See It Now, and Weep

The planet is getting weirder.

How about this? Fred Friendly, the former CBS News president who spent much of his life exhorting TV journalists to do better, dies in the same week that KCBS-TV Channel 2, the network’s Los Angeles station, does a three-part news series about talking to the dead.

And at the end of a ratings sweeps month in which another network-owned station, KABC-TV Channel 7, courageously blew the lid off bras that don’t fit.

Connecting the dots, is there a message here about regression?

The opening to each night of the KCBS death-talking series was pure theater, with reporter Linda Alvarez’s introduction of James Van Praagh--whose fame is growing as someone claiming to communicate with the dead--followed by pictures of clouds superimposed over faces and accompanied by spooky music.

Just like the movies.

Friendly was adamant about music and simulation having no place in news, his former CBS News colleague Ed Bliss recalled on “The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer” on PBS Wednesday.

“He hated things that were artificial,” National Public Radio commentator Dan Schorr, who also worked with Friendly at CBS News, remarked on the Lehrer program.

Based on his public comments, Friendly was very down on TV news when he died Wednesday at age 82, the stamp of a legendary TV news pioneer still clinging to him like ivy on the buildings at Columbia University, where he taught young journalists for so many years.

Much earlier, he’d been the off-screen Fred behind the on-screen Ed. The Ed was Edward R. Murrow, the more famous half of this pair when they made history at CBS News in the 1950s and ‘60s, with the debonair, chain-smoking Murrow facing the lens and the bearish Friendly deploying it while producing the famous “See It Now” and “CBS Reports.” If there were a Mt. Rushmore for journalists, these guys would be there.

The “NewsHour” ran out of time just as Schorr began spinning one last anecdote about Friendly. On the phone from Washington on Thursday, he told the story he was unable to tell on PBS:

“The first time I ever saw Friendly was in 1953. We went to his office, and on his desk there was a hand grenade that someone had put there as a practical joke. In feigned panic, he ran from his office shouting, ‘There’s a hand grenade on my desk! If it’s a dud, I can think of a dozen people who would put it there. If it’s live, hundreds.’ ”

Schorr said the scene illustrates Friendly’s ability to poke fun at himself and also his awareness that he had a lot of critics.

Like all nags who constantly harangue you to improve, Friendly was a relentless burr in the butt. “You are in show business, but you are not showmen,” he once lectured TV journalists. He was said to be arrogant, egocentric and sometimes difficult. “He could be irrational in his rages,” Schorr recalled on the phone.

But of course, Friendly was right to fear for the future of the business he impregnated with ideals and big dreams, for the title of one of his most famous documentaries--the revolutionary “Harvest of Shame,” which traced the plight of migrant farm workers--applies equally to much of today’s broadcast journalism:

* Where the deepest footprints are left by technology, not thought and intellect. If today’s journalists were to learn one thing from Friendly, what would it be? Schorr paused briefly before replying: “The power of an idea. Everything to him was presenting ideas.”

* Where newsmagazines, most of them largely frivolous, long ago supplanted the long-form documentaries that Friendly and Murrow pioneered on CBS. Recalled Schorr: “Friendly would say, ‘Murrow, take an hour and talk to Robert Oppenheimer [the ultimately disenchanted father of the A-bomb].’ Imagine, an hour with one great talking head.”

* Where in Los Angeles and other cities, local news reporters are generalists who only rarely are assigned news beats--city government, county government, education, the environment, race relations, you name it--which would allow them to develop the kind of knowledge and contacts that yield in-depth coverage instead of the narrow and superficial once-overs these subjects routinely earn. Why bother, when in-depth reporting is so infrequently accommodated?

* Where in Los Angeles, not one English-speaking station has a bureau or permanent office in Sacramento. Local reporters are dispatched to the nation’s capital to join the Lewinsky herd, and to Nagano, Japan, to cover the Winter Olympics--stories available to viewers from the traditional networks and 24-hour news channels--but never to Sacramento to cover the governor and legislature whose actions have an enormous impact on citizenry. The only way these people can get covered is if they make a speech or get involved in a high-speed chase.

“For some of us older people, Friendly’s death reminds us of what were the exciting days of television, and how much of that has been lost,” Schorr said. Oh, come now. Isn’t that about like a toothless old-timer going on and on about the good old days and no one today hitting the ball like Babe Ruth? Schorr: “Nobody could hit the ball like Babe Ruth.”

Friendly would have to adapt to change if he were to exist in today’s TV news. That is, if he could exist. “He couldn’t possibly,” said Schorr. “You know, he was always over budget. When we were working on a documentary in East Germany, and someone wanted to go back there and re-shoot something, one of Friendly’s producers warned him that he was running over budget. He said, ‘Lemme tell you something for all time. If you do a lousy show, the fact you came in over budget will not help you. If you do a great show, no one will remember you were over budget.’ Can you imagine someone saying that today?” Schorr asked. No, given how dramatically the culture of news and its economic infrastructure have changed.

Now come the eulogies, the heartfelt along with the perfunctory, with many in the business--eyes misty, hands over hearts--saying how they’ve been influenced by the high principles of journalism espoused by Friendly.

Without being able to quite recall what those principles were.

Let’s see, wasn’t one of them, never let a news story get in the way of a good freeway chase? Go live when you’ve nothing to report? Don’t let “that woman,” as President Clinton titled Lewinsky, out of your sights? Well, whatever.

Affirming that the spiritual world is not exclusive to one station or network, the fast-traveling Van Praagh was on ABC’s “Good Morning America” Thursday, getting team coverage from Charles Gibson and Lisa McRee. When it comes to the dead, Van Praagh claims to be clairsentient--that is, feeling their presence and hearing their thoughts. It’s not too much of a jump to believe that TV news would be healthier if more of its practitioners were clairsentient about Friendly.

Time does march on, however, and every era has its heroes, witness NBC News embracing Geraldo Rivera and the Fox News Channel hiring that notorious loose lip of the Internet, Matt Drudge, who wouldn’t know Fred Friendly from Fred Flintstone.

And listen, we can’t be dinosaurs and live in the past. Just as Murrow and Friendly are today remembered as giants, who’s to say that, the way things are going, people won’t be saying the same about Rivera and Drudge in 20 or 30 years: Yup, they don’t hit the ball like that anymore.

The line on Friendly is that he angrily resigned from CBS News in 1966 when his network reran “I Love Lucy” episodes while NBC telecast a U.S. Senate hearing on Vietnam. They say that history has a way of repeating itself. We’re not quite there yet, but there may come a time when a president of a news division again will resign in protest.

When the network refuses to carry a freeway chase.