TV Newsman Bill Stout: An Appreciation

In a field where people on camera grin a lot, he glared, and you just never forgot him.

Bill Stout no longer here? Not around to face issues head on? To puncture balloons? To verbally decapitate the arrogant and supercilious? To speak out for the underdog? To define so incisively and eloquently the strengths and weaknesses of a community whose vastness and diversity seemed almost to defy definition? Not around to growl when he didn’t like something, and also growl when he did? No longer present to punctuate his commentaries on KCBS-TV with sentences that were tiny pit bulls?

Gone? Yes and no.

Stout’s face has been erased from television, but surely not his memory.

The man was good, really good. When he died Friday, much of the very best of Los Angeles journalism died with him.

“Stout was the kind of guy who couldn’t have cared less about his obituary,” said his close friend Pete Noyes. But he’s going to get one anyway.

“He died as a commentator, but he made his reputation covering the news,” said Noyes, the veteran managing editor at KNBC Channel 4 news. “He was as good a newsman as I’ve seen in this town. There are real television journalists in this world, and he was one of them.”

Stout’s death at 62 shrinks the club significantly, though. His continued presence on Channel 2--amid youthful colleagues whose average age has been ever diminishing as the station seeks to attract a younger audience--seemed almost archival in a visual sense. He was so different from . . . them, Mt. Rushmore among statuettes.

Well, look where he’d been, and what he’d done after getting early experience working for the Associated Press in Minneapolis.

“He was a superb newsman, an excellent writer and absolutely fearless, always digging up stories, and he had the best contacts in town,” said Sam Zelman, who was Stout’s boss as CBS News bureau chief in the 1950s and later news director at then KNXT (since renamed KCBS). “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a reporter in the broadcast industry who could top him,” said Zelman, a retired CNN executive, from his home in Atlanta.

Noyes, himself an old-fashioned journalist known for high standards, is just as complimentary about Stout. “When I was a very young reporter, I noticed there was this TV reporter who was beating everyone on stories,” he recalled. “I mean he would walk right in on the chief of detectives, on anyone, and break stories. He reported the biggest stories, the blacklisting of Hollywood writers, the Watts riots, everything.”

When Stout anchored West Coast updates for CBS News in the 1960s, Noyes was occasionally his producer. And Noyes was Stout’s colleague at KNXT, too.

“He was totally irreverent in the newsroom,” Stout said. “There was no news director who could scare him. And he had this great sense of humor that was beyond belief. I tell you he would just rip me apart. He was so articulate, so bright, so quick, that he had the ability to reduce a producer to a blithering idiot.”

“He was even irreverent of television as a news medium, even though it was his bread and butter,” Zelman said. “He was always cranky with less than superior work and he worshiped the idea of having primary sources. He was almost an anachronism in an industry where the emphasis today is on brief content, jazzy stuff and good looks.”

Of course, Stout knew that. The man whose trademark was skepticism had become increasingly skeptical about his own business in the 1980s, ever concerned that if TV news continued on its present path, its content would be eclipsed by form and entertainment values.

Stout had his flaws, and a long history of heavy drinking and smoking had taken a toll. Zelman last saw him in October. “He talked slowly, walked hesitantly, but was articulate as hell,” Zelman said. “He always had something important to say. He was no small-talk artist.”

But a different sort of artist.

Not long ago, Stout got a Hollywood star, an ironic award for a man whose career was the very antithesis of such cliches. He didn’t need the star. He was Hollywood, and Los Angeles, and journalism.