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

[jqcitizen]

CNN really surprised me by announcing that Jon Stewart of the Daily Show will be on Larry King tomorrow.
Of course Larry is about as great a 'Softball' interviewer as there is anywhere so Stewart might go a little easier on CNNs quality of reporting news. I sure loved it when he lit into Tucker and Begala by nearly boasting (accuratly I think) that his comedy news is more accurate and informative than CNNs.

[GeoNorth]

I've been there myself on a smaller scale. I have been in the radio business for 35 years. This shit is happening on every scale. Small market radio should be serving the community. What news you get, stuck in the incredibly stupid morning show, is cribbed from the local newspaper. They don't want to spend the money or the energy to do it right.
I have been fired for running a lost dog announcement on the air on a VT station. I was told that makes 'em sound small market. VT is small market. I've been told that local radio can't compete with satellite, iPod or the internet. Why would they want to? That stuff can't do what a local station can do, that is, be local. I was called controversial because, regarding the debate between Merry Xmas and Happy Holidays, I simply asked everybody to stop and enjoy the holiday season in the spirit for which it is meant. Wow, what a potty mouth I must be.
The broadcast industry is in it simply for the money. There is no journalistic integrity at that level. Hell, at any level except for the journalists themselves. And I have been told by the powers that be that journalists, talent, writers and anybody involved in programming is a liability.
At the local level, even the advertisers are treated with contempt.
If you are a communications student, there is a future in broadcasting and it's not pretty. You will learn to say anything and do anything to keep your job. If you want to hold on to your own personal integrity, you will have to blog.
By the way, the viewer or listener is the absolute bottom of the barrel in the hierarchy of broadcasting. Programmers and business people consider the audience to be stupid. How do I know? They have actually said that! They hold you in absolute contempt.
Resist any regulation of the internet or our voices will be silenced forever. It's all that is left.

[hardrain77]

Chez, it's gonna take all of us to stand up and say, 'fuck this'

And it's about fucking time.

[inkadinka]

my opinion of glen beck is that he another in the closet gay republican. I have no respect for the man and his show is boring and stupid. I am so glad I dont have to see his hysterical rants anymore.

[kegbot1]

This is perhaps the best critique of television news and the news business in general I have read in a long time.

Perhaps its because the same thing happened to me as Chez - I lost a good job in print journalism because I dared to write (for no money) without 'permission' on the evil Internet.

I have more comments on this great article here - http://tinyurl.com/27y7bv

Welcome to the club, Chez.

[JerseyBob]

Mr. Pazienza I agree. It's about a free press and freedom of speech. Cable and broadcast programming, and print are being taken to a communications world that might be described as a paradigm shift. Existing and developing technology will have us watching and listening to quality internet broadcast on our large screen televisions. Internet bloggers of various persuations will probably do best aligning with a mediating organization, e.g., the HuffingtonPost.com, that will serve as a portal to opinion and comment. Yes, a portal and not a gate, as rebuttals are welcome. It seems that a mediating organization would be necessary and would serve to expedite rather than limit the dispersion of free thought.
What might not be available to bloggers is direct access to some news as it occurs; that is, straight news reportage as opposed to comment which necessarily comes after the fact. Direct reporting can be made by AP, Reuters, etc., straight news drones; other commentators flesh it all out. More and more comment is being offered by the blogger. We are experiencing bloggers, or not bloggers, who “just happened to be there” at the site of a newsworthy event. Where large news organizations have vast resources and seem to be able to report from anywhere, they are not ubiquitous. Mary Doe, blogger, not necessarily a tech maven (store bought technology) is virtually ubiquitous. Notice cable and broadcast news asking for various media input from viewers.
Credentialing, which has much to do with access, could be an issue if bloggers or blog intermediaries need to “be there” when news is being read by an official. Credentialing is a gate; granted, in some instances there needs to be some administration of a press pool. Broadsheets (most notably the New York Times) are on a road taking them to the world of blogs and the constant mating/and courting rituals that have changed the media landscape. Empowering choice is with the user more now than ever before. Here is an exciting courtship with a vision of what the offspring might look like hiding in plain sight.

[Sciguy]

"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."

"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." "

If these things are true - and I have no doubt they are - why don't you grab a lawyer and sue for wrongful termination? Also, you said you'd never received a copy of the CNN handbook AND you had some (presumably) large medical expenses. Those things are also likely to get one fired in this day and age - but you, unlike so many of us, have a voice! Use it! Find out how much your medical treatment cost, and sue. Find out how many other people never got the handbook and sue. Keep on squawking, and SUE. CNN may not understand ethics, but they do understand money - and lawyers.

[dynadem]

There's no wrongful termination claim here.

[JustMyWords]

True. The only grounds for termination that will stand up in a lawsuit are age, gender, race and religion. Unless you're covered by a union, the majority of states are what's known as "at will" states. Conservatives will usually tell you that's a good thing - by golly, you don't have to sign a contract or join a union to work in this state, you're employed "at will" and can work, or quit, as you please! The part they leave out is that since you are employed "at will," your employer can fire you if and when the notion strikes, for any or no reason at all, with no notice required.

[rixhex56]

I think this article points out a problem that goes beyond the usual conservati­ve-versus-­progressiv­e realm. The problem is corporate greed and, of course, its dominance of not only our government, but also other areas of our society in general. That problem appears in the conservati­ve-versus-­progressiv­e context primarily due to the association between the Republican Party and corporate corruption, which is also unfortunately becoming more and more affiliated with Dems at this point: therein lies the proof of the larger context of the real problem.


I must ASSUME that there are some conservatives, perhaps even some people who call themselves Republicans, who recognize the scourge of corporatism that is overtaking our national values, even as there almost assuredly are some so-called progressives who still do not see the implications of the corporate model working within our government. This is reflected in the story underlying this article --- a producer fired for expressing his opinion OUTSIDE of his corporate employment environment, not because he was saying anything wrong, or even inaccurate, as is done on some of the corporate cable news channels, but because his opinion is opposite of the corporate heads-of-state that be, whose real goal is to NOT inform the electorate, but rather to dumb them down through lack of information AND misinformation.


Given the apparent lack of will among a majority of congress members to hold the current corporate presidential adminstration accountable for its many clearly established crimes, which mirrors the same trend among MSM news channels, one can only conclude that the problem is more prevasive than conservati­ve-versus-­progressiv­e --- it is more like corporatis­ts-versus-­Americans.


Unfortunately, one cannot consider this problem without also considering the fact that there are among us a large number of ignorant, and idiotic, people who are as they are either because they cannot help it, or because they simply choose that way of life because it is easier for them not to think. These people aid the corporatists cause through their unwillingness, or their inability, to recognize the corporatist agenda.

[WoodyGMJones]

And what about the idea that we, the public, own the airwaves; that we are basically responsible for whether the licensees either keep or are denied their broadcasting privileges? Did we let congress and the lobbyists sell off our airwaves without so much as a murmur? Oh yeah, we did...

[rixhex56]

Indeed. And not much coverage of that on the MSM, either, compared to, say, Roger Clemens. I wonder, though, how would have stopped it.

[ConcernedAboutRFuture]

Chez,

I stopped watching CNN when they attacked Michael Moore on the healthcare issue... never was it more clear to me that they are biased and working for anyone but the public.

Keep blogging... I always read your stuff.

TV is a dying...NONART!

[wolfgangmo]

Great article.

And a little note to any corporate advertisers who are continuing to waste money on TV. My wife and I, and every friend I can think of stopped watching TV about 10 or so years ago. That means that there is a swiftly growing number of citizens [sorry dudes, but I am NOT a consumer] who do not hear your commercials and do not buy your products.

Evolution little corporate dudes. Change and adapt or die.

[Jen326]

Chez,

I'm sorry to hear about the way you have been treated by CNN, but I can't say that I"m at all surprised. When I graduated from college, I looked into writing for newspapers and magazines and found that there was an expectation for fluff if you wanted to get paid. I'd rather wait tables for cash, live modestly, and hope that my blog will catch fire and someday bring me some kind of income. Like you, I believe that the internet is the future of news because I trust the news found by other bloggers more than I've ever trusted mainstream media.

I also like that they don't fear us yet. It allows us bloggers to fly under the radar, which is the best place to be.

I'm glad to hear that we have you full time. It's a life of very little money (although with the name recognition that you already have, money will come a bit easier for you), but it's a job that is so satisfying for someone that just wants to share and discuss what is really going on.

Now for my shameless self-plug... www.littlecountrylost.com.

[mjnk]

Ling, long time ago I stopped watching CNN entirely. There's no news there. And you forgot to mention Wolf Bluster.

AS for American Morning...a 'news' show. Yeah and Regis is Walter Cronkite!

[midadstore]

Chez, you won't be doing this alone. Damn! I really liked Julie's input on CNN...I wondered where she went. I may be nobody to CNN, but this nobody will not watch them anymore and will be informing them of this and why. Chez, I look forward to reading you on the Huffpost and wherever else I can find you!

[samboo]

Hell Yizzle.

[Damfino]

Hell, CNN lost me when they canned Aaron Brown. Living in the Pacific Northwest, I was priviliged to catch Aaron day by day as he moved from station to station and, finally, went national. When CNN hired him, I thought, Finally, they got wise. Not a chance. So, Chez, you're in good company. In my view, Aaron was and is a class act and CNN proved it's ignorance then, with Aaron, and now, with you.