Don't Touch That Dial!
One TV news show doesn't cover car wrecks and 7-11 holdups, and, what's more, it's run by a woman.
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Although Bill Porterfield and Patsy Swank are something of anomalies on television, Lee Clark seems made for it. She is an attractive woman, always very precisely groomed, whose appearance is dominated by the tremendous sweep of her carefully styled, dark hair. She can look, from one angle, as cheerfully pretty as Mary Tyler Moore and, from another, as distant as Lauren Bacall standing at the foot of a long flight of stairs. She has at all times, whether seated or standing, whether speaking or silent, an urgent, controlled energy that seems as natural to her as double clutching is to a race driver. In fact she appears very much the same off the air as on it, directing her staff as she does the show, with pushes and nudges rather than quick kicks, although an otherwise stationary individual might be well advised not to bend over within her range.
The rest of the current staff, varying in strength between six and ten full-time reporters, is a more homogeneous group than the original staff. Like Lee, they are well-dressed, articulate, attractive. They are urban rather than rural, confident rather than wary; and they attack their work with startling enthusiasm. In addition to their skills as reporters, they seem very much at home on the tube, a feeling not every member of the original staff was able to project. "If we were as smooth then as we are now," Patsy Swank said not long ago, "we all would have mistrusted the whole thing."
When Newsroom began under Jim Lehrer's guidance, no one who appeared on the show had had any extensive experience working in television and they all had to learn. But there were also problems in learning to work together. Newsroom was Lehrer's creation, and on the air he ran the show with an iron hand. During the show he sat in the middle with his reporters in a circle around him, and any comment or question had to be directed toward him like spokes coming into a hub. So strong was his control that it caused irritation among the more experienced newsmen who felt that their opinions and comments were generally as valuable as Lehrer's. The younger, less experienced reporters were a little frightened of him. He made them feel hemmed in on the air and not able to come off as naturally as they could.
Lehrer's domination even caused several minor mutinies. Before the show, various staff members would work out plans of question and comment to one another that would exclude Lehrer for minutes at a time. Once, during one of these mutinies, a comment began with one reporter, went to the person next to him, then to the one next to him, and so on until the ball had been passed clear around the table. Lehrer, feeling his grasp on the show loosening, had turned his chair toward each successive speaker until, having turned full circle, he found himself in a panic. The turning had wrapped the microphone cord around his neck and he was choking.
In spite of these brief rebellions, Lehrer never permanently lost control and everyone there knew it. Lehrer, for his part, was fiercely loyal to his staff. He had given some young, inexperienced people a chance and he did not quickly condemn their mistakes. He also protected personal prerogatives. When the station management suggested that he speak to one of the reporters about her hair style, he refused to do so. And when a staff member asked to file a legal complaint against the Dallas County Commissioners, a move that would seldom be made with the blessing of other Dallas media, Lehrer agreed to go ahead.
The reporter Lehrer had assigned to cover the county courts was named Mike Ritchey. He came from Abernathy, Texas, and had worked for a while as a football coach in another small town. He had gotten his first job as a journalist by walking into the newspaper in San Angelo and asking to be hired. "I don't have much experience," he had said, "but I sure can type."
Ritchey's job on Newsroom gave him the opportunity to hang looser than he had before. His hair grew longer and his affinity for freaks of varied persuasions more apparent. At the same time there was a dark moodiness about him, a frequent quality among men who have been raised while pressed between the endless plains and low hanging, heavy sky of West Texas.
Strangely enough, Ritchey was a perfect choice to cover the County Commissioners Court. The commissioners are not a body of the most liberal mind in North America, but they tended to like Ritchey, long hair or no. He had, as a true son of West Texas, a decided country boy affability and charm. He spoke in accents that were familiar to them. "Why, hell," they must have thought, "That boy'd come around if I just talk to him a little." And talk to him they did. One night Lew Sterrett, the county judge, gave Ritchey a message for that "jigaboo" who worked on the show and went on to say that Ritchey could quote him. That night Ritchey did just that, giving the message exactly as the judge had given it to him. The judge was not upset. For once a reporter had quoted him right.
One night in the spring of 1970, while giving a routine report on the commissioners' meeting, Ritchey mentioned that, following the regular session, the commissioners had gone into a closed session to discuss further business. The report intrigued Darwin Payne, another Newsroom reporter, as he watched a re-run of the program later that evening. Payne is both an experienced newsman and a scholar. He has taught journalism at SMU, has published monographs on the workings of the press, and is working on a dissertation on the late editor and author Frederick Lewis Allen. Payne felt that the closed session was in violation of the 1967 Open Meetings Law. After looking up the law, he was convinced that the meeting had been illegal. He checked with Lehrer, then went to the Dallas District Attorney's office to file a complaint. The astonished officials shuffled him from one office to the next until a few days later, after several meetings and some consultations with a lawyer, it was determined that such charges had to be filed by someone actually excluded from the meeting. That meant Ritchey, who was ready and eager. On June 15, 1970, the complaint was filed in his name.
Spirits were running high on the Newsroom staff. Secret meetings were the kind of official shoddiness that other news media seldom covered, much less fought through a court battle. And Lehrer, when it really counted, had stood with them. Ritchey took to calling him "the Chief."
Of course there was great furor over the whole thing. City Councilman Jesse Price was quoted accusing the Newsroom staff of being "a bunch of hippies—not just hippies, but yippies." Both Dallas papers were watching the story and their mail became glutted with letters that, whether for or against Newsroom's stand, all seemed to be angry.
Of the county commissioners, Lew Sterrett, was the most incensed. He announced that he would not answer the summons which Justice of the Peace Robert Cole, under whose jurisdiction the complaint had been filed, assured the press he would send. If Sterrett didn't answer the summons, he would have to go to jail. Sterrett insisted jail was the alternative he would choose.
Whether this move was tactical genius on Sterrett's part or pure belligerence is anybody's guess; but it escalated the controversy beyond the point that Newsroom could reasonably go. It was no longer simply the issue of open meetings that was now at stake; what had started as an idealistic crusade was now forced into appearing a vendetta against one man. Also, there was a movement afoot to stop the station in its tracks. The letters and phone calls to members of the stations' board of directors were getting more frequent and Lehrer began to feel that Newsroom might not survive if it pressed the complaint any farther. Lew Sterrett would seem pretty small fish if no more could ever be caught.
On July 3, a Friday, Lehrer announced in the staff meeting before the show that he had decided to drop the suit. The staff was stunned but no one was hit harder than Ritchey. His name was on the complaint and he was going to have to back down. He was going to have to face the reporters and hangers-on down at the court house, many of whom, to Ritchey's vehement denials, had said all along that Newsroom wouldn't carry through with the thing. It was a cataclysmic moment for the country football coach turned reporter. When the show went on the air, Ritchey, instead of joining the others around the set, sat in the room against a wall where the cameras, as they shifted from shot to shot, would inevitably catch him sitting there in the background, grim and staring coldly straight ahead.
Near the end of the show Lehrer made the announcement for the public. He said that Newsroom wanted no part of the carnival Sterrett was making of the judicial process, that the judge and some of his friends were trying to put Channel 13 out of business, and that the decision was his own and none of the station's management had forced him into it. As the program ended, Ritchey, the hard-scrabble kid from Abernathy who was now in tears, burst through the double doors and disappeared. That Monday, after what must have been a desperate weekend, he returned to work, withdrew the complaint, and prepared to return to the courthouse where he would face any music that was going to be played.
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