in Redwood National Park. Covering the news was what I was born to do. I lived it, breathed it, ate it, and made it my way of crusading against the society from which I had felt so alienated in my earlier years. I was relentless, just as I'd promised Don Michaels I would be.

Within two years, Michaels retired and soon I was named news director, running the small news department, filming and reporting stories throughout the day, anchoring the six and eleven o'clock nightly newscasts, and even cleaning up and taking out the trash before the long drive home to my cabin. It was around-the-clock, usually seven days a week. I made a whopping $600 per month. Far less than I took home from a weekend job painting a house, but I wouldn't have traded it for the world.

CHAPTER 3

Moving up

A
T THE END of my third year at KVIQ, I was beginning to understand something about the business of being a broadcast journalist. The market size of a television station was based on its audience size. I was working in one of the smallest markets in the country, something like number 198 out of 206. If I wanted broader horizons, bigger stories, and more opportunities, I'd need to land a job in a bigger city. But I had no idea how to go about it. Then one morning I received a call from a man introducing himself as Pete Langlois, the news director of KCRA-TV in Sacramento, the twentyfirst market, and the state capital to boot.

“We want you to fly down and discuss taking a job with us,” Langlois said in soft monotone of a voice.

“Sure, yes,” I said with surprise. “But how did you hear about me?” I couldn't imagine anyone outside of Humboldt County even knowing about our little news operation.

“Your competitors,” Langlois droned. “They want you out.”

There was only one other station in town and they had always been number one in the news. My commitment to investigative reporting had helped turn that around, and after I became news director and anchor, we captured the number-one spot in the ratings and kept it. As Langlois would later explain, the general manager of our competitor station knew the owner of KCRA and had asked him for a favor—to get me out of town.

The job that KCRA offered me wasn't what I expected. I'd be in management as the executive producer of the station's prime-time magazine show,
Weeknight
. It was a light, fluffy show that mixed feature stories from the news department with entertainment and show business reports. They wanted me, they said, because the show needed someone who had been a news director to provide more organization, focus, and leadership than the previous producer. But it meant, they added, that I would no longer be a reporter. I told myself I didn't care. It was a huge jump up in market size, incredible pay, and the only offer on the table. What a mistake it turned out to be.

I gave the show everything I had, always trying to minimize the fluff and inject the investigative journalism I loved. But I was trying to turn a lamb into a lion. The longtime cohosts wanted to keep it soft and light. The reporters only wanted to make the hosts happy. For me, it was like overdosing on candy and I could barely bring myself to even watch
Weeknight
. I argued, sweet-talked, and bullied the staff, trying to make the tone more substantial and journalistic. It was all to no avail. After less than a year it was clear to me, and everyone else, that this job was not for me. When Pete Langlois called me into his office one afternoon, I figured I was about to be fired.

“I don't think you belong with
Weeknight
,” he said when I'd barely sat down.

“I know I don't,” I answered with a huge sigh, feeling equal jolts of abject fear and complete relief. “I'm not happy. The staff isn't happy. This isn't what I was meant to do.”

I confessed to Langlois that it was painfully obvious to me that I was wired to do hard-hitting, investigative news reporting. That's what had come so naturally to me in my first TV job. My passion for the news is what had made me so successful in Eureka.

“I agree with you,” Langlois said, sounding as detached as ever.
Here it comes
, I thought,
the end of my career
. Instead, he said, “I want you take over our Call Three. Bring your intense focus and energy to that and there will be no stopping you.”

I was stunned, elated, and profoundly relieved. Call Three was an institution at KCRA's Eyewitness News, dedicated to seeking justice for consumers who'd been wronged. Staffed by a group of highly
skilled community volunteers, it handled thousands of consumer complaints every month that poured in by phone and mail. Call Three would document their cases, determine the validity of their complaints, and then become their advocate with the merchants or businesses in question. KCRA's designated Call Three reporter would then comb through the resolved cases and pick the best success stories to report on twice a week. The reporter who had handled Call Three for several years had just been hired as a news anchor in another city, and now the segment would be mine.

“I'll take it, Pete,” I said so loudly I thought the whole newsroom might hear me. The producer under me at
Weeknight
took over my duties as executive producer, and soon I was off and running with my new gig.

Once I became familiar with the Call Three staff and procedures, I immediately conspired to make it something unique and more substantive. Call Three helped consumers with things like getting shoddy repairs fixed or a refund for a faulty product. The reports would focus on how happy the consumers were that Call Three helped them resolve their complaints. I chose to focus instead on exposing the consumer fraud and went after the perpetrators with my cameras. Once I began peeling back the veils, what seemed like small cases at first often became big stories.

One viewer contacted Call Three to complain that he had been denied medical coverage for his one-year-old daughter who was dying of cancer. Digging into it, we uncovered a billion-dollar construction firm falsifying its payroll records on government-funded housing projects across the country, paying the workers less than half of what it billed the Department of Housing and Urban Development for their labor. This way, the corporation, whose president had close ties with the Republican Party, could skim millions of tax dollars.

The worker highlighted in our story was told that his government-backed health insurance was invalid because he failed to report his full income, which, of course, he never received. I discovered hundreds of other workers in the same boat and, as a result of our reports, the government ultimately forced the corporation to fully
compensate them. The health coverage for the little girl whose father first contacted Call Three was validated and she received her cancer treatments.

Viewers soon began calling us with tips. Whistle-blowers came forward. We exposed the local Air Force base polluting the groundwater of its surrounding communities with highly toxic solvents, heroin rings with ties to law enforcement, and even the highest ranking Nazi War criminal ever located in the United States—Otto Von Bolschwing. We found him living in a rest home not ten miles from KCRA.

Although I loved my work and went at it with everything I had, every night I was watching Tom Brokaw on the
NBC Nightly News
, dreaming of being one of his reporters in the field. Not a correspondent at the White House or on Capitol Hill, not based at the New York or Los Angeles bureaus, but a foreign correspondent reporting from the front lines anywhere in the world where there was conflict and turmoil. I didn't know how to make it happen, but I thought continually about getting to network news. It was an obsession.

One day, as if on cue, a stranger named Ken Lindner walked into the newsroom. Tall and lean, with an expensive Italian suit, flashy tie, and a paisley silk muffler scarf tossed casually over his shoulders, Lindner caught the attention of everyone in the newsroom as he shook hands with Langlois and ducked into his office for a meeting. When Lindner emerged a half-hour later he headed straight for my desk and, with a million-dollar smile, said, “Hi, I'm with the William Morris Agency and we want to represent you. Can I take you to lunch?” I glanced toward Langlois's office to see him leaning against the doorway with his arms folded, quietly nodding his approval.