Local News’ Best Friend Says That He’s Had Enough

That great Los Angeles journalist Pete Noyes has quit local news more times than Magic Johnson has left the Lakers. But this time he swears he means it.

“I’m gone, I’m history,” he said on the phone Friday.

I have great affection for Noyes because he cares about news almost like no one else I’ve known. He’ll be thinking about the business and chafing over what it’s become until they crank him into his grave.

Noyes is 67 now. After working as a Navy print reporter for Stars and Stripes in Tokyo and the City News Service here, he got his first job in television news in 1962 as city editor/writer at KNXT-TV (now KCBS) Channel 2. And now, 36 years and a Peabody Award, six Emmy Awards, 10 Los Angeles Press Club Awards, 12 Golden Mike Awards and a Radio and Television News Directors Assn. Award later, he’s had it.

Because?

“The state of local news is devastating today, and I want no part of it anymore,” Noyes said. “It’s corrupting everything I know about journalism, and I feel I have no place to go.”

Yes, but how does he really feel?

If ever a name fit perfectly, this guy has it. Pete? A no-nonsense moniker for someone mercilessly blunt and to the point, and one signaling chin music and aggression, not diplomacy. And Noyes, attached to a movable uproar who straddles no fences and tolerates no fools? Are you kidding? Only Pete H-bomb would be better.

He’s yelled at me from time to time. That is, I think he was yelling. With Noyes it’s hard to tell.

“When he’d scream your name across the newsroom, you’d shake in your boots,” USC journalism professor and Pete admirer Joe Saltzman once recalled about working for Noyes. “He was a crazy man, a lunatic. He’d do everything but set a fire. He talks fast, and he spits when he talks. You could always tell how well the news was going by his shirt. If it was in his pants, nothing exciting was happening. But as the day wore on, his shirt would start coming out of his pants, and pretty soon it would be all the way out.”

However, an oft-told story about him heaving a typewriter at a reporter is absolutely untrue, Noyes protests, adding, “but I did throw around a couple of people in the newsroom.” Too few, I’d bet.

This is no telegenic celeb with groupies at his heels. Noyes has spent his career almost entirely off-camera, either heading investigative units or as a news executive, and was a news director at stations in Sacramento and San Diego. In Los Angeles, in addition to four separate stints at Channel 2, he’s also worked for a pair of short-lived syndicated newsmagazines and been at KABC-TV Channel 7, twice been at KNBC-TV Channel 4 and most recently was with KTLA-TV Channel 5’s “special projects” unit, until it was eliminated this month.

Noyes said he was told he’d likely be offered another news position at Channel 5 in January, but if that happens, would turn it down. In fact, he’d been telling friends for some time that he planned to sever himself from local news at the end of 1997.

No longer do they speak the same language.

“None of the stations in Los Angeles cover anything about the issues that really pertain to people’s lives,” Noyes charged. “They see themselves as problem solvers. They’re big on stories about wrinkle cream and things like that. The major issues to them are crime reporting and freeway chases.”

Freeway chases don’t affect people’s lives?

There was a brief pause on the other end of the line. If Noyes had a typewriter, he probably would have thrown it.

“What I’m talking about are the stories that really affect people,” he continued. “About their taxes. About the way their children are educated. Have you seen anyone on TV do any stories about bilingual education to amount to anything? And one of the hardest stories to sell in television is about medical care. About HMOs. No one is interested in putting those stories on the air. They’re too ‘boring.’ That’s the operative word, ‘boring.’ Car chases are not ‘boring.’ Ergo they make great visuals.”

TV is by definition a visual medium. Without pictures, call it radio. Yet “the problem in television news is that they will sacrifice [something] important if they don’t get the video for it,” Noyes said. “I’ve heard this time and time again: ‘It’s a great story but there’s no video to support it.’ ”

Freeze this frame. You can envision some of the crime-chasing young commandos of local news seeing this and wondering what tar pit Noyes emerged from, hoping that reading his words won’t taint them and that whatever he’s got isn’t contagious.

If only it were.

If only we could be sure that his students at Loyola Marymount will heed him when he begins teaching journalism there next month.

If only his words were chanted in newsrooms along with the mantras of the outside paid consultants he blames for helping pull down local news by telling stations “what news was and what news wasn’t.” He traces it to the 1970s, when the TV generation was coming of age, news was emerging as a huge profit center and stations began turning to outsiders such as superguru Frank Magid’s consulting firm in Iowa for guidance on making newscasters more viewer-friendly and newscasts they appeared in more exciting.

Although news depth was not an immediate casualty, it was about this time that Noyes says he began hearing “boring”--there’s that word again--being used to denigrate stories. Sacramento was deemed boring, for example. As a result, no Los Angeles station today has a single reporter posted in the California capital to cover the critical workings of state government. And news beats have all but vanished from local news, with nearly all reporters cast as generalists with no special expertise.

“That’s irresponsible,” said Noyes. “When I started out, everyone was very much interested in covering not only Sacramento, but in covering City Hall, the Board of Sups [Supervisors] and the Board of Education. We’ve got news directors in this town now who don’t have families, don’t have kids, don’t even have pets. And they’re determining the quality of news [going on the air].”

On the other hand, stations here haven’t the reporting strength to cover stories that require a level of sophistication beyond doing a live stand-up in front of a body bag. “No station in town can pull it off,” said Noyes. “When I started out, everyone had experience in newspapers or in radio. They were very much into news, what news meant and how to communicate it. No one was hired out of college. But in the L.A. market today, you see interns becoming reporters overnight because they’re pretty or of the right [minority] persuasion. Each station is blessed with only one or two good reporters, and most of them are forced to be out doing things they don’t want to do.”

Will things get better? “No,” Noyes answered immediately. “The people in control of the budgets don’t want it to get better.”

Noyes says his proudest moment in news here was earning that prestigious Peabody Award with reporter Dick Carlson in 1976 for exposing an auto scam whose eight perpetrators wound up in prison.

One Noyes remains in local news. Pete’s son, Jack, is an assignment editor at Channel 2. It’s hard thinking of the old man not still being in the business, too, raising hell somewhere, his shirt all the way out, and being just the kind of royal pain that all newsrooms need to remind them when they swerve off course. It’s hard to imagine, too, that at some point he won’t again succumb to his instincts and answer the call of the wild.

He insists he won’t miss it. “The greatest excitement I had was breaking a big story,” he said. “But that’s all behind me now.”