He’s Had Enough of ‘Sold-Out’ TV News

For 10 years he was a hotshot, muckraking in the time-honored Edward R. Murrow tradition for the CBS TV station in the country’s second-largest market. He won Emmys, went undercover to expose local white supremacy groups, anchored the news on weekends.

But in the hierarchy of the TV news business, reporters sweat it out on the streets and, if they are good and lucky, win accolades from their peers, but they have little power, little fame and little paychecks--at least compared to the full-time anchors.

So, unable to cajole his way to the anchor desk at KCBS-TV Channel 2, Ross Becker jumped ship five years ago, leaving the network-owned station to accept an offer to front the news at independent KCOP-TV Channel 13.

It looked good on paper. KCOP was sinking millions into reviving a virtually nonexistent news department. He would be its centerpiece--with an anchor-sized salary.

But virtually no one watched, and now, after five years of disappointment, frustration and failure, Becker has decided to leave KCOP when his contract expires in September--in fact, to leave Los Angeles and what he calls its “sold-out, disgusting, tabloid” brand of TV journalism altogether.

“We missed a great opportunity,” said Becker, 42. “The company gave up on it too soon and none of it worked out like I thought when I took the job five years ago. I think where the frustration comes in is that I’m an aggressive person by nature. I drive aggressively. I cut the lawn aggressively. I think we should cover news aggressively. And we didn’t have that attitude here.”

Becker had been hired by news director Jeff Wald after KCOP decided to spend millions to overhaul its news operation and try to compete at 10 p.m. against the hourlong newscasts of KTLA-TV Channel 5, KCAL-TV Channel 9 and KTTV-TV Channel 11. It built a new newsroom, bought all the latest equipment and then designed a high-action newscast in which the anchors and reporters walked around the set.

And the ratings went nowhere. Eventually, the station scraped the walk-around format. Then it cut back news to half an hour a night. Wald, frustrated with the way things had gone as KCOP became part of the United Paramount Network and seemingly more concerned with entertainment than news, left the station earlier this year.

Clearly, KCOP suffered the disadvantage of being last in the news game among local stations. But Becker also chides management for its preference to counterprogram breaking-news events with regular programming, and for not promoting the newscast effectively.

“We were hidden under a rock,” he said. “I would venture to say that you will still find what we found five years ago, and that is that most people don’t even know that Channel 13 even has a newscast. And that’s sad because we have spent a ton of money here.

“But the saddest thing, I think, is that Jeff is gone, and I’m going, and because of the way things were done, despite the best efforts of a lot of people who really do care about TV news, what is left behind is no soul, no credibility, nothing more than just a building with a bunch of great equipment. I don’t think we have much more identity now than the-newscast-where-people-walk-around. We haven’t made any mark.”

Rick Feldman, KCOP’s general manager, had nothing but praise for Becker and his daily efforts in what turned out to be a rather thankless position. But he disagreed that the station failed to support the news. He said KCOP has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to promote the broadcast.

“To some degree we will never be able to have as weighty a news image as some of the other stations, and that has much more to do with how much time they are on the air rather than what our product ultimately is,” Feldman said.

Becker doesn’t believe he wasted his time at KCOP. He said these years have enabled him to transform himself from “rogue reporter” who cared about nothing except getting his own work on the air without editorial interference into a “leader” in the newsroom, helping to shape all the disparate pieces and personalities into a big, sensible whole. And taken away from the intoxicating but myopic daily grind of working on his own stories, forced to examine the entire spectrum of local TV news every day, Becker blanched.

He understood going in, he said, that television news at any station was primarily a “presentation of news,” with very little original “news gathering” by individual reporters. But he said that the compromising and tabloidization he witnessed both at 13 and on the other newscasts sickened him--from the staging of news, such as having interview subjects walk through doors again because someone missed the shot the first time, to presenting stories verbatim from the newspaper without independent verification of the information, to passing off car chases as news when the reporters and anchors know nothing about them.

Now he plans on going back to the Midwest--he grew up in Green Bay, Wis., and worked in Indianapolis before coming here in 1980. There, in some medium-sized market where he believes change for the good will be possible much faster than here, he hopes to make his last stand as anchor/newsroom leader/upholder of the flame.

“We have had a technological revolution in this business; now we need a revolution of conscience and content,” he said. “People are tired of wondering whether it’s true that aliens are about to land in their back yards. They don’t want to be insulted anymore while TV news ignores such major events as the recent Supreme Court decision on gerrymandering.

“But even if some people, thinking people, have given up on us, I don’t want to bail out entirely. I grew up with television news. I remember as a 5th-grader being glued to the television for the Kennedy assassination and realizing for the first time there was a world outside my neighborhood. Then through the Vietnam War and Watergate, I saw the huge effect television could have on people. I still believe in it. It’s tainted and corrupted, but I still believe it can be used properly. I just won’t compromise anymore.”

KCOP’s Feldman said that the station is still committed to news and is looking for anchors to replace Becker and Ellen Leyva, who is moving to KABC-TV Channel 7.