Say What You Will (Requiem for a TV News Career)

Maybe this was always the way it had to be.

When I was 19, I broke into the offices of WVUM -- the radio station at the University of Miami -- live, during an installment of my weekly radio show. I raided a file cabinet and my crew and I proceeded to read the minutes of that week's executive board meeting on the air, paying special attention to a recurring topic of conversation among my apparently exasperated supervisors -- a series of incidents which, collectively, were referred to as "The Chez Situation."

The board as a whole was less-than-pleased with, for example, my insistence on jokingly pointing out to my audience the fact that WVUM's faculty adviser seemed to be waging and winning a valiant war against sobriety, and as such deserved congratulations all-around. There was also my insinuation that one of the station's sponsors, a club which had just opened on South Beach, would likely be closed in two weeks then renamed and reopened two weeks later. (In fact, it took about a month to close.)

I regularly ignored the program director's God-awful musical "suggestions," choosing instead to play whatever I felt like hearing.

I ridiculed the University's decision to replace the garbage cans on campus with new, attractive, and extraordinarily expensive stone receptacles immediately after making an announcement that tuition for the coming year would be skyrocketing.

I poked fun at the frat boys.

I advocated mischievous insurrection.

I occasionally threw out a few low-level swear words on-air.

I was kind of a punk kid, and I admit it.

Yet, despite the all of this, I remained on the air simply because even though my superiors may have been irritated by the fallout from my juvenile antics, they usually found the antics themselves eminently entertaining. I was good at what I did; I had a voice and I wasn't the least bit afraid to use it, consequences be damned -- or not considered at all. Being exactly who I was, for whatever reason, seemed to be more important to me than any other consideration.

When I got into television, I did my best to bury my inner-revolutionary. For 16 years I've been a successful producer and manager of TV news, cranking out creative, occasionally daring content on good days and solid, no-frills material on the days in between. I've won several awards and for the most part can say that I'm proud of what I've done in the business, particularly since I never intended to get into it in the first place; by the time college was over, I was playing steadily in a band and fully believed sleeping on floors and subsisting on beer and Taco Bell to be an entirely noble endeavor. I wound up working at WSVN in Miami only after the band imploded, taking my dreams of rock n' roll glory with it. Since those earliest days, I've come to understand that the libertine, pirate ship mentality I found so seductive during my time in a rock band is pretty much a staple of most newsrooms, particularly at the local level. What's more, it's accompanied by a slightly better paycheck (although often only slightly).

Over the past several years though, something has changed. Drastically. And I'm not sure whether it's me, or television news, or both.

With the exception of the period immediately following 9/11, which saw the best characteristics of television journalism shocked back into focus and the passion of even the most jaded and cynical of its practitioners return like a shot of adrenaline to the heart, the profession I once loved and felt honored to be a part of has lost its way.

I say this with the knowledge of implied complicity: I continued to draw a salary from stations at the local level and national networks long after I had noticed an unsettling trend in which real news was being regularly abandoned in favor of, well, crap. I may not have drank the Kool-aid, but I did take the money. I may have been uncomfortable with a lot of what I was putting on the air, but I was comfortable in the life that it provided me. I just figured, screw it, most people don't like their jobs; shut up and do what you're told, or at least try to. Besides, I told myself, what the hell else do you know how to do?

That attitude began to change in April of 2006 -- when I found out that I had a tumor the size of a pinball inside my head.

I was working for CNN at the time, a job I had been proud to accept three years earlier as CNN was in my mind the gold-standard of television journalism. I readily admit that it was Time-Warner's medical plan that provided me the best care possible for the removal of the tumor and during my subsequent recovery, but following my operation, what had been clawing at my insides for years finally began to come to the surface. TV news wasn't the least bit fulfilling anymore, and I either needed to get out of it once and for all or find an outlet for my nascent iconoclastic tendencies.

So I started a blog.

I did it mostly to pass the time, hone my writing skills, resurrect my voice a little, and keep my mind sharp following the surgery. As is the case with many online journals, not a soul other than myself and a few close friends and family were even aware of what I was doing, much less read my stuff regularly. I thought nothing of returning to work at the end of my medical leave while continuing to write online. Really, who the hell knew who I was? Who cared what I had to say?

As it would turn out, over time, more than a few people.

My admittedly worthless opinions on pop culture, politics, the media and my personal past were quickly linked by sites like Fark, Gawker and Pajiba and I found my readership growing exponentially. During this time, I still didn't consider telling my superiors at CNN what I was doing on the side, simply because, having never been provided with an employee handbook, I hadn't seen a pertinent rule and never signed any agreement stipulating that I wouldn't write on my own time. I hadn't divulged my place of work and wasn't writing about what went on at the office. The views expressed on my blog, Deus Ex Malcontent, were mine and mine alone. I represented no one but myself, and I didn't make a dime doing it.

For 20 months after starting DXM, I continued to work as a producer on American Morning, one of many charged with putting together the show. During that time, I received consistently favorable reviews (while in Atlanta I was told that I was well on my way to becoming an executive producer) and, more importantly, neither my credibility nor objectivity was ever called into question. Like anyone who considers him or herself a respectable news professional, whatever my personal opinions were, they were checked at the door when I walked into work. Having grown up in a household in which the highest ideals of journalism were never more than a conversation away -- my father was an old-school investigative reporter -- I knew full well that you couldn't avoid having opinions and viewpoints, but you never let them get in the way of your journalistic responsibility

As far as CNN knew, I was a valued employee, albeit one with almost no say in the day-to-day editorial decisions on American Morning. This held true even as I began contributing columns to the Huffington Post, giving my writing more exposure than ever before.

Then, last Monday afternoon, I got a call from my boss, Ed Litvak.

Ed, seeming to channel Bill Lumburgh from Office Space, informed me of that which I was already very well aware: that my name was "attached to some, uh, 'opinionated' blog posts" circulating around the internet. I casually admitted as much and was then informed of something I didn't know: that I could be fired outright for this offense. 24 hours later, I was. During my final conversation with Ed Litvak and a representative from HR, they hammered home a single line in the CNN employee handbook which states that any writing done for a "non-CNN outlet" must be run through the network's standards and practices department. They asked if I had seen this decree. As a matter of fact I had, but only about a month previously, when I stumbled across a copy of that handbook on someone's desk and thumbed through it. I let them know exactly what I had thought when I read the rule, namely that it was staggeringly vague and couldn't possibly apply to something as innocuous as a blog. (I didn't realize until later that CNN had canned a 29-year-old intern for having the temerity to write about her work experiences -- her positive work experiences -- in a password-protected online journal a year earlier.) I told both my boss and HR representative that a network which prides itself on being so internet savvy -- or promotes itself as such, ad nauseam -- should probably specify blogging and online networking restrictions in its handbook. I said that they can't possibly expect CNN employees, en masse, to not engage in something as popular and timely as blogging if they don't make themselves perfectly clear.

My HR rep's response: "Well, as far as we know, you're the only CNN employee who's blogging under his own name."

It took self-control I didn't know I had to keep from laughing, considering that I could name five people off the top of my head who blogged without hiding their identities.

Uh-huh, as far as you know.

When I asked, just out of curiosity, who came across my blog and/or the columns in the Huffington Post, the woman from HR answered, "We have people within the company whose job is specifically to research this kind of thing in regard to employees."

Jesus, we have a Gestapo?

A few minutes later, I was off the phone and out of a job. No severance. No warning (which would've been a much smarter proposition for CNN as it would've put the ball effectively in my court and forced me to decide between my job or the blog). No nothing. Just, go away.

Right before I hung up, I asked for the "official grounds" for my dismissal, figuring the information might be important later. At first they repeated the line about not writing anything outside of CNN without permission, but HR then made a surprising comment: "It's also, you know, the nature of what you've been writing."

And right there I knew that CNN's concern wasn't so much that I had been writing as what I'd been writing. Whether a respected and loyal CNN producer of four years, like myself, could've gotten off with a warning had I chosen to write about, say, my favorite pasta sauce recipes, who knows. I'm dead sure though that my superiors never concerned themselves with my ability or inability to remain objective at work, given my strong opinions; they worried only about an appearance of bias (specifically, a liberal bias), and apparently they worried about it more than any potential fallout from firing a popular blogger with an audience that was already large and was sure to grow much larger when news of his firing put him in the national spotlight.

It's probably right about now that I should make something perfectly clear: I'm not naive -- I always understood that CNN, like any big company, might be apt to fire whoever it damn well pleases so long as the law remains intact at the end of the day.

Should they have fired me though?

Probably not, and only arrogant myopia would make them think otherwise.

As soon as the official word came down, I picked up the phone and called a friend of mine named Jacki Schechner. CNN junkies will recognize her as a former internet reporter for the network, one who pulled double-duty on American Morning and The Situation Room -- that is until the day she was taken out into the figurative woods without any warning and given the Old Yeller treatment. CNN's willingness to fire someone like Jacki tells you everything you need to know about how backward the network's thinking is when it comes to new media. It pays more lip-service to bloggers and their internet realm than any other mainstream media outlet, but in the end that's really all it is -- lip-service. Jacki was not only popular in internet circles, she had forged personal relationships with most of the big names in the blogosphere and knew her stuff inside and out. Inevitably though, CNN -- particularly American Morning -- chose to wear down and ultimately piss away this asset in favor of an on-air acquisition that fell right in line with the tried-and-true "TV" sententia: Veronica De La Cruz. The network never considered for a minute that new media might behave differently than television -- that the regular rules might not apply.

And that's the problem.

As far as CNN (and to be fair, the mainstream TV press in general) believes, it still sits comfortably at the top of the food chain, unthreatened by any possibility of a major paradigm shift being brought to bear by a horde of little people with laptops and opinions. Although the big networks recognize the need to appeal to bloggers, they don't fear them -- and that means that they don't respect them. Corporate-think dictates that the mainstream television press as a monstrous multi-headed hydra is the ultimate news authority and therefore is in possession of the one and only hotline to the ghosts of Murrow and Sevareid. Sure those bloggers are entertaining, but in the end they're really just insects who either feed off the carcasses of news items vetted through various networks or, when they do break stories, want nothing more than to see themselves granted an audience by the kingmakers on television.

This, of course, is horseshit.

During my last couple of years as a television news producer, I watched the networks try to recover from a six year failure to bring truth to power (the political party in power being irrelevant incidentally; the job of the press is to maintain an adversarial relationship with the government at all times) and what's worse, to pretend that they had a backbone all along. I watched my bosses literally stand in the middle of the newsroom and ask, "What can we do to not lead with Iraq?" -- the reason being that Iraq, although an important story, wasn't always a surefire ratings draw. I was asked to complete self-evaluations which pressed me to describe the ways in which I'd "increased shareholder value." (For the record, if you're a rank-and-file member of a newsroom, you should never under any circumstances even hear the word "shareholders," let alone be reminded that you're beholden to them.) I watched the media in general do anything within reason to scare the hell out of the American public -- to convince people that they were about to be infected by the bird flu, poisoned by the food supply, or eaten by sharks. I marveled at our elevation of the death of Anna Nicole Smith to near-mythic status and our willingness to let the airwaves be taken hostage by every permutation of opportunistic degenerate from a crying judge to a Hollywood hanger-on with an emo haircut. I watched qualified, passionate people worked nearly to death while mindless talking heads were coddled. I listened to Lou Dobbs play the loud-mouthed fascist demagogue, Nancy Grace fake ratings-baiting indignation, and Glenn Beck essentially do nightly stand-up -- and that's not even taking into account the 24/7 Vaudeville act over at Fox News. I watched The Daily Show laugh not at our mistakes but at our intentional absurdity.

I mentioned calling Jacki Schechner -- so what did she tell me?

"Think about how frustrated and disillusioned most of the American Morning staff is."

Not simply frustrated and disillusioned, but outright miserable.

And then she reminded me that in the past year-and-a-half, nearly 20 mid to high-level people have left American Morning; many of them quit with no other job to go to -- they just wanted out of the business. That speaks goddamned volumes, not simply about the show but about the state of the entire profession.

CNN fired me, and did it without even a thought to the power that I might wield as an average person with a brain, a computer, and an audience. The mainstream media doesn't believe that new media can embarrass them, hurt them or generally hold them accountable in any way, and they've never been more wrong.

I'm suddenly in a position to do all three, and I know now that this is what I've been working toward the last few years of my career.

Awhile back I was watching a great documentary on the birth of the punk scene, it closed with former Black Flag frontman and current TV host Henry Rollins saying these words: "All it takes is one person to stand up and say 'fuck this.'"

I truly hope so, because I'm finally doing just that.

And I should've done it a long time ago.

Follow Chez Pazienza on Twitter: www.twitter.com/chezpazienza

Comments

[FifthGenerationLeftist]

This was a a blog post that practically made me cry. I felt remarkably similar emotions when I stopped teaching. The profession changed for the worse around me, then I was fired by a superintendent who had a long-standing grudge against my late father. I'm glad Chez isn't taking this lying down. Fired for having opinions his bosses don't like, and opinions expressed on his own time. God...

[ProfessorDuh]

Contrast this with how CNN treats Howard Kurtz, who also works for the Washington Post. Of course, Kurtz is a lousy, preening hack, so maybe that makes a difference.

[swkidder]

GO FOR IT ... and know that what the networks might believe ... may not actually be true. There are a growing number of us who never watch television to get the news ... with the possible exceptions of Keith Olbermann, Jon Steward, and Stephen Colbert ... we listen to Democracy Now and we read the blogs.
Occasionally I do choose to read the MSN for the amusement value of seeing how they're choosing to spin a specific issue, and to see how close they're currently willing to tiptoe to the line across which lies the real news ...
It will be fun to read the "NEW YOU," and remember .. there's no one more dangerous than someone they almost killed .... breathe, saddle up, and go get em.

[RogerHWerner]

Damn, what a great post! What would be great fun would be to see you sue CNN for false termination. I seriously doubt CNN would win a case when they never gave you an employee handbook; vague language in that handbook wouldn't help them.

I agree that the mainstream media is so out of touch with reality it's laughable. I think what we're seeing in this election thus far demonstrates this and it is the tip of a much large phenomenon. Internet news and blogging is the future. I occasionally read American MSM but when I want news about a specific region, I look to the smaller media of that region since all I see in the American press is sensationalist crap. I find bloggers who are knowledgeable about specific issues since they are more apt to provide useful information: As you've noted, "Talking Heads" are completely full of shit.

I wish you luck. You write well and obviously have something to say. Say it!!

[BritPatJax]

Unfortunately you and many like you get used to the trappings and only really get your voice when you are thrust out of the cosy nest. Nevertheless, better later than never. Google 'Nick Robinson' of the BBC to see what a real journalist has to ask the President in denial? I really do hope that it will all change with the election but in a heavily capitalist corrupt country I will not hold my breath

[seabasstin]

You've probably gotten a lot of these kinds of words in the 16 pages of comments, but I still felt the urge.

Your attitude and your current actions are immensely inspiring and positive.
On the flip side CNN's behavior is the typical reactionary, stupid, uninspired, and hopeless behavior of a dying giant.

I have long felt that big media* has lost a battle they didn't even know they where in.

*: television, cable, Mpaa, Riaa, and publishing, actually even the telecom companies these days.

In their hubristic state of invincibility, they have failed to notice that people have left behind the necessity to rely on them for content, commentary and analysis.

The old modus operandi of large corporation is getting eroded by the wealth of new outlets for News/Conte­nt/Comment­ary/Analys­is/Art/etc­, and the world where Broadcast (one to many) was the main form of communication; is slowly fading into the past, (like all super powers these days) and being replaced by the many to many model of the internet and the cell phone.

"Banzai Daniel san, Banzai"*, keep fighting the good fight.

* From Mr Miagi in Karate kid... it just seems appropriate.

[Crozier]

Of course we agree, sir! For years, the MSM was purchased and resold by the leading global suprasovereign entities. You are a commodity to be sold and bartered with so long as you did their bidding. This prostitution creates a self-loathing that eventually produces redemption.

Good luck, and this retired Anglican bishop prays for you.

[Cuzn]

If we don't demand our right to free speech we will see it disappear. If he wasn't identifying or defaming his employer, what he did in his off time was his business. They gave up any right to censor what he wrote and said, (in his off time), when they failed to have him sign for his copy of their policy manual. They needed his signature on a disclosure that he had received a copy, read it, understood the contents and the consequences of not following it.

Unfortunately, most of us are unhappy in our work, but we have families to feed and bills to pay, so we stay and get ulcers from the frustration. I suspect that is why so many in the TV News industry are still there, sucking up, because they cannot afford to lose their jobs. If you're happy in your work you are in the minority. Most of us can't say the same.

I applaud this young man and hope he will find an outlet for his talent that will not frustrate but will afford him the wherewithall to support his family.

[sam6]

I worked briefly with CNN, 2 weeks, as an Arab I could not take it and turned down their offer. A phone call from certain lobbyist would interrupt live report story over the use of the word “occupied”, the caller had his way when the CNN reporter used the word “seized” instead of occupied. They hated my selections for the Middle East news agenda which would place hot news of the longest occupation in history, Palestine on top. Their strict instructions to me included strict use of the title PLO chairman/leader instead of Palestinian leader/president Arafat, giving prominent weight to radical Hamas leaders and news. At the time they were undermining Palestinian secular Fatah and promoting their terrorist rivals Hamas. Really weird experience.

[MarkJohnHunter]

I had a similar, although small time version of your experience Chez Pazienza. I wrote a once a week column for The Alpena News (Michigan). As it turns out the editors prefer to put public relations statements and opinions in the objective articles as facts. It was my mistake to put facts in my column. I very much enjoy the Huffington Post. The bias of the media is most easily shown by what they do not print, or whose public relations and opinions they are willing to print as facts. In election after election I am aware of what gets in the news media and what does not. Call me paranoid, but there are patterns for most news outlets. Chex, the name of your book might be, IN SEARCH OF JOURNALISM. Mark John Hunter PS To whomever commands the spell check on this site, Huffington is a mis-spelled word????

[skyloaf]

Welcome to the club Chez. Thanks for giving voice to a lot of (former) journalists' pain. An essential function of democracy has been damn near destroyed by rampant, unfettered capitalism. And that rooster will never leave the henhouse.

[Counterglow]

I suspect that although the profit motive was always part of the picture, it is only lately that it has become the all-consuming obsession of television news.

Members of the print media have long held that many television news people (the term journalists is rarely applied to them, unless one is making that quotation gesture with one's fingers) are shallow, egomaniacal clowns so completely dominated by the perceived need to supply visual content that they wouldn't recognize real news if it jumped up and fastened a set of fangs in their asses.

TV news dumbed down the public, and it is usually served up by people who have long since forgotten that glib doesn't mean intelligent. Television news and its "if it bleeds, it leads" approach has been so successful at disengaging the American public from real news in favor of info-tainment and self-congratulatory bullshit that any viewer with an IQ above two figures has been desperately seeking an alternative ever since that jackass Rather took over from Walter Cronkite.

With the advent of a vital, increasingly competent and fact-driven on-line community, that alternative is finally here.

[GulfAaron]

Being a New Orleans resident and Katrina survivor, I've been really depressed by CNN's coverage of what's going on down here. Despite Anderson Cooper's seeming commitment to the region, the worst instincts of profit-driven news reporting win the day again and again. Thanks for sharing this chilling example of corporate ownership run a muck.

[moguling4ever]

Excellent article. My company ironically is a major CNN nemesis in the blogesphere. Our initiative is to help bloggers and citizen journalists better monetize themselves and their blog space. Giving away this content is not very smart, especially if its good content. CNN get over yourself. You're not Youtube, stick to what you do best. Go to http://www.ireporter.tv and join revolution and digg us please

[NewFrontier]

Thanks for the link. I followed it to an example blog that happened to be on Human Growth Harmone and was surprised to read about the side effect known as "Acromegaly" -- protruding jaw and eyebrow area. OMG, it described Arnold Swatzeneger right down the jaw line and neanderthal forehead!! But I dare anyone to speculate about his possible use of steroids in California.

[ericdfields]

You've got my support.

[JScott]

Interesting that Anderson Cooper 'live blogs' on some of his show oops I forgot they have 'control' over that.

[Didi47]

Mr. Pazienza:

My heart hurts for you and the shabby way CNN treated you. I only hope your article will makes its way throughout the net; because it certainly won't be aired on the networks anytime soon. I've lost count of the number of emails I've sent CNN over their unbelievable misrepresentation of the the news. What was once a reliable and trustworthy news outlet, now resembles nothing more than a bunch of puppets repeating scripted comments and phrases over and over again (especially in this election) until it's painful to see and hear.
Their arrogance and obvious contempt of their audience ("The Best Political Team On Television, yech) have made a mockery of the word journalist and commentators. What they've fed the public in this election borders on the criminal in my opinion, and I can only hope their advertisers pick up on the bad taste they are leaving in people's mouths. I now boycott all products advertised on CNN and so do many of my friends.

Your writing skills are extraordinary and you can rest assured, you won't be out of a job very long. Honesty is such a rarity these days, that the public hunger for it will propel someone with your skills into a much better position.

I Wish you nothing but the best and thank you for writing the truth.

[JScott]

Wonder what Ted Turner thinks about all this.
For that matter-
"shareholders," let alone be reminded that you're beholden to them."

Did CNN ever think perhaps the 'shareholders' have a clue about say 'new media', blogging etc.
and about speaking truth to power, doing some investigation and not just the endless 'sturm and drang of crap and celeb pr news only for ratings? I'm sure shareholders (maybe unless they are robots or consumers of FNC) are humans who crave some credible news and journalism instead of the crap they throw on em now.