Have Aliens Taken Over His Brain?

There was Edwin Newman, for nearly 35 years at NBC News, reporting live on assassinations and elections and moderating two presidential debates.

Here is Edwin Newman, anchoring “Weekly World News,” introducing a story about an island tribe that worships Don King.

USA cable’s new series based on the wild supermarket tabloid might not seem the proper place for a veteran broadcaster, best-selling author and a chevalier of the French Legion of Honor.

But the fact is, Newman is really a wild and crazy guy. He’s having a grand time on “Weekly World News” reporting earnestly such stories as a physician who literally heals himself, a day-care center run by the Hells Angels and a woman who is impregnated with Big Foot’s baby.

“If one gets a reputation for being willing to do funny things, the invitations come in,” said the 77-year-old Newman, who retired from NBC in 1984. “Not very long ago, I was on ‘Murphy Brown.’ I have been on ‘Golden Girls,’ ‘Mr. Belvedere’ and ‘Wings.’ I have worked with Lily Tomlin and Patty Duke.”

Newman also was a guest host on “Saturday Night Live” before his retirement. “I was just leaving NBC at the time so, at my wife’s suggestion, I sang an old popular song called ‘Please Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone!’

“I should tell you I was invited [earlier] to be on the show, not as a host, but to take part in a skit when I was still with NBC News. It was supposed to be a skit about NBC’s ratings, which at the time were abysmally low. So I was to sing a song from ‘Carousel’--’You Never Walk Alone.’ But NBC News vetoed my appearance.”

With that background, the USA Network saw Newman as a natural to anchor its new entry in its Saturday night comedy block.

“I think there is a kind of fun irony with Edwin Newman because he has such rich news credentials, journalistic credentials,” said Rod Perth, president of USA Networks Entertainment.

“He’s not afraid, in his own very dry way, to have fun with the whole notion of reporting in a very straightforward way these rather outrageous stories. [Executive producer and former NBC head] Brandon Tartikoff and I thought it was a terrific idea. Since the Weekly World News is printed on newsprint, we thought we needed a journalist who could be a sort of video analogy, if you will, to the actual newspaper.”

Newman has wondered if viewers will believe the stories presented are actually true. “For years now, I pass newsstands where the various tabloids are sold, I shake my head and wonder do people really believe these things or are they reading them for laughs? At the end of the program there’s a line saying it’s all fictitious, but whether people watch this kind of thing after the credits, I do not know. Some people have expressed the hope that putting on ‘Weekly World News’ as a spoof will perhaps reduce the appetite for the [other] tabloid shows.”

“I hope that the majority of our viewers are slightly more intelligent,” Perth said. “But I suspect there is that chance that some people will really believe that a woman was eaten by her fur coat or a man was really killed at a strip bar by a tassel. If people can comprehend what we are doing and go along with the fun, I think there is a real level of sophistication to it.”

When Newman began his journalism career in 1941, he said, “there was a great deal of emphasis on humor in newspapers in those days. The principal influences on me were humorist writers like H.L. Mencken, P.G. Wodehouse and especially Ring Lardner, so I had an ambition to emulate what they had done.

“I have written a great deal of humor for many magazines. In addition, and I don’t want to sound boastful here, my books on English [“Strictly Speaking” and “A Civil Tongue”] were considered to be funny and my third book was, in fact, a comic novel. It was called ‘Sunday Punch.’ ”

Whenever possible, Newman tried to inject humor into his news broadcasts on NBC. But some viewers, he acknowledged, weren’t always amused.

“I can remember one comment that I made that aroused a good deal of criticism principally from women’s groups. By that, I don’t mean anything against women’s groups. But it was just after Barbara Walters had signed up to go to ABC with a five-year contract. I think it was $1 million a year.

“I happened to be doing the ‘NBC Nightly News’ a day or two later and there was a story about a comparative compensation for men and women. Men were getting more than women for doing the same work. I ad-libbed: ‘These figures apparently were compiled before a certain recent development in the news business.’ I don’t know if the NBC switchboard lit up from coast to coast, but a great many of the switchboards did.”

* “Weekly World News” airs Saturdays at 10:30 p.m. on USA.