Category Archives: radio

Fifty 

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It was 5:55 a.m.  Fifty years ago today, I turned on the microphone, pushed a button on the cart machine to play the theme, and said to people throughout Missouri, “This is news on the Missourinet….” for the first time.

We’re going to tell you the story of how it all started and some of the things that it turned into. This will be a long entry.  But half a century is a long time and no, it does not seem like only yesterday.

This entry runs to about 15-16 printed pages, so you will be forgiven if you decide it’s not worth finishing if you start.  But the company isn’t doing anything to celebrate this anniversary, so I’ve decided to put some things on the record. Voluminous things and I apologize for being voluminous. But The Missourinet and the people who made it deserve a historical accounting.

All we did was revolutionize the way Missourians learned about their state government, their candidates, their office-holders as well as the daily flow of events throughout the state.  We lived by the second hand and by the events, some scheduled and some random, and a few were tragedies that put us to tests and challenged our capabilities to respond. But respond we did.

The Missourinet was a dream of my former assistant news director at KLIK in Jefferson City, a station that has since become just one more format in a building full of formats in Columbia, one of the hundreds of stations owned by one of the larger radio station groups in the country.  Clyde Lear was the first Plan B graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism, a program that let people do a special project instead of writing a thesis.  I probably would have a master’s degree today if that option had been available in my time at the Journalism School.  But as time went by, I found that doing radio was more interesting than writing a big paper about some arcane issue in the business.  Clyde’s project was how to do a statewide radio news network.

A report Clyde did for KOMU-TV while he was a student shows some of the roots of the company that he, Derry, and others founded.  The creation of a broadcast center on the first floor of the Capitol was a significant development, as you will see.

Bing Videos

Clyde, who earned enough money in the summers selling religious books to finance much of his college education, recalled on his own blog many years later:

My first “run” at starting a radio network failed. It happened in the fall of 1968 between my final book summer and starting at KLIK. My idea was a simple one. I’d charge each station an average of $10.00 per week for feeding them personalized stories from Missouri’s capital city. Bigger stations would pay more; smaller markets less. All I needed was 20 of the some 70 markets to earn $200 per week; pretty good pay in those days. So, I started selling; driving east on I-70 toward St. Louis. KWRE, Warrenton signed on; then St. Louis’ powerhouse rocker, KXOK; then Farmington; then another along I-55 and then Cape Girardeau. At Sikeston in the southeast corner of the state I hit a snag. The owner was a board member of the Missouri Broadcaster’s Association and he reported that he thought the MBA was going to start its own news network. He suggested I chat with the President of the MBA over in Joplin — on the other side of southern Missouri. I remember clearly driving all night for an early morning meeting with this guy who confirmed that most certainly the MBA was getting into the radio network business and there wasn’t a chance I’d succeed. So, I drove home. Five hours. A failure. And dejected. The next day I applied for and got my $85/week job at KLIK. The rest of the story is that the MBA never moved on its scheme. But I’d had a taste; learned tons; and four years later was much wiser.

Just down the hall from us in that century-plus old building at 410 East Capitol Avenue in Jefferson City, was the office of farm Director Derry Brownfield, who had dreams of doing some kind of agricultural marketing program throughout the state.

When I met Derry, I thought he had the perfect name for a farm broadcaster.

Clyde was a terrific reporter and as a Jefferson City native, he had a background in the city I did not have. We made a great team. Both of us were committed journalists, aggressive, creative—and newlyweds.  Clyde left us after a couple of years (to sell driveway sealer for a local lumber dealer—-which might help you understand how paltry his salary was) but he stayed in touch with Derry and with me.

He and Derry got some financial backing to put a farm network on the air on January 2, 1973. They called it Missouri Network, Inc.  Derry did the broadcasting. Clyde was the engineer, manager, salesman and whatever else needed be done. They started with just six affilaites, but  before too long they had a lot of stations and when they started picking up affiliates outside Missouri, they had to change the name.

And that’s where the Brownfield Network began. Today it is known as Brownfield Ag News and bills itself as “the largest, and most listened-to ag radio network in the country with more than 600 affiliate radio stations across Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, South Dakota, Wisconsin, and the Delta region.”

“The Delta Region” originally was The Delta Net, a specialty network for Missouri’s bootheel and farming areas around it where the crops are a little different—cotton for example—that went on the air a year after Derry’s first broadcast.

By early 1974, Clyde and Derry’s project was strong enough for them to move toward creation of a news network.  The Missourinet, they decided to call it.  Clyde asked me to be his news director.  I put him off because the CBS Regional Vice President and KMOX General Manager Robert Hyland had told me that the station in St. Louis wanted to “bring you in” when there was a news department vacancy. I believed it and so did then-news director Bob Hardy but as the months went by and Hardy moved more to the programming side, and a new news director took over, it became apparent I had been misled.

So I agreed to work for Clyde.

(An early ad from Missouri Life, which the company owned until it cost too much to keep. It flourishes today under another generation or two of owners.)

The only thing close to a statewide radio network that existed before that was something that was haybaled together once every four years for a gubernatorial inauguration.  The Missouri Broadcasters Association arranged all the necessary phone lines for stations throughout Missouri to pick up the KLIK broadcasts of the parade and the ceremonies at the Capitol.

But a full-time network focusing on state government and politics that also picked up stories from affiliates throughout Missouri—a state version of the national networks—was revolutionary in Missouri broadcasting.

Clyde and Derry had built so much confidence in the industry that The Missourinet started with something like 36 affiliates.

I was the seventh employee of the company, the sixth on the staff  at the time because one of the early ones had stayed only briefly and was gone when I arrived. I thought it would be great, at least for a while, to work from 8-5 getting things set up and hiring two other reporters.

Not so fast, Bob—Derry had gone to Rome to cover the World Food Conference.  So my first day started before 6 a.m. and I had to drive to Brownfield’s farm off of Route 179 just past Marion where a studio had been set up in a house originally intended to be a residence.  My first broadcasts were farm news.  Thankfully our other farm broadcaster, Don Osborne, did the markets.  I knew how to do news but I didn’t know a pork belly from a tenderloin, so that worked out well.

When Derry got back, I went to work on the state network side.  The first thing we had to do was think of a new name for a history show I had done on KLIK called “Missouri in Retrospect.”  The station still had the original scripts but I had copies retyped by the station secretary and it was always our plan to do a network version of the show. We kicked around several ideas before slightly paraphrasing the title of Bernard DeVoto’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Across The Wide Missouri. I suggested substituting “our” for “the,” and the rest is, well, history.

It took a lawsuit to allow us to run the program. The manager of KLIK maintained I had done the program as part of my employment there and thus the station owned all the rights to it—although the program began as a voluntary effort on my part to commemorate Missouri’s sesquicentennial in 197I and I had kept doing it voluntarily until I left with the station never telling me I had to keep doing it.  So we had a little lawsuit that let us run the show on the network while the station had someone else reading my scripts.  We finally got it settled without a hearing.

One day, when Clyde was working at KLIK, he looked across the table that separated our desks and said, “You should put this in a book.”  Eventually, there were three.

One day we went to St. Louis to meet a fellow with a synthesizer to create the opening and closing themes for our newscasts.  We settled on a jazzed-up version of the first five notes of The Missouri Waltz, the state song. In 1976 I heard someone comment that it’s a lousy state song, languid and reeking of the old South and having nothing to do with Missouri except being a song about a song that someone learned while sitting on their mammy’s knee, “way down in Missouri where I heard this melodeeeeeee.”  I immediately agreed but not until relatively recently have I heard something immeasurably better—The Missouri Anthem sung by Neal E. Boyd, the young man who won the America’s Got Talent contest.  Neal died in 2018 at the age of 42. There’s a video of him made when he was running for a legislative seat—he ran twice and lost both times—in which he sings the anthem: Neal E. Boyd and Brandon K. Guttenfelder – MISSOURI ANTHEM

After that we had to find a studio, furnish it, hire the other two reporters, and let the world know about us.

The original Carnegie library in Jefferson City was about to move into its new building and had furniture to sell.  The U-shaped circulation desk struck me as the ideal studio piece. We also bought a big two-sided library shelf.  A few days before we went on the air the three members of the news staff exhausted themselves trying to get that big U-shaped desk up a flight of stairs, around a corner to the left and then through a door on the right.  It took all day and we finally took the thing apart enough to get it in.

We didn’t have regular soundproofing materials for the studio so we put carpet on the floor and on all the walls; the orange and red shag design looked okay in the 70s but by the time we left 216 East McCarty Street to move into an attic of an old house across the street, that carpet looked sooooooo 70s.

(The original cast in what is now a Missouri Bar office that once was our newsroom—-with a piece of the “soundproofing.”)

Down on the first floor of what had once been a funeral home was affiliate KWOS. The station break room had a drain in the floor.  It was next to the hand-operated elevator that brought caskets from the display room, down the hall from the Missourinet office, to be used by those who had been prepared in the later KWOS break room.

It wasn’t until a few years ago that we got a group picture taken of the three of us who were the Missourinet that first day.

The first reporter we hired for the Missourinet was Jeff Smith, who had worked with us at KLIK for a while before going to Illinois to find more profitable employment.  And we also hired a young reporter from KRKE in Albuquerque named Charles Morris.  Jeff much later retired as a VP with Northwest Airlines and Chuck went on to a long career in religious broadcasting, recently retiring as the voice of Haven Ministries.  Our get-together a few years ago was the first time we’d been back together in the better part of four decades. That’s Charles on the left, Jeff, me, and Clyde on the right. Frankly, I think we look pretty good, fifty years along.

I don’t think it ever occurred to any of us that this thing might not make it.  I like to say we materialized Clyde’s dream.

We went on the air on January 2, 1975. We had spent the week before that doing interviews and gathering actualities for our first newscasts.  We spent a day “dead-rolling” our programs—newscasts at :55 with repeats at five minutes past the hour (the 7 a.m. newscast was stretched an additional five minutes in those days when stations did longer newscasts, in case anybody wanted to stick with us for the extra time) and again on the half-hour—-except during the noon our when the third feed went out at 12:29 because the farm network had a show that was fed from the Centertown office at 12:35.  Our second newscast on the first day featured Governor Bond welcoming us to the Missouri airwaves and saying a nice thing or two about us.

We were everywhere.  We sent people with the Missouri delegations to the national conventions. When a tornado hit Neosho not long after we went on the air, we sent Chuck to Neosho to give us live reports.  We were in the House and the Senate every day and often would be at the Capitol for night committee hearings when the common folks got to tell their stories about potential legislation and we were recording, recording, recording so listeners could hear the voices of those shaping their public policy.

At the time, the Capitol Press Corps was made up of guys who’d been around for years with two wire services, two newspapers from St. Louis and two more from Kansas City with other newspaper reporters from Cape Girardeau, Springfield, Joplin and St. Joseph. There was some
“who are these guys” questions and there was some skepticism that we would last.  We were a completely new animal and sometimes—because we hadn’t been around very long—we asked some impertinent questions.

People throughout the state heard their legislators arguing about bills. They heard the governor’s voice talking about issues.  They heard the state epidemiologist talking about the Swine Flu, the Revenue Director updating the number of income tax returns being filed (with the assistance of United Press International Bureau Chief Steve Forsythe, we embarrassed one Director of Revenue by having the department mail somebody’s tax return to a stranger).  And our affiliates provided stories from all corners of the state.

Some members of the House didn’t like it when they heard that their voices in debate were being broadcast on the radio but we quickly overcame that.  Once, the chairman of a Senate Committee—William Baxter Waters—demanded that I remove a microphone from a witness table at a hearing. He and I worked that out right afterward and we never had another problem with recording hearings.

There were few hearing rooms at the Capitol when we set up operations, which meant a lot of committees met at night because there was no place to hold hearings in the daytime. The House sometimes had hearings in the Capitol restaurant in the basement because it could hold a pretty good number of people.  It worked out well—until the refrigerators and freezers motors kicked in and unless you were face to face with the committee, you couldn’t hear anything.

Sometimes we had hearings in the legislative library, a wide-open room with the witness table facing the windows and the audience sitting behind them It’s a beautiful place (more beautiful now that it’s been restored to its original colors) but the acoustics were horrible.  Those of us sitting behind the witness struggled to hear what was being said. I had headphones plugged into my SONY 110B cassette recorder, so I was better off.

House Appropriations Committee meetings were in the House Lounge with the large committee seated at a c-shaped section made up of several tables to the left of the entrance. The witness sat at a table across from the entrance and others, including me, sat behind them, to the right. When things got boring, which was most of the time, I would find myself looking at part of the Benton mural and a few minutes later I would realize I was looking at another segment. Several years later when I wrote a book about the mural, I discovered Benton designed the painting to draw the viewer’s eyes through it.

There also were hearings in the Highway Department hearing room a block away, in the rotunda, and at least once, in the House chamber.

One hearing in the Senate Lounge—on the Equal Rights Amendment—was packed and undoubtedly was far beyond fire safety standards.  The Senate committee was around a couple of tables on a platform on the left side from the entrance and I spent the hearing account halfway under the committee table, right in front of the table that witnesses who struggled through the crowd would stand at to testify.

We were doing primary election returns in 1976 when Congressmen Jim Symington and Jerry Litton and former Governor Warren Hearnes were competing for the Democratic nomination to succeed the retiring Stuart Symington, Jim’s dad.  It appeared Litton, a cattle farmer from Chillicothe, had pulled off an upset when we got a telephone call. There had been a plane crash at the Chillicothe airport. We immediately suspected the worst because we knew Litton was staying at home until the numbers came in and then planned to fly to Kansas City for a victory party.  We worked the phones and wound up talking to the driver of the ambulance that had gone to the scene. He confirmed there were no survivors.  Litton and his family all died along the pilot and the pilot’s son.

A few days later we arranged to broadcast the Litton funeral.

Twenty-four years later, Nancy and I were at her sister’s house in Albuquerque, decompressing after a week in the back country of Colorado mapping ancient pueblos and rock art sites, when the KOB-TV newscaster announced that the plane carrying Missouri Senate candidate Mel Carnahan was missing.  We switched over to CNN and it was reporting the plane had crashed. I called the newsroom and everybody was there—including Clyde.  I told Brent Martin, my managing editor, to find Lt. Governor Roger Wilson and stick with him because he was going to be sworn in as governor that night if worst came to worst.  Brent gave Clyde a recorder and sent him to the Capitol.  Roger didn’t want to say much but Clyde, the old fire horse of a journalist got a brief interview from him anyway.

Nancy and I got a little sleep and then drove 996 miles from Albuquerque to Jefferson City the next day. Brent told me later that when he went on the air at 5:55 that morning for our first newscast, he had to stop and remind himself that thousands of Missourians would be hearing for the first time that their governor was dead.

Our Chief Engineer, Charlie Peters, spent the next day getting phone lines installed the capitol for the big funeral that was expected.  By then the word was out that President Clinton and Vice President Gore would be attending the funeral, along with a large number of those I referred to as “the stars of C-SPAN.”  Workers at the Capitol had worked hard to get aluminum stands set up for photographers and TV cameras and facilities for radio and other media.  One of the Carnahan aides complained that the  Secret Service had gotten involved and, “It was secret and not very much service.” We had a little set-to with them when they said we couldn’t broadcast from our planned location. I think the Carnahan folks intervened because the media stayed put.

The funeral was on a beautiful day three weeks before the election and it was outdoors on the south lawn. Clinton, Gore, and members of the U. S. Senate and the House of Representatives walked right past our broadcast position. The AP took a picture of the procession and I’m standing right at the fence, broadcasting what I was seeing.

Two events. Two plane crashes.  I believe they changed the course of Missouri politics.  People have asked me what were the biggest stories the Missourinet covered.  The flood of 1993 was a huge and long=running story.  But the most important stories of the first half-centuries of The Missourinet were the most important ones we covered.

It was a difficult event to broadcast because I had allowed myself to get closer to the Carnahans than I did to anyone else I ever covered. Jean kept me up to date on the book she was writing about First Ladies and I gave a couple of speeches at special events there.  The governor’s coffin was in the mansion’s main hallway and I, as the radio pool reporter, was in the library to the left of the hallway as you enter the front door.  Jean came down to welcome the governor’s office staff and when she came in, she saw me in the library and came over and hugged me and said, “We’re so glad we got to know your son.”

Our son, Rob, was a flight instructor at the time (now a Southwest Airlines Captain) and one evening during the campaign, when Governor Carnahan showed up to fly a light plane to Hermann—he hadn’t had his pilot’s license very long, I don’t think—where was going to meet Jean and their Highway Patrol security officer and go on to a fundraiser in St. Louis. Somebody had to fly the plane back to Columbia.  But when they got to Hermann on that hot summer night, the plane’s engine wouldn’t refire.  The Governor invited Rob to go into town with them and have dinner together. And Jean remembered that when she saw me in the library on a day that she had the heaviest of hearts.

There have been other funerals at the capitol, only a few, and none had a greater influence on What Missouri—and maybe the nation—would become.

Carnahan had gone to St. Louis three weeks before the election for a fund-raiser and then was headed to southeast Missouri for another one when the plane went down.  Many years later, I met the man who hosted the fundraiser in St. Louis and he told me that Carnahan announced during the meeting that he had, for the first time, pulled ahead of John Ashcroft in the race for Senate.

The crash was a huge problem for Ashcroft. He did the honorable thing by pulling all of campaign commercials and not campaigning for the last three weeks.  It was too late to put somebody else’s name on the ballot and on election night, I was anchoring our coverage when, along about midnight the last big slug of votes came in just before we went on with that hour’s report. I remember thinking, “My God, he’s done it.”

We covered a lot of important stories in the first 50 years of The Missourinet. Those were probably the most consequential stories.

Telephone lines were the lifelines of our operation when we started. But as the Brownfield Network expanded into other states, we had to look at an alternate distribution system because the phone bills were getting financially difficult.  Satellite technology was just catching on and Clyde and the other company officials decided we had to distribute our services by the bird.  Our first satellite dish was set up behind the office at 216. The Missourinet and Brownfield Net became the first broadcast networks, including the national ones, to be distributed entirely by satellite.

A bigger uplink dish was installed at the farm office.  In 1989, as we consolidated the farm and news divisions in the one building at 505 Hobbs Road, the company hired a big-lift helicopter company to airlift the big dish from the farm to the new office site.  I think there still is a video on Youtube that shows what happened—-that shortly after the helicopter lifted the dish off and headed toward town, one of he retaining bolts snapped and the added eight was more than the others could hold so the whole thing fell a few hundred feet into a farm field with a disastrous “crunch” and our dish became material for recycling.  Fortunately, the incident happened early so the dish didn’t fall on top of road, a home, or even a shopping mall.  We used a portable uplink until we got all of the insurance stuff settled and built a whole new one at 505.

One day we got job application filled out in pencil from a kid working our affiliate in Lexington. When we were far enough along to hire a sports director, we brought him in.  His name was (and still is) John Rooney.  Each morning, after I had finished the major newscast and John had finished his 7:20 sports report, he and I would make a fast trip to the Yum-Yum Tree up on High Street to pick up a version of a sausage, egg, and cheese biscuit and a diet cola drink called TAB.  We’d be back in plenty of time to do the 7:55 newscast.

John later teamed with another up and coming young sports broadcaster for some of our early Missouri Tiger basketball broadcasts.  Both John and Bob Costas went on to long careers in major sports broadcasting. John, of course, has been in the St. Louis Cardinals broadcasting booth for a long time.

After a few years at 216, we moved across the street into a house at 217 E. McCarty. The news department was in the attic. Our studios were one floor down. It was dark up there so Clyde installed a skylight, which was fine until summer arrived and that old attic, as attics do, got hot, really hot. There were times when I’d send some members of the news staff to the kitchen to cool off. We finally got up on a ladder and scotch-taped some wire-service fanfold paper to the ceiling to deflect some of the sun’s rays and heat.

We moved to 505 Hobbs Road, the present headquarters of the two networks, in 1988-89.  That place became the nerve center of a major broadcasting corporation that was moving to become one of the nation’s dominant entities in collegiate sports radio and is today THE largest.

As time went by and as technology changed, my House reporter—Travis Ford—convinced the Speaker to let us run live floor debate on our web page. I did the same with Senate leader Jim Mathewson.  A few years later, we convinced the Missouri Supreme Court, which only recently had agreed to let people record and film its hearings, let us stream arguments before it. I’m not sure if we were on the internet for the trial of impeached Secretary of State Judith Moriarty, but I do know we recorded the whole thing. The recordings are in the oral history archives of the State Historical Society in Columbia.

When the state re-instituted the death penalty with legal drug injections as the means, we knew we had to cover executions because we believed the state should not inflict its most severe penalty without statewide news media present, and by then UPI had faded away, leaving us and the Associated Press as the only statewide media organizations. The Missourinet’s Dan McPherson covered the first one—which was done in the gas chamber at the old penitentiary (they couldn’t use gas because the seal around the door to the chamber had rotted away and witnesses as well as the honored guest would all be executed so a lethal cocktail of three drigs ws used for George “Tiny” Mercer, who was about as bad as they come.  Dan was one of the pool reporters that covered the event and reported to the large number of other media folks what had happened—and there was a large crowd for the first execution in more than a decade. Dan is one of three of our former reporters who had to learn  new way of writing and thinking when they went to law school. He’s been an assistant attorney general for a long time.

In 2009, I covered the execution of Dennis Skillicorn, one of 22 executions I covered, first in Potosi and then in the newer prison at Bonne Terre.  Executions were done at midnight then (now they’re scheduled for 6 p.m.) and reporters then, and now, cannot use cell phones during the event itself—or other recording or photographic devices.  I kept notes of the times various events occurred that night and afterwards, in my motel room, I sent out a series of tweets doing a chronological recounting of events.  I think I might have been the first reporter in the world to tweet an execution.

And it goes on through the pronouncement of death, interviews (if there were any) of survivors of his victims and eventually with me leaving the prison.

It got a lot of reaction. Some thought it was gruesome. Some thought it was a revelation. Some were critical, including some anti-death penalty people in Europe—as I recall.  I only did this once, not because of any bad reaction but because when executions were finished and I was back in my motel room, I had to write my stories and feed them back to Jefferson City for the morning newscasts. By then it would be about 4 a.m., and my only thought was getting to bed.

After the 1986 elections, we compared the two wire services reporting of the numbers and found a lot of inconsistencies. I met with Secretary of State Roy Blunt to see how we could develop a centralized, reliable election reporting system, and the Missouri Elections Consortium was born, giving the media that paid the consortium fees that were used to pay Blunt’s staff who had to run the feeds.  Secretary of State Bekki Cook took the consortium system and made it available to the public at large.

We believed in pushing the envelope.  One year, we had an intern whose expertise on the internet was so much a benefit that we almost started doing video feeds of the legislature. We were wired for let people watch the state senate’s last day but backed away at the request of the President Pro Tem who worried the senators would misbehave on the last day if they knew they were being televised. By the time the next session began we had lost our intern and some internal company management changes ended our experimentations.

One election, we went on the internet live at 7 p. m. and stayed live until we wrapped up our coverage after midnight.  During the feed we paused to do reports on the network.  We had a small audience of people watching us do radio in the August Primary that included reports from reporters or stringers at various campaign headquarters. Our audience tripled for November.  The next time, we tried to use Google Groups so we could have videos. Our success was spotty but we were looking forward to taking the next step but it never happened.

Clyde let me have a summer off one year to work with the Missouri Cable Television Association to establish a Missourinet cable channel that would be kind of a hybrid between ESPN, CNN, and PBS.  We put together a terrific programming package that we could deliver to the cable operators throughout the state for a price per customer per month that was about as much as a large bag of M&Ms with peanuts.  When I pitched it to the local operators, they looked at me as if I was a telephone post.

Today the House, Senate, and the Supreme Court do their own streaming.  House floor sessions are televised and so are some hearings. Inaugurations are televised, streamed, and broadcast.

One reason we were able do the things we did, or try the things we tried, was that the owner of the company was a journalist at heart.  As we have seen radio change in these last fifty years, and too often not for the good of the communities in which they operate, we realize how important Clyde was to the things we were free to do.  I think Missourians are better off because we didn’t just do newscasts but because we were motivated to push that envelope.

Because Clyde was a journalist at heart, he let me do a lot of things—especially getting involved with the Radio-Television News Directors Association, the equivalent in our business to the American Bar Association or the American Medical Association. The company paid for my travels to meetings in Washington and convention cities. I was the first person elected to lead the organization twice and my active participation in it led me to lecture programs on college campuses and even conducting seminars on creating free newsrooms in Romania and Poland after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Clyde never voiced any concerns about the costs of those activities. And I always had great news staffs that kept up our levels of reporting while I was gone.

I walked out the door for the last time as news director on December 1, 2014. As they say in sports, “I left it all on the field.”

The Missourinet is still where I left it but not the same as I left it.  It has changed as the radio industry has changed.  But it still fills its role as the statewide news organization that keeps an eye on our government and our politics.

Clyde retired before I did and I see fewer faces that I recognize whenever I visit to record some new episodes of Across Our Wide Missouri (I have a new batch on a shelf next to me) or drop in for some other reason.

A lot of people worked for The Missourinet in those years and good people work for it now.  It’s different but the industry is different.

Fifty years ago today we went on the air.  We started something good.  We had faith in each other that we could do it.

We started with Royal manual typewriters (our first newsletters were called “Notes from a Battered Royal—which all these years later has morphed into “Notes from a Quiet Street.”), cart machines in the studio, one reel-to-reel tape recorder that we used for telephone interviews (everything else was one-to-one in person interviews) and one UPI wire machine.

And we had no idea what the network or the company would be fifty years later.

It’s only a tiny part of a billion-dollar corporation with headquarters in Plano, Texas now, but it keeps churning out meaningful products and profits.  Learfield Communications helped inaugurate the big-money collegiate sports marketing deal to the country when we bid six million dollars to broadcast Missouri Tiger basketball and football games for five years.  Today, Learfield says, “From tailgates to t-shirts, courtside seats to NIL activations, on game day and every day, Learfield is your connection to college sports and live events. We engage 150M+ loyal and passionate fans across the US with unrivaled leadership across sponsorship, ticketing, licensing, and more. Our playbook is powered by media, technology, and data, unlocking value for university partners and venues while connecting brands to fans.”

The 50th anniversary of the Missourinet will pass quietly today. The corporation decided there would be no celebration. But that’s okay because The Missourinet will do what it did on January 2, 1975—cover the news for the people of Missouri, with good people who will do it responsibly and do it well.

Four of the founders of various parts of what became Learfield Communications (a combination of Lear and Brownfield)  are in the Missouri Broadcasters Association Hall of Fame—Clyde, Derry, Rooney, and me. It’s quite an honor but more important, it’s a validation that Clyde had a dream and we make it come true far beyond what any of us could conceive.

So there’s some of the story of The Missourinet, just for a historical record.  It began fifty years ago today, on this date, January 2, 1975.

It seems like it was only—

Fifty years ago.

Salting the Mine

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Out in the Old West, there were stories told of people who wanted to sell a worthless gold mine to a gullible individual by putting a little gold dust into a shotgun shell and then shooting the gold into some of the mine’s rock, making it appear that there was gold waiting to be mined.

It was called salting the mine.

A few days ago, Philadelphia radio station WURD fired one of its talk show hosts who admitted she used some questions supplied by the White House in an interview with President Biden.  Andrea Lawful-Sanders has lost her job because she let the White House get away with it. .

She admitted on CNN that the White House sent her eight questions to ask when the interview was scheduled after the Thursday night debate disaster. She said she “approved” four of them.

WURD CEO Sara Lomax said in announcing the firing, “WURD Radio is not a mouthpiece for the Biden or any other administration.” She said the station’s trust by its listeners  to “hold elected officials accountable” had been jeopardized.

A second local radio host, this one from battleground state Wisconsin, has admitted he was given five questions.  But Earl Ingram has told ABC News he was not able to get through all of them in the limited time scheduled for the interview.

This story deserved to be made public.  This practice is not unusual.  There were times when the Missourinet newsroom got calls from campaigns suggesting we should interview their candidates.  In this case, a spokesman for the Biden campaign admitted to FOX News Digital, “It’s not at all uncommon practice for interviewees to share topics they would prefer. These questions were relevant to the news of the day.”  She maintained that acceptance of the questions did not determine whether the interview went ahead.

One night, when a presidential election was very tight, we got a call about 7:10 from one of the campaigns wanting to know if we wanted to interview its candidate about the importance of getting out and voting.  The person calling apparently was not aware that Missouri’s polls had closed ten minutes earlier and sounded shocked when he was told, “Mr. _____ never wanted to talk to us during the campaign and we’re sure not interested in talking with him now.”

“You mean, you don’t want to talk to the next President of the United States?” came the incredulous response.”

“What did I just tell you?”

“Oh.  Ohhhhhh—kay?”

The Missourinet had no patience—-and the current generation of reporters at the network is the same way—with people who want to salt the political mine, who think news reporters should be their mouthpieces.

Sadly, there are those willing to put candidates on the air on radio or TV just because they can—-and they lob a few softballs at them or ask the supplied questions because the interview makes great promotion material regardless of the informational value.

Candidates love “free media” and rely on outlets to become their mouthpieces.  And it’s easier to become a mouthpiece than it is to try to nail a candidate with a touch question that’s not part of the script.

It might be promotable but it’s not honest and the fallout from the Biden “salting” after the debate is deserved.

This stuff happens and it is painful to even discuss it openly because it justifies the thinking by some people that the media are controlled by whatever political ideology is different from theirs.

I don’t believe that.

I do believe there is too much talk and not enough hard reporting in my lifetime industry, which is why I also believe it is important for citizens to avoid focusing on a single information source. At our house we wander around among CNN, FOX, MSNBC, and we occasionally take a look at One America Network and Newsmax, the blatantly pro-Trump organs. And we check in with the traditional three networks from time to time.

We have our opinions and we like to think we have formed them independently because we evaluate competing ideas.

I would love to interview our ex-President.

I would introduce him as “Mr. Trump,” not “President Trump” because I believe in Harry Truman’s comment that when he left the White House he was “promoted” back to being a common citizen.  Some offices and some ranks are left in the office or should on a hanger in the back of the closet when a person retires from them or is excused from them.

We’re straying from our topic.

The temptation to accept an interview offer with someone who thinks they are important or someone who wants to be important comes to reporters all the time. Good reporters make it clear they, not the interviewee, are in charge of the interview and they are free to challenge answers or bore in when a straight answer is not given to a straight question.

And sometimes they should just say “No,” and enjoy the astonished reaction from the other person who has been thinking the talk show host or the reporter is just some clay to be manipulated.

I rather enjoyed doing that, in fact.

If you wanted to be interviewed on my air, I controlled the rules, not the candidate.  And to be honest, there were times when we covered an event or did an interview and put nothing on the air because nothing newsworthy was said.  We did not waste our listeners’ time because somebody had caused us to waste ours.

 

 

Creating News Deserts 

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A Facebook comment from Moberly noted last week: “The Moberly Monitor-Index (once a daily, now a weekly) made a brief reference to the situation on its Facebook account today as well, but I didn’t see anything on its website. Aside from any TV coverage from Columbia, that’s going to be the only local news outlet henceforth.”

The comment was about Alpha Media’s layoffs of all on-air employees at radio stations in Moberly, turning the station into just another satellite-provided bunch of programs with no local relevance.

The comment points to another alarming trend—the death of the local newspaper.

Small and medium-market newspapers have been swallowed up by Gatehouse (or as a friend of mine from one of those newspapers calls it, “Guthouse”) Media, including the Gannett chain.  Gatehouse now uses that name—Gannett, and other newspaper conglomerates.

The practice has been to buy small or medium market newspapers, hollow out the staffs, turn dailies into weeklies and weeklies into digital products as much as possible, again to the detriment of the local markets but to the great financial benefit of the corporation.

With gutted local newspapers and gutted local radio stations, we are seeing more and more news deserts being created.

At a time when we as a nation and we as a state desperately need more eyes on newsmakers and more diverse voices in our social dialogue—and more attention to local issues—we are getting less and what we are getting shows no industrial responsibility to giving consumers diverse viewpoints.

The corporate monopolization of our mass media is one of the greatest threats our country faces but one that gets little public attention.

More than a century ago this nation was crippled by the power of trusts, whether it was steel or petroleum or transportation trusts (even baking powder, which triggered Missouri’s biggest political scandal early in the last century) that limited competition  and put acquisition of corporate wealth above public interest, convenience, and necessity in so many parts of American life.

We are there again and media control is one of the most dangerous of all of those trusts.  Dwindling sources of information and increasing control of the remaining sources increases our national weakness.

An ignorant nation cannot be a free nation. And Alpha and Gannett/Gatehouse and their ilk are among the corporations that are controlling more and more of our information sources and reducing local service, replacing it with national voices that probably could not point to a map and show you where Festus, Moberly, Farmington, Lebanon or Bethany Missouri are.

Some degree of re-regulation of broadcasting is warranted requiring meeting a certain level of local responsibility. Some degree of trust-busting to provide an opportunity for more independence of opinion in our media is increasingly necessary.

While government can play a role—a carefully modulated role—in these ares is not beyond consideration, the ultimate responsibility for demanding greater diversity in media voces lies with the listeners, readers, and viewers of our electronic communications.

Letters to the FCC and to congressional delegations from places like these communities can carry some weight in Washington.  Boycotts from local advertisers, many of whom already rely on direct-mail or independent internet messaging, can carry weight with corporate broadcasting owners.

Newspaper corporations have one important thing that broadcasters do not have—the First Amendment. Government control of newspapers, as the FCC exerts licensing control over broadcasters, cannot exist and should not exist.

How anti-trust laws could be applied to newspaper conglomerates will be a difficult conversation, even more difficult than the conversations about internet abuses, although similar when the First Amendment enters the discussion.

Nonetheless, all of us are victims of those who control increasing percentages of our media outlets and see no responsibility for diversity of thought and opinion or of local involvement. We are victims only so long as we allow ourselves to be victims, only so long as we refuse to seek out challenges to our own ideas.

Why should we fear that?  Why should we let others tell us what to think and regard those who think differently as enemies?

The trusts were broken when they became so oppressive that the public forced governments to act.

We have reached that point now in our information industry. And we should not accept it.

Guillotines for Fun and Profit

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Alpha Media owns more than 200 radio stations across the country.  Its recruiting web page is loaded with corporate-speak buzzwords about “having a passion for great radio” and a “highly-functioning, best-of-class team on all levels” that goes about “building strong relationships in our local communities.”

“If you are looking for an environment where management has a passion for our business; in working hard to provide the best possible live and local radio in the industry; and in having fun, then Alpha Media is for you,” it says.

You will excuse a lot of people in Moberly, Festus, Lebanon and the Farmington/Park Hills areas if they gag on those words. They’ve been stabbed in the back by the owner of their legacy radio stations.

Alpha Media assassinated local radio in those communities last week, laid off—with no notice—entire on-air staffs including some folks who had been everybody’s neighbors for decades.

In place of the voices who talked about local things including local sports, weather, and events, listeners of radio stations in those markets will be hearing syndicated programs from Alpha. Unfortunately, this kind of thing is not new.

Local radio has been dying by self-inflicted corporate wounds for a long time.

Your loyal observer, who believed throughout his professional career and continues to believe in the value of local radio, is astonished by the total hypocrisy of Alpha Media claiming it is “working hard to provide the best possible live and local radio in the industry and having fun.”

That’s precisely what these stations have been providing for decades.

Having fun?

If you think running a guillotine is lots of yucks, you’d probably be in total agreement with Alpha’s actions in these three communities. .

These radio stations were once owned by a man named Jerrell Shepherd, a small market radio entrepreneur who believed radio stations should not just be IN communities, they should be OF communities. The idea that grandpa or grandma might hear their grandchildren’s names mentioned during broadcasts of local high school sports events; the idea that the new president of the Lions Club would talk about an upcoming peanut sale fund-raising event; the county fair livestock auction; the hospital auxiliary ice cream social; Sunday morning church services; what the city council or school board did last night; that people might instantly go to their local radio station when bad weather approaches or has arrived—street closings, lunches at the schools or the senior center, obituaries—-are immaterial.  But those were and are part of being a locally responsible corporate citizen, especially in markets this size.

But that was then; this is now. The Hell with being a locally responsible corporate citizen.

The big-growth media companies, more interested in bottom lines than community responsibility and identity, only want to make money. And that’s why the familiar voices went to work one day last week and were told they would no longer have a job at the end of their shifts.

The “best possible live and local radio in the industry” became a lie that day in those towns.  And the definition of “having fun” became gallows humor.

Reporters from various central Missouri media who contacted Alpha to get an explanation have received nothing back.  A full-page ad in the local newspapers explaining, without the corporate doublespeak, why ditching true local radio is justified would be a courteous thing for Alpha to do. But don’t count on it.

There is no doubt that local newspapers and local radio stations have faced some struggles as more business is done through the internet.  And the issue with some businesses is not that they don’t make a profit—they just don’t make a big enough profit.

Employees reduce profits in all kinds of businesses which is why all kinds of businesses are finding ways to dump workers (Notice how few people at McDonald’s take orders at the cash registers lately?).  It would be nice if Alpha explained that to the people in these towns who no longer have a radio station they cared about because it cared about them.

Satellites and the internet allow for cutting the overhead of a radio station by allowing layoffs of as many of those dollar-consuming staff members as possible, replaced by voices of strangers from who-knows-where and who are unlikely to ever set foot in places like Moberly, Festus, Lebanon, or Farmington.

Broadcasting used to be regulated by the Federal Communications Commission which required broadcasters to operate “in the public interest, convenience, and necessity.”  But the industry back de-regulation in the Reagan years and got it.

I was part of a national professional organization that supported de-regulation because we thought some regulations stifled public discussion of important issues more than it promoted it.

We supported it because it required stations to meet certain standards of public service that really were hollow standards.  We believed that serving the public did not mean government dictating, in some instances, what had to be said before a counter argument could be aired.

We were wrong.

We never anticipated the homogenization of broadcasting that comes with owning hundreds of stations, with the death of local programming thanks to satellite-delivered syndicated shows—Rush Limbaugh being the first of the great influencers, a man who is considered the savior of AM Radio.

But now, we are faced with asking, “Saved from what?”

Radio began to lose its soul when communities became markets; when stations became properties, and when staffs became overhead expenses.

Part of the answer to “saved from what?” was delivered last week in Moberly, Farmington, Lebanon, and Festus.

Alpha Media is advertising for new employees at the Missouri stations it has hollowed out. The openings listed on the company web page say something about how it will provide “the best possible live and local radio in the industry.”  The company wants a business office part-timer and a part-time board operator/production assistant and a business office/sales assistance person. They want an Integrated Marketing Consultant (Sales) for their stations in Bethany and Moberly and on-air programmer/board operators in Farmington and Festus.

Local news people? Local sports people?  Local talk show hosts?  Those are the people who are “live and local.” The company isn’t looking for any of them.  Board operators are the ones who throw a switch in the studio to bring in a syndicated show off the satellite or internet.  Production assistant?  Well somebody has to record or produce commercials—if sponsors want to buy them now.

What has happened in these markets and is happening in broadcasting generally also is happening in the newspaper industry. We’ll look at that on Wednesday.

Uncertainty

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I want to talk to you today about my greatest hero and about his life and his times which resonate in these uncertain days.

I want to tell you about helping George Clooney make a movie.  But Clooney, whose work I admire, is not the hero of this story.

Back about 2005, I was wrapping up my second chairmanship of my profession’s national organization, the Radio-Television News Directors Association (now the Radio Television Digital News Association) when George Clooney’s production company reached out to us to help with some information about Edward R. Murrow.  I also was the organization’s historian so the response fell to me.

Edward R. Murrow was, and is, my hero. To be involved, even in such a minor way as I was in producing an Oscar-nominated Murrow movie produced by George Clooney—who can be as serious as a heart attack in his work although many of his movies are light-hearted—is one of the most important distinctions I have gathered.

Murrow had given his greatest speech at our convention in 1958, three months after See It Now was killed by CBS boss William S. Paley. It’s known as the “wires and lights in a box” speech.  It’s also considered his professional suicide speech because he was critical of the early network television news decisions as he warned: “This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it’s nothing but wires and lights in a box….”

Here’s the entire speech, should you choose to listen, from our convention more than 65 years ago:

Bing Videos

I provided the background information and a copy of the organiztion’s 1958 logo for the opening and closing segments of the movie.  You won’t see my name or that of RTNDA in any of the credits, but that was my contribution. I am not bothered by the omission. It was, after all, a minuscule part of the story.

When the movie came out, RTNDA had a reception in Washington where Clooney, Strathairn, and Grant Heslov (who played a young Don Hewitt, the creator of Sixty Minutes), attended.  I have a signed movie poster in my loft office.

Seventy-one years ago, he said:

“If we confuse dissent with disloyalty–if we deny the right of the individual to be wrong, unpopular, eccentric or unorthodox–if we deny the essence of racial equality then hundreds of millions in Asia and Africa who are shopping about for a new allegiance will conclude that we are concerned to defend a myth and our present privileged status. Every act that denies or limits the freedom of the individual in this country costs us the confidence of men and women who aspire to that freedom and independence of which we speak and for which our ancestors fought.”

McCarthyism was ramping up in America at the time.  There are those who feel we are in our greatest peril since then, perhaps greater.  Reading these words reminds us that we as a people have been where we are before and we have survived because reporters such as Murrow (and we still have some today although we are also bombarded by many on the other side) refused to back away or had no fear in confrontations with demagogues. The story of a free nation seems to be cyclical, which is one reason to study unvarnished history.

His most famous broadcast was “See it Now” on March 9, 1954 when he used McCarthy’s own words to condemn him, concluding:

“We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine; and remember that we are not descended from fearful men. Not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were for the moment unpopular.

“This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy’s methods to keep silent, or for those who approve. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities. As a nation we have come into our full inheritance at a tender age. We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home. The actions of the junior Senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad, and given considerable comfort to our enemies. And whose fault is that? Not really his. He didn’t create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it–and rather successfully. Cassius was right. “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”

David Strathairn recreated those remarks with great effectiveness in the movie.

Bing Videos

I invite you, especially if you are a reporter today or a young person wanting to be a reporter in this rapidly changing world of journalism, to watch this 1975 program about Murrow, produced by the BBC.

:Bing Videos

And I invite you to read this column from constitutional lawyer John Whitehead, written in 2005 when the movie came out. It seems appropriate now:

The Rutherford Institute :: Edward R. Murrow: “We will not walk in fear, one of another.” |

I close with Murrow’s words that are a challenge to all of us when there are those who believe they can seize power because they can intimidate a nation.

“This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy’s methods to keep silent, or for those who approve. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities.”

 Murrow reaches out to us seventy years after that broadcast. All we have to do is remove “Senator McCarthy” and fill in another name and we will understand the challenge we as citizens must not avoid meeting.

One of Murrow’s journalism descendents, Dan Rather, used to close his broadcasts with the word, “Courage.”

May all of us, we who are not descended from fearful men and women, find it in 2024.

 

Sixty Years

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I still find it awkward to tell people, “Fifty years ago…..” and then tell them what I remember from that time.

Sixty years ago today, I had been the producer of the noon news at KOMU-TV.  I was in graduate school at the University of Missouri and working as a graduate assistant instructor in the radio newscasting class which also involved being the assistant news director at KFRU Radio, anchoring some of the student-wrtiten newscasts on that station (this was before the Journalism School created KBIA where some students get their first taste of broadcast newswritig and anchoring), so I couldn’t anchor at Channel 8.  So I produced the noon newscast that reported President Kennedy had gone to Texas to assure Texans that he was not going to dump Lydon Johnson as his running mate in 1964.

We left the station at 12:30, about the time shots rang out at Dealy Plaza in Dallas.

When I walked through the front door of the rooming house at 508 S. Ninth Street (now one of at least three houses in which I lived that are now gone), one of the guys upstairs shouted down, “Is that Priddy?”

“Yeah.”

“You getter get up here! The President’s been shot!”

The people upstairs had been listening to KFRU and had heard ABC’s Don Gardiner break in with the first word of the shooting.   Most commemorations of the event today focus on Walter Cronkite and CBS-TV.  But it was Don Gardiner, normally the morning news voice on WABC in New York, who interrupting a middle of the road music show from WABC that was fed down the network between network news programs.

(105) JFK’S ASSASSINATION (ABC RADIO NETWORK) (NOVEMBER 22, 1963) – YouTube

Gardiner’s first bulletin about 12:33 p.m. CST came from United Press International correspondent Merriman Smith who was in the fifth car behind the presidential limousine as it moved from Dallas’ Love Field toward the Dallas Trade Mart, where Kennedy was to deliver a luncheon speech.

Nick George, who is announced early in the broadcast as the New York Editor for ABC, later became a teacher at the journalism school and was an influential figure in the development of some early Missourinet reporters.

As you will hear, events unfolded quickly and the reporters—mainly Smith and AP’s Jack Bell .

In 1963, reporting from remote sites was, to say the least by today’s standards, extremely primitive.

The White House press pool reporter’s car had a radiotelephone in it, the only mobile phone available to the 58 reporters in the pool. Pool reporters rotated from the back seat to the front and it ws Smith’s day in front.  Smith grabbed the radiotelephone and dictated a FLASH (the highest priority item to go out on the wire service) to Dallas UPI Bureau rookie Wilborn Hampton, who typed it into the distribution teletype machine, showed it to his editor, Jack Fallon, who shouted, “Send it!”

UPI sent it out at 12:34:

“DALLAS, NOV. 22 (UPI) – THREE SHOTS FIRED AT PRESIDENT KENNEDY’S MOTORCADE TODAY IN DOWNTOWN DALLAS.”

As the word went out and Gardiner started his broadcast, Smith was crouched in the front seat of the car while the AP’s bell was beating on his back and demanding, “Give me the goddamn phone!”  But Smith wouldn’t give it up and continued to give information to the bureau.  “On a story of this magnitude,” Smith later said, “I was not about to let it go until I new the office had it all.”

It took six minutes to get to Parkland Memorial Hospital. Smith gave the phone to Bell who called the Dallas AP burau—and couldn’t get through.  Smith ran up to the presidential limousine where he saw Texas Governor John Connally wounded. “I could not see the president’s wound. But I could see blood spattered around the interior of the rear seat and a dark stain spreading down the right side of the president’s dark gray suit.”

Smith turned to Clint Hill, the Secret Service officer who was in the followup far and ran to the presidential limousine, jumped on the back and shielded Mrs. Kennedy with his body as the car sped to thehospital, and asked, “How bad was he hit, Clint.”

“He’s dead, Smitty,” said Hill.  Smith dashed into the hospital, took a telephone from a room clerk and started dictating the information you will hear Gardiner pass along to listeners that day. Most of what you hear Gardiner reporting is based on Smith’s coverage.

UPI ran another FLASH at 1:35 that Kennedy had been declared dead.  AP was two minutes behind.

The event was an important one for radio and particularly for television.  For the first hours, the story belonged to radio.  Newspapers already had gone to press for their afternoon editions. Several put out bulleting editions.  But in the early going, the story belonged to radio.

We had no satellites to relay the story as it unfolded.  There were telephones and wire services and that was all there was. Television relied on film that had to be shot and developed, mostly black and white (because color television was just beginning) and often not even processed as positive images.  We would shoot silent negative film and the television control room could electronically reverse the polarity of the film and the viewers saw black and white pictures.

KFRU’s newsroom was in the Columbia Tribune building at 7th and Cherry Streets (it’s partly a candy store and partly a restaurant now) because the station was half-owned by the Waters family that also owned the Tribune.

The main studios were out on the eastern business loop.  In Studio A, the main studio, a slver pipe rose up behind the control board and curved toward the announcer’s position.  The pipe contained wiring that was hooked to a small red light.  That was the network bulletin light.  If the network wanted to break in on programming, that light would come on and the board operator was immediately to flip a switch that put the network on the air. When that light came on, the board operator that day, perhaps Bill Younger who worked the afternoon shift threw that switch.

I quickly walked the four or five blocks to the KFRU newsroom to huddle with Eric Engberg, the news director and fellow graduate student—-Eric later had a long career as a CBS correspondent—and we started planning local reaction stories to run when the network broke away from its coverage for its local stations to report.

I was sent out toget reaction from Senator George Parker and Representative Larry Woods.

ABC did not break until Monday morning before coming back to broadcst the funeral.

I got to know, to a lesser degree in most cases but in a greater degree in one case, some of thosewho brought us the news that day.  Nick George, for example, became an acquaintance.

The one I knew best is the one who broke the news of Kennedy’s death on national television.  Eddie Barker was the news director of KRLD-TV and radio in Dallas that day and was at the Trade Mart preparing a broadcast of the Predident’s speech.  Word already had reached him that something had happened in the motorcade and moments late the motorcade roared past the mart.  He went on the air, broadcasting what he could learn.  One of his friends who was at the mart was a doctor at Parkland who went to a telephone and called the hospital emergency room where an acquaintance told him the president was dead.

Eddie’s friend saw he was “struggling to maintain a coherent broadcast with the limited information availability,” walked over and whispered into his ear, “Eddie, he’s dead.”

“The words sent a cold chill running down my spine. I didn’t want to believe them, but the source was too good.  I then made a decision that has caused a lot of comment in the years since that strangely brilliant Friday afternoon.  I told an audience that included the whole CBS network that a reliable source had confirmed to me that President Kennedy was dead.  What I didn’t know was tht my shocking report caused a lot of anxiety at cBS News Headquarters in New York,” he recalled in his autobiography, Eddie Barker’s Notebook several years later,  Shortly after that, Walter Cronkite told viewers, “We just had a report from our correspondent, Dan Rther, in Dallas that he has confirmed tht President Kennedy is dead.”   There still had been no official confirmation.

At 1:37, our time, CBS news editor Ed Bliss—and other of those I came to know well—gave Cronkite the AP bulletin that Cronkite is often seen reading to his audience when the story is recounted on TV today.

Dan Rather is often credited with passing along the first word of Kennedy’s death. Rather, who was the new chief of the CBS New Orleans bureau, had been on the other side of the railroad overpass west of Dealy Plaza, closer to the Trade Mart, when the motorcade flew past  He ran to the Dallas CBS bureau and started working the phones to Parkland Hospital. The doctors all were busy but an operator told him two priests were in a hallway nearby.  One of them told Rather, “The President has been shot and he is dead.”  Rather, his The Camera Never Blinks, said he asked, “Are you certain of that” and the priest, who was there to perform the last rites, respoded, “Yes, unfortunately, I am.”

Rather called Barker and told him what he had.  Eddie had just talked to the doctor.  They did not know that three people at CBS, New York were listening on the broadcast loop that had been set up for Barker’s broadcast of the speech. Before Rather could tell those listening, Barker, in his broadcast that he thought was only local in Dallas, announced a source from Parkland had told him the president is dead. Rather chimed in, “Yes, yes, that’s what I hear, too.  That he’s dead.”

It wasn’t official.  But CBS radio and television went with it.

It was only a short time later, as you will hear if you listen to the ABC account, that it was reported a Dallas policeman, later identified as J.D. Tippett, had been shot and killed.  And within a few minutes, a suspect named Lee H. Oswald had been picked up.

The night police reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram had slept late that day but rushed to the office when he heard of the shooting.  The newspaper started printing special editions that were snapped up by the public as soon as they hit the streets. “Inside the city room it was bedlam,” recalled then-CBS correspondent Bob Shieffer in his book, This Just In.  When word came that Oswald was going to be held in the Fort Worth jail, Schiefer dashed there and was present when Oswald was brought in.

“Early in my police reporting days, I learned a truck from the cops. People will sometimes blurt out the truth if they are surprised by the question, so I jumped in front of the handcuffed suspect, who was between two detectives, and shouted, ‘You song of a bitch, why did you do it?’”

‘”Well, I didn’t,’ he said as the cops hustled him into the lockup.”

Schiefer was just settling in back at his newsroom desk when the phone rang. A woman asked him if someone could give her a ride to Dallas.  Schiefer responded heatedly, “Lady, this is not a taxi, and besides, the president has been shot.”

“I know.  They think my son is the one who shot him.”

“Where do you live?” Schieffer. “I’ll be right over to get you.”

On the way to Dallas, said Schieffer, she seemed more concerned about herself than about the death of a president. “She railed about how Oswald’s Russian-born wife would get sympathy while no one would ‘remember the mother.’”

When Oswald’s wife and mother heard the news, they had the presence of mind to get a lawyer, John Thorne. Police placed the family in protective custody.  Several weeks later, Eddie Barker called Thorne and expressed an interest in interviewing the Marina, how a widow. Thorne, who Barker did not know, surprised him by saying, “She watches you every evening nd I’ll be glad to ask her.”  The interview was arranged during which time she told him in her Russian-accented English, “I think Lee shoot Kenedy.”

Don Gardiner died in 1977.  Bob Schieffer, 86, is a podcaster— “Bob Schieffer’s ‘About the News’ with H. Andrew Schwartz.”—retired as the host of Face the Nation in 2015 and embarked on a singing career.  Eddie Barker died in 2012.

Dan Rather is 92 and still likes to stir the stuff.  He was fired from CBS in 2006 after some reports using unauthenticated documents to report on President George W. Bush’s Vietnam War-era service. After working on the cable channel now known as AXSTV for several years. Rather joined the Youngturks YouTube channel and five years ago began writing a news letter called “Steady,” on Substack.

All of those you hear in the ABC coverage are gone now.

Merriman Smith committed suicide in 1970.  Some say he was despondent about the death of his son in Vienam and perhaps suffered from PTSD from witnessing the Kennedy murder. Jack Bell died in 1975. Clint Hill is 91 and is the last surviving person to be in the presidential limousine that day.

At Jefferson City radio station KLIK that day, news director Jerry Bryan checked the UPI wire just after climbing the stairs to the third-floor newsroom in a pre-Civil War building on Capitol Avneue and checked the UPI machine before going home to lunch.

He picked up the telephone and called the on-air studio down on the second floor and started telling listeners what Merriman Smith was sending him. He continued to report via telephone until station engineer Ed Scarr put together enough cable to run a microphone from the studio up two flights of stairs and down the hall to the newsroom so Jerry had a microphone. The station operated only during daylight hours in those days and did not have a national network.  Bryan was the Don Gardiner of Jefferson City that day until the station signed off at 5:30. A reel-to-reel recorder in the newsroom was set up to turn on automatically during the “Missouri Party Line Show” when a phone call came in from a listener. Bryan’s call to the studio triggered the recorder, which had a large reel of tape on it.  His early coverage that day was recorded, by accident, and still exists.  Jerry resigned in 1967 and became the press secretary to Governor Hearnes and now lives in St. Louis.

His assistant news director, who had come to Jefferson City from KFRU at the start of 1967 replaced him.  His memories, which have been shared at length with you in this entry, remain vivid–as do the memories of many.

Walter Cronkite, who died in 2009, was a native of St. Joseph, Missouri. He attended the unveiling in 1999 of  bronze bust in the Hall of Famous Missourians. There were two speakers at that ceremony that evening—Governor Carnahan and me.

The next day, he was introduced in the House and in the Senate and made brief remarks.  The press corps in the senate was seated at a table on the floor to the right of the dais and when Walter walked in, we made him sit at the press table with us.

For the next fifteen years that I covered the Senate from that table, I always made sure that when a new reporter joined us at the table, I made sure that person knew that was Walter’s chair they were sitting in and they were expected to do him honor with their reporting.

Before Walter Cronkite became the icon he became at the CBS Evening News desk, he had a program on Sunday afternoons called You Are There, during which historical events were portrayed.  He always finished the broadcast by proclaiming,

“What sort of a day was it?  A day like all days, filled with those events that altered and illuminate our time. And you were there.”

November 22nd started “like all days.”  But it was filled with events that altered and illuminate our time.

And I was “there.”

The Bag

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Did you ever hear someone say something out of the blue that just hit you squarely between the eyes?   Something that stopped you cold.  Something you had to write down because it was so startingly profound to you that you dared not let it escape?

It is so rare that this kind of thing happens.  Stops you in your tracks.

I was asked to speak to the local Unitarian Universalist Fellowship a few days ago and on Thursday I was doing the final edits of my remarks before printing them out.

As I was typing those last thoughts, I was listening to Sirius/XM’s channel of old radio programs from the 30s into the 60s when radio drama and entertainment finally faded away because television had become the established preference for people’s entertainment.

I was listening to an episode of “Have Gun, Will Travel,” a western drama show about a gunslinger-for-hire named Paladin (no first name ever given). Some of you might remember Richard Boone in the role on television in the early 60s.  But before then it was on radio with John Dehner, whose face you might recognize before you recognize the name) as Paladin.

Paladin had been hired to deal with an Indian chief who was reluctant to give up a white child who had been kidnapped when his family was wiped out. The chief argued that the boy was “his son.”

They finally decided the boy was white and would be returned to relatives. At the end of the negotiation, the “chief” said something that reached out of the speaker and instantly grabbed me. It was so startling and so profound (in my estimation) that I paused the broadcast and went back to get the wording correct.

“Skin is leather bag God made to hold the soul. Color of bag no matter.”  

That’s a grabber.  I’ve searched the internet to see who really said something like that and can find no reference.  It was so startling, so different from the usual dialogue written for those old radio dramas for Native Americans, that I typed it at the end of the speech—-not that I planned to use it but because I had to make sure I got it.

I don’t think I’ve ever had something—especially a non-news item—jump out of the radio like that before and instantly force me to halt what I was doing so I could write it down—and I’ve heard a lot of great rhetoric (and a lot of really lousy rhetoric, especially lately) come out of the speakers of my radio, my television, and my computer.

I think I’ll tidy it up a little bit and find a good use for it from time to time.

“Skin is a leather bag God made to hold the soul.  The color of the bag doesn’t matter.” 

Amen.

 

Lost, Strayed, or Stolen

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I have often said computers are wonderful things because they can teach us new and innovative ways to cuss.

A few days ago as I was moving a bunch of pictures into a new file, they wound up in the wrong place.  In getting out of that place I appear to have hit a key that wiped out my shortcut to the files of great thoughts that I have prepared for this space.

I have been assured by my Geek Squad consultant that the files are not lost. They have just strayed into an unknown place.  I would offer a reward for their return if I thought they were stolen. So,while I am searching I will be able to post only new lightning strikes of wisdom.  And since Nancy and I shall be traveling for a few days the search will be suspended.

But I have found that travel can produce new wisdoms.

Years ago, in the so-called Golden Days of Radio, there was a popular show called “Mr. Keane, Tracer of Lost Persons.”  The comedy trio of Bob & Ray parodied the show with a routine called “Mr. Trace, Keener than Most Persons.”

Should any of you be more “Mr. Trace” than “Mr Keane,” your suggestions will be appreciated.

Unfortunately, the only reward will be getting to read the lost wisdom.

 

The demise of local news

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A friend has passed along an article written a few years ago by Jonathan Bernstein, a columnist on the Bloomberg Views website in which he lamented that the “demise of local news may be ruining Congress.”  Bernstein wrote that several senators facing re-election found that “no one in their home states knows who they are.”   He cited a piece by Washington Post writer Paul Kane, who saids, “A prime cause of this fight for name recognition is the increasingly fragmented media in which partisans largely receive their news from ideologically driven cable news and social media. Middle-of-the-road voters, reliant on their local news, are often left in the dark.”

Kane noted, “Overall, there are more reporters covering Congress than ever, except they increasingly write for inside Washington publications whose readers are lawmakers, lobbyists and Wall Street investors.”   He cites North Carolina Senator Richard Burr, began his Washington career in the House before moving to the Senate in 2005.  When he arrived in Washington, three newspapers from North Carolina had Washington Bureaus.  Now, none of them do.  “I can give a major policy speech, and no newspaper in Charlotte or Raleigh or Winston-Salem will even cover that I was there, much less that I gave a policy speech.”

Bernstein offers a scenario:  The president proposes a new initiative.  If the local newspaper has a Washington bureau, a member of Congress might figure out how district voters feel and then endorse whatever constituents want.  The constituents can then read the news coverage in the local paper.  But that’s not how things work anymore.

He wrote, “More and more politically active voters get their news from national partisan TV, radio and digital outlets. Less engaged voters can easily tune out all political news, at least until the height of election season. So the safest bet for an incumbent is going to be to echo the party line (which will normally mean no coverage at all) or, better, just to keep his or her mouth shut. Why stick with the district’s needs over party loyalty when no one in the district will ever hear about it — except the die-hards who support the party line no matter what?”

He also worried that the changing face of the news business works against the local Senator or Representative proposing things that benefit the district.  “If the rewards for action are reduced, fewer and fewer members of Congress are going to bother,” he says.  The end result: “The demise of state and local political reporting is often thought of as a potential threat because without a vigorous press, no one will expose malfeasance, and politicians will have weaker reasons to avoid corruption.  But perhaps the reduced incentives for good behavior by these elected officials are an even bigger reason to despair.”

This is not just a national issue.  It is a matter of concern in every state.  The same concerns Bernstein voices apply to our state and city governments.

There probably are fewer reporters covering state capitols full-time than there are reporters covering Congress.  Newspapers from St. Joseph, Cape Girardeau, Springfield, and Joplin once had year-around reporters at the capitol.  Not today, although Springfield still sends a reporter to the Capitol during sessions.  There once were two wire services covering state government. The Associated Press is the only one left.  Second newspapers from Kansas City and St. Louis went out of business years ago.  Don’t expect to learn much from metropolitan TV or radio stations about what’s happening in Jefferson City although what happens at the capitol affects their viewers every minute of their lives.  Missouri Independent, a new and aggressive news organization whose articles appear in several newspapers, is an important addition and works hard to fill the yawning gap in coverage of state government and politics.

Missouri newspaper subscribers are more likely to get their news about state politics and government from weekly columns written by their legislators than they are to read anything from a local reporter that details or questions what the local lawmaker is doing or saying because few local news outlets have anyone focusing on covering the actions of their area lawmakers. The weekly columns from office holders must not be acceptable substitutes for reporters who are the fires to which political feet are held.

The situation is worse when it comes to local radio or television news telling of what lawmakers or even city council members are doing.   The corporatization of radio stations has eliminated many vigorous local news departments.  When stations that once had people covering city hall, the courthouse, the school board, and other local events become only one of a half dozen (or more) formats under one roof—and sometimes not even in the same town they are licensed for—with one person who does some news on all of the stations only during morning drive, citizens are not well-informed.

And in an election year, the voters are left to the mercy of manipulative commercials and partisan podcasts.

The economics and the technology of the news business have changed.  In general, those changes have led to more concerns about the bottom line and less concerns about informing the increasingly less-educated, more self-centered electorate who make up a political system that favors agendas over broad public service. The public is in danger of being the frog in the pot of water not realizing it is being boiled to death.

It has been observed that the best thing to happen to newspapers in many towns is the disappearance of local radio news.  People have only the local newspaper to turn to if they want to know about events at city hall and elsewhere. But it is unlikely those newspapers have anybody specifically assigned to make local and federal legislators accountable to their constituents. And in too many instances, local newspapers have come under ownerships that have no local commitments and thus provide few safeguards against poor public policy to their readers.

Some cities are fortunate that new owners step in who have a dedication to their communities and who believe in the responsibility the press has to them.

It is easy to blame the media for the shortcomings in political awareness among the public.  But to do so is to ignore the responsibility that we, the public, carry in a free society. Bernstein spoke of irresponsibility when he wrote, “More and more politically active voters get their news from national partisan TV, radio and digital outlets. Less engaged voters can easily tune out all political news, at least until the height of election season.”

If we despair of today’s politics, we must despair of ourselves.  While the too-often bottom-line-only news media share the blame (some might say “the credit) for what we have become as a political people, we cannot escape our own personal civic responsibility to pay attention, to ignore the manipulator and the self-serving promoter, to question claims and concepts, to ask if those who claim they can do anything unilaterally really have the power to do so in a three-branch system of checks and balances, and to evaluate, think, and act for ourselves.  Citizens cannot allow themselves to be victims of “the demise of local news.”  It is better to live and ask questions than to exist and accept self-serving answers or comfortable assurances.

Think about that as we sit in the pan of water while the political stove gets hotter.

You can read Bernstein’s article at : https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-05-31/demise-of-local-news-may-be-ruining-congress

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SPORTS:  Look for a Long, Hot, Depressing Summer, Baseball Fans; Maybe You Should Go to a Race

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(BASEBALL)—We are left to recall a man who lived and died baseball, who passed up a potential Heisman Trophy college career to play the game of baseball, and who gave us some memorable thoughts and calls during fifty years in the broadcast booth as Jack Buck’s sidekick and later as the number one play-by-play guy with the Missourinet’s first sports director, John Rooney.

Mike Shannon is gone. He was 83. He was a multi-star athlete in high school who went to the University of Missouri on a football scholarship. In the days when freshmen could not play varsity football, Shannon so impressed Missouri coach Frank Broyles that Broyles thought he could have won the Heisman Trophy if he had stayed with football.

Instead, Shannon got a $50,000 signing bonus from the Cardinals and played baseball.

He gave us a lot of things on the field and in the booth. His Shannon-isms might be rivalled in all of baseball history (at least in our experience) only by the colorful phrasing of another native Missourian, Casey Stengel:

“It’s Mothers Day, so a big happy birthday to all you mothers out there.”

“Back in the day when I played, a pitcher had three pitches: a fastball, a curveball, a slider, a changeup and a good sinker pitch.”

(During a game in New York): “I wish you folks back in St. Louis could see this moon.”

“Ol’ Abner has done it again.”  (a late-game observation when the game is tight going into the last innings.)

“He’s faster than a chicken being chased by Ronald McDonald.”

“Our next home stand follows this road trip.”

“The wind has switched 360 degrees.”

“The crowd (is) on their feet for the Canadian Star Spangled Banner.”

And there were many more. Mike Shannon was Mike Shannon. Nice guy.  Good ball player. One of those guys who made a baseball broadcast booth much more than calling balls and strikes.  They don’t come along often and their enthusiasm for the game can’t be faked or scripted.

And we really need him these days.   His beloved Cardinals are in the pits. There’s no sugar-coating it.

They haven’t won a series since April 10-12 and were 10-19 after their weekend series against the Dodgers, wrapping up a road trip in which they went 2-8. They haven’t been this far under .500 in at least 16 years, 2007, the last time the cardinals finished below .500.  They have to go 80-53 if they’re going to win 90 games and compete for a wild card slot.

The Cardinals had never finished the first month of the season in last place in the National League Central—-and it was formed in 1994.

This weeks’ USA TODAY power rankings put the Cardinals 23rd out of the 30 teams.  The team started the year with fairly low expectations from the newspaper. They were ranked 11th.

And they’re expecting a 41-year old pitcher who has had a mediocre rehab assignments in Springfield and Memphis to lead a turnaround?   Wainwright had an ERA of 6.14 in Springfield and 6.35 at Memphis, 13 strikeouts in 12.2 innings in which he gave up 18 hits and nine runs.

Doesn’t me he can come up to the big club and do better—-rehab assignments aren’t necessarily about winning and losing.

But still…..

The Cardinals could be worse.  They could be the Kansas City Royals and ranked 29th by USA TODAY.  Only Oakland (soon to be Las Vegas, perhaps) is below them.

Where’s Mike Matheny when the Cardinals need him?

He’s in Kansas City where he is 172-242 in his three-plus seasons after going 591-474 in seven seasons in St. Louis and never having a losing record. The Royals went 7-22 in the first month of the season.

(MIZ-WHO?)—We confess that we’ve lost track of what the Missouri basketball team has won or lost since the season ended.  I think we’re suffering from portal fatigue.  They still lack a horse in the middle, a big one.

We’ll root for whatever Dennis Gates puts on the floor next year. But the era of carpet bagger-players the NCAA has ushered in with the portal and the NIL business has been a huge mess we prefer not to try to follow.

Pretty much the same for the football team.  We hope coach Drinkwitz is able to put together an outstanding team.  But by and large it’s going to be a bunch of strangers on Faurot field next fall.

It’s tempting to say that the NCAA has really screwed up collegiate sports.

(RACING)—All three major series were on track during the weekend—although the weekend stretched to an extra day for one of them.

(INDYCAR)—Close, but no cigar—again—for Romain Grosjean who led 57 of the first 66 laps before Scott McLaughlin fought his way past on lap 71 and held on to beat Grosjean to the line by about 1.8 seconds at Barber Motorsports Park at Birmingham, Alabama.

Grosjean, who started the race on the pole,  admits that he’s headed to Indianapolis for the two races in May—on the road course on May 14 and the Indianapolis 500 on the 28th.

McLaughlin’s win, his fourth in the INDYCAR series, was the product of race strategy.  His team planned on three pit stops. Grosjean’s team hoped to win the race on two stops.  But the three-stop strategy eliminated any fuel concerns for McLaughlin, who called it a “happy driver strategy.”

McLaughlin is the fourth driver to win in the four races run this year in INDYCAR.

Two-time series champion Will Power challenged Grosjean in the final laps but couldn’t get close enough to make a pass attempt.  Pato O’Ward and Alex Palou made up the rest of the top five.

(NASCAR)—The long dry spell for Martin Truex Jr., has come to an end after 54 races and 597 days.  Truex, opting for two tires on his last pit stop, held off Ross Chastain, who went with four, for the final fourteen laps.  Truex crossed the stripe a half-second ahead of Chastain.

The race was run yesterday (Monday) because it was rained out on Sunday. The win made the long weekend a family affair. His younger brother, Ryan, won the Xfinity race on Saturday.

Ryan Blaney, William Byron, and Denny Hamlin completed the top five. Byron led almost half of the 400 laps (193 of them) but couldn’t keep up with the top three in the closing laps.

Chastain’s run has put him on top of the points standings.

Chase Elliott, in his third race after returning from a broken leg was 11th and is now within the top thirty in points.  NASCAR rules say a driver must be in the top thirty in points and must have at least one victory if they’re not 16th or better in points at the start of playoffs.  Elliott is still looking for his first win of the year.

Josh Berry, who filled in for Elliott while he was recovering, was driving Alex Bowman’s car at Dover because Bowman suffered some compression back fractures in a sprint car wreck last week. He’s out indefinitely.  Berry finished 11th.

(FORMULA 1)—Sergio Perez is the first driver to win twice at the Grand Prix of Azerbain.

He beat teammate Max Verstappen, the defending f1 champion, by 2.1 seconds. Ferrari’s Charles LeClerc claimed the other podium spot.

Perez’s victory moves him to within six points of Verstappen in the standings. Both drivers have won twice this year. Two-time F1 champion Fernando Alonso, who seems to have found a new life in his career driving for Aston Martin, is third.

(Photo Credits; MLB Tonight (Rooney and Shannon) and Bob Priddy)