A Remembrance of Wayne Satz

It’s curious what you think about, and when.

On a jet to San Jose, Costa Rica--bound for vacation in a gorgeous land where even the humblest houses have TV antennas and locals can get CNN and a Homer Simpson who speaks Spanish--I thought about Wayne Satz.

I can’t say why, but I also thought about him in a boat several days later, while chugging dreamily up a canal in Costa Rica’s steamy, jungly, isolated region north of coastal Limon.

As a FOW (Friend of Wayne), I was strictly on the fringes. I knew him personally only a little, but even on this relatively superficial level, he was someone who was memorable. I liked him a lot, and can still see his intelligent face and hear his distinctive voice. We spoke by phone every now and then, and also exchanged faxes. His were very witty. Mostly, though, I knew him professionally, and followed his work closely.

When someone dies, it’s almost obligatory to say that person will be missed. In fact, Satz was already missed when he died Dec. 24 of a heart attack at age 47, having not been a local news reporter for more than five years.

In these awful days of diminishing returns in local news, the television news business in Los Angeles has a critical need for many Satzes. It has hardly any.

Satz was simply a helluva reporter. At KABC-TV Channel 7, where he worked from 1974 to 1987, his specialty was investigations, the macro kind that swiveled your head. His best work--the story he was most proud of and one that earned his station the prestigious Peabody Award--starred a masked Los Angeles police officer who charged on camera that many of his fellow cops were racist hair-triggers. The impact was electrifying. The LAPD was outraged.

That was years before the Rodney G. King incident and the LAPD-indicting Christopher Commission report.

It was his breaking of the McMartin Pre-School alleged molestation story in 1984 that brought him the most fame--and notoriety--in later years. Although no one was convicted in the Manhattan Beach nursery school case, Satz clearly believed the lurid charges of sexual abuse and other misconduct involving children, and his early reports were uncharacteristically emotional and high-charged. Too much so, his critics contended.

Despite the temptation to vamp inherent in investigative journalism, however, Satz regularly carried himself with dignity. But if he targeted you in a story, he could be dangerous, if not lethal.

Satz was a pin-point bomber. He could dig. He could be aggressive. He could be courageous. He could write. He could be eloquent. He could sell a story on the air. He could be tough. He could be funny.

On Monday night, about 100 Satzophiles gathered in Studio City to celebrate him and reminisce. Satz’s friend and former colleague, John Babcock, was there, and said the group showed a video of Satz, including some offbeat home footage he had put together when Richard Nixon resigned as President in 1974. Satz was very creative with the camera and used imaginative techniques to tell a story. He knew how to visually exploit television’s strengths. He was doing just that in his weekly media critiques, “Cutting Through the Bull,” at KTTV-TV Channel 11, where he was employed at the time of his death.

In contrast to many in the business, however, he never set out to use television, or his skills, to distort or lie.

“He was a perfectionist, and unlike so much of broadcasting today, he was entirely concerned with getting everything right,” said Babcock, who directed the investigative unit that served Satz at Channel 7 and is now the station’s manager of electronic news gathering. “He had a terminal sense of fairness, and he demanded the same thing of people who were around him. He did not tolerate mediocrity.”

Ironically, the great exposer was himself somewhat secretive--he was unmarried and lived alone in the Studio City home where he died--and tended to compartmentalize his friends. “None of us ever really figured Wayne out,” Babcock said. “As for myself, I knew that he was an attorney but didn’t learn until after he died that he was a gifted sculptor, and that he loved kids.

“One of his nephews told me that Wayne once told him that if he was ever lucky enough in life to have a public forum, then use it,” Babcock said. “And, God knows, Wayne did use it, and he used it well and with great honesty.”

Too much honesty for Channel 7, as it turned out. The station that so valiantly stood behind its excellent investigative reporter when he had been verbally attacked by the LAPD and others, ejected him in 1987. As the station’s on-air “ombudsman,” he reported charges that Channel 7 had sought unethically to manipulate the ratings by airing a series about Nielsen families. That the charges were true did not spare Satz from losing his job.

Well, it can be a dirty business, and along with others opposed to sham and hypocrisy, Satz became increasingly cynical about it as the years passed. And no wonder.

When I heard that Satz had died, I did a strange, even macabre thing that I can’t account for. On impulse, I called his number, hoping that his answering machine would click on so that I could hear his voice once more. But someone had turned it off.

It would be nice to report that the Satz broadcast legacy lives on in Los Angeles. But that isn’t true. I returned to Los Angeles Saturday. That night, I switched on a local newscast (it doesn’t matter which one) and saw a reporter (it doesn’t matter who) standing in front of a house (it doesn’t matter where), talking “live” about a crime (it doesn’t matter what) that had happened there that morning.

Local news.

I’d been away almost two weeks. But as in Tortugero, the sleepy Costa Rican village on the Caribbean that I briefly visited, time had stood still.