A Day of Digging : Following the nose of two of L.A.’s in-depth TV reporters

Investigative reporting has been around since the days of the turn-of-the-century’s muckrakers, but it exploded in the 1970s with Watergate, when Woodward and Bernstein made the job look glamorous and rewarding. Televsion news soon adopted the practice of using sources, public records--and occasionally undercover work--to expose fraud or corruption in government and big business.

Consumer reporting is a sort of spin-off of investigative reporting. It uses similar methods to keep customers from getting ripped off through false or misleading advertising or products that are inferior or unsafe.

Media observers note a recent decline in the number of such reporters on local television (their work is expensive and time-consuming); several have survived who win accolades and ratings.

But a day in the life of two reporters shows the job isn’t all meetings with Deep Throat in shadowy parking structures:

THE CONSUMER REPORTER

Either through luck or scheduling genius, KNBC’s David Horowitz, 54, breezes through his sometimes 18-hour workdays with the unruffled precision of a Swiss watch. Maybe it works so well because Horowitz’s life--at least his working life--is carefully booked down to the half hour.

At 9:15 a.m. on a typical Monday, Horowitz, up since before dawn, has already been to the gym. Now suited and tied, he’s striding down to makeup at NBC in Burbank, where his face will be sponged with a sun-kissed glow that will remain until after Horowitz’s daily story on the Channel 4 News at 4.

First, though, he stops at an audio booth to do a quick voice-over for a piece running later in the week. “We’re usually working on some 20-odd stories at the same time,” he says. By the end of the day, Horowitz will have done bits and pieces of work on at least five different stories, including an undercover series on phone fraud and a segment testing the effectiveness of a new anti-crime device for his syndicated consumer show “Fight Back!”

It is this segment that Horowitz is working on at 9:45 a.m. in a rose garden on the NBC grounds, where the heat from Santa Ana winds has already coaxed complaints from the jovial “Fight Back!” crew. The popular series, in its 15th season, is distinctive for its humorous challenges of too-good-to-be-true sounding commercials and manufacturer claims (one typical “Fight Back!” story tested rain gear by sending a suited-up Horowitz through a car wash). The tests not only make colorful television, but they have a point, says Horowitz: There’s so much advertising these days, “it’s hard to tell the legitimate products from the flimflams.”

Today’s test is no exception. James McCreary, the inventor of “Dyewitness,” a green pigment that is sprayed mace-like into the face of an attacker, says his product is safe, effective and semi-permanent, not only discouraging the attacker but allowing easy identification by police up to a week later. At McCreary’s request, “Fight Back!” will test the product on Dyewitness distributor John Cochrane, who has bravely volunteered to be defaced in the name of truth in advertising--and free publicity.

With the cameras rolling, Horowitz and McCreary improvise a conversation about Dyewitness and demonstrate the product on a dummy. Then Horowitz announces they’re going to test the product on a person. “Just take a couple of deep breaths,” he coaches Cochrane when the tape stops. Have you ever done this before, he asks. Nope . Are you nervous? Yep .

Cochrane and his wife, who is to do the spraying, run through an “attacker” scene near a picnic table. The preliminaries may be rehearsed, but the actual product tests only happen once--and on camera, says Horowitz. He also explains why he won’t be involved in this test: “For me to do it makes me partial. The audience might be able to say ‘He rigged it to look bad!’ When we test a product, we find out from a company exactly how the commercial was prepared.” For a detergent ad, for example, he says such specifics might include “the temperature of the water, what kind of dirt they used, the temperature of the room.”

About two hours and one very green subject later (so far, Dyewitness really dyes), it’s time for lunch in the NBC commissary, which boasts as a menu item “David’s ‘Fight Back’ Salad”.

With the “Fight Back!” installment in the can, the afternoon is devoted to KNBC news stories. It’s off for a tour of an Altadena home that has been remodeled to the specifics of its wheelchair-bound owner. Horowitz interviews the man and his wife and then leaves his cameraman to record the house’s distinguishing features. He drives back to his office in time to interview a small-business owner who got an invoice for phony Yellow Pages advertising he never ordered. The businessman didn’t pay the bill but wants to warn others.

“I run a race just to stay still with all the mail I get on scams every day,” Horowitz says, adding that 18 years ago, when he became KNBC’s consumer specialist, his producers worried he wouldn’t have enough to investigate. “I told them, if we started today, we wouldn’t run out of material in all of our lifetimes combined.”

His work has sometimes paid off by changing the system. In 1987, an on-air Horowitz was held at gunpoint by a man brandishing what was later discovered to be a very real-looking toy weapon--resulting in state and federal legislation banning the sale of such toys, to which Horowitz lent his support. In November, he flew to Sacramento as the lead witness in a hearing on “Uses and Abuses of 900 Numbers.”

“The key is to make the public aware so that they can do these things themselves,” Horowitz says. “That’s the power of mass public exposure.”

THE INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER

Harvey Levin looks really bad. He’s sporting a bandage across his nose and a four-day stubble. A ratty baseball cap partially covers the white gauze wrapped around his head, and he’s the target of giggles and stares from his fellow staffers at KCBS in Hollywood.

“Cool, Harv, what are you doing today?” asks someone in the newsroom.

“A C&R; commercial, Ernie,” he zings back.

Levin’s typical day refutes the idea that TV reporting is a glamorous business. He works in a windowless office the size of a closet and is beeped on his pager constantly, seven days a week, by judges, cops, anybody who thinks they have a story of the remotest importance. He’s been threatened, sued and run from.

He thinks it’s great.

“Literally, I can’t wait to come to work in the morning,” says the 41-year-old former attorney. “I completely love this job.”

This particular week he’s finishing up a series about, he says, “what happens if you don’t have health insurance in L.A. County.” Today he’s heading for Los Angeles County USC Medical Center to see how long the uninsured must wait to receive treatment. The disguise is to keep him from being recognized and to help him blend in with the hospital’s often indigent clientele.

Levin and his cameraman, David Bush, load up an unmarked van and head to the hospital. Once there, Levin tapes a microphone to his bare chest and tucks a battery pack in his sock; Bush readies the hidden camera. Both refuse to divulge exactly how the camera works, for fear of giving away carefully developed trade secrets.

“I could tell ya,” Levin says. “But then I’d have to kill ya.”

He heads for the hospital, where he plans to complain of back pain. He’s sent to a check-in room down a long corridor, where patients lay on gurneys pushed against the walls. One woman, her name scrawled on a card next to her face, wails and moans ceaselessly. In a perverse way, the story looks good--that is, as if something may pan out.

No luck. The woman in the check-in room tells Levin he may have to wait a few hours--not unreasonable given there’s no emergency--and offers the less busy times he could come back. Levin finds a similar situation in pediatrics, where he claims to have a child who needs a checkup.

Levin decides to cut his losses and try a different angle--digging into private medical clinics. He’s curious about whether busy clinic workers give out prescription drugs without examining patients, and he decides to test his theory at a random location in East Los Angeles.

“What kind of drug should I ask for?” he says, then hops out of the van and goes inside, still in his scruffy disguise. Score! A staffer gives him four bottles of amoxicillin, a prescription antibiotic that can have dangerous side-effects on some allergic individuals. A second clinic also gives him prescription drug samples “for his sick wife.” It’s all captured on camera, of course.

“I don’t see what’s wrong--in a public building particularly--with allowing a scene to play itself out in a realistic way (while the cameras are rolling),” Levin says. At the same time, he can’t help but feel sympathetic toward the people, often clerks and lower-level employees, who have the misfortune of ending up on tape. “I do feel bad about the fact that sometimes the pawns rather than the bad guys (get busted).”

After a rare lunch break, Levin hits the trail again. But a third, fourth and fifth clinic refuse to part with their prescription drugs.

How often does he set out on a story and come up with nothing? “It happens,” he says, although usually (including today) he has enough insider information and background research to warrant an investigation.

“We’ve ruined people’s lives. When you’re doing a story that could have that kind of impact, you have to do careful research.”

As afternoon approaches, and with only the first two clinics bearing out his theory, Levin decides to kill the story. As it is, he already has three parts to his series, at least one of which is going to prove very embarrassing to the county. (“You’re just a spoiled kid who never learned how to control himself,” says one mental health worker when Levin goes in asking for help). Anything else would have just been icing.

“It’s sort of like mining for gold,” says Levin, whose stories--including a recent series on worker’s compensation fraud--have also resulted in legislation and policy changes. “You can’t want a conclusion. Had I wanted a conclusion, I could’ve gotten one,” he says. “But these things have to be airtight.”

Seven More

These aren’t the only two reporters digging around the Los Angeles area.

Local consumer reporters: Judd McIlvain on KCBS, Larry McCormick on KTLA and Bill Gephardt on KCAL.

Local investigative reporters: Chris Blatchford on KCBS, Larry Attebery on KCOP, Furnell Chatman on KNBC and Patrick Healey on KNBC.