KNBC-TV’S ‘GOOD GUY OF NEWS’

Any business that includes scowling, growling Pete Noyes can’t be all bad.

“Noyes?” KCBS anchorman/commentator Bill Stout repeated the name of his old comrade and competitor as if contemplating a rare dinosaur. “He’s really a throwback, something frozen in a different time, endless nosing and digging, noisy, hell-raising and obstreperous. He’s one of the good guys of news.”

So very, very good that Noyes, the hard-driving managing editor of KNBC-TV’s “Channel 4 News,” joined retired New York Times correspondent Gladwin Hill on Saturday night in being honored by the Los Angeles chapter of Sigma Delta Chi, the society of professional journalists. Noyes was introduced at the awards dinner by another of the good guys, Stout.

It was well-earned recognition for a 56-year-old toughie who’s spent much of his career swimming upstream and evading the piranha, crusading for high standards in a perilous business where high standards are sometimes only a rumor.

Noyes? There may never be anyone else like him in local news again, and that’s a pity.

A few lethal words from Noyes can clear your sinuses. He’s all rough edges, delivering opinions like roundhouse punches and impossible to silence, as his employers have discovered. From his tumultuous days at KNXT (now KCBS) in the early 1960s to the present, Noyes has always had this goofy notion that newscasts should consist of news.

You won’t find anyone in TV with more honesty or integrity or conscience.

“He created broadcast journalism, as far as I’m concerned,” said Joe Saltzman, who used to work for Noyes and is now chairman of broadcasting at the USC School of Journalism, where Noyes teaches part-time. “Without Pete Noyes, we would have ended up with Geraldo Rivera and all the news would be trivia.”

And without Pete Noyes, a few TV newsrooms would have been calmer.

The noise from Noyes can be deafening. “I’ve been accused of screaming and throwing typewriters,” Noyes said. “But I only scream when I have to deal with incompetency or stupidity, and there’s a lot of both in television news.”

“When he’d scream your name across the newsroom, you’d shake in your boots,” Saltzman remembers about his days at KNXT. “He was a crazy man, a lunatic. He’d do everything but set a fire. He talks fast, and he spits when he talks. You could always tell how well the news was going by his shirt. If it was in his pants, nothing exciting was happening. But as the day wore on, his shirt would start coming out of his pants and pretty soon it would be all the way out.”

No telling what his shirt’s status was when he sent me an angry letter five weeks ago protesting my failure to write about a Channel 4 news series on the dangers of beryllium poisoning.

“It’s now obvious to me that if television news does anything serious and responsible,” he wrote, “the television critics, including yourself, will ignore it.” He added: “I’ve had it with all of you.”

The irony is that the critic of TV critics is a severe critic of the medium himself. As a prime shaper of Channel 4’s news coverage, he believes in broadcast journalism, but is blunt about its flaws.

“I don’t think television news is as strong as it was in the 1960s, when there was innovation,” said Noyes, whose son, Jack, works in news at a Tulsa station. “You go across the country today and all the news looks alike. Watching it almost puts you in an alpha state. Everybody is taking their cue from the networks. Everybody says the average story should run a minute-30 or just 30 seconds if you haven’t got any tape.”

Hence, there is too much TV news emphasis on pictures?

“I don’t think you see stories killed at Channel 4 because there are no pictures,” he replied. “But the length is curtailed when you have no pictures. TV excels in disasters. That’s the strength, you know that. The weakness is stories that take a lot of effort, the investigative stories. TV has a problem with an assortment of images and sometimes would rather take the easy way out and not do the story because it is too complicated.”

Is there too much emphasis on anchor personalities?

“I don’t think our (Channel 4) success is based on personalities. We have one strong personality, and that’s Kelly Lange. Channel 7 has lots of strong personalities. And look at Channel 2, with all those people who are paid big bucks because they are big personalities, and it hasn’t helped Channel 2 a bit.”

How good are TV reporters?

“The essence of a good news show is the people on the street, people like John Marshall, who goes out every day and brings you back a story that covers all the bases and is not libelous. We have a couple of very excellent young reporters, too. But most local news reporters are too dominated by what they think is the structure of the industry, that there is a formula for every story: so many seconds of video, a voice-over and a 20-second interview, a stand-up bridge, another interview and a sign-off.”

And the networks?

“I’m embarrassed by the three networks. They ignore the western United States. They have some great reporters over here (in the Los Angeles bureau) like George Lewis and Don Oliver at NBC, and people over at CBS like Dave Browning. But these tremendous talents are going to waste. The problem is that TV news has no confidence in itself, that it relies too much on the New York Times or the Washington Post or the Los Angeles Times.”

There have been times when Noyes was also embarrassed by his own station.

As for his Channel 4 news bosses, he defines the four-year period separating former news director Irwin Safchik and present news director Tom Capra as a leaderless Black Hole. “Capra is the first news director in some time that has known anything about news,” Noyes said.

Considering those sharp jabs at his own industry, Noyes’ biggest feat may be survival, especially now when cost-cutting Channel 4 has joined other network stations in shedding competent, seasoned news employees.

“I’ve seen so many people come and go here, and I’ve survived them all,” Noyes said. “I think that in the past I’ve had the respect of the brass in New York, and they were afraid to take me on locally. I think that’s was why I survived these diabolical two-year periods of having different news directors coming in here and try to straighten out the place. I’m a fighter, that’s all I can say.”

A dinosaur, but not extinct. “I’ll give it my best shot,” Noyes said. A booming, roaring cannon shot.