Fighting for Air: In the Trenches with Television News. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, June, 1991 by Sam Donaldson

Fighting for Air: In the Trenches with Television News. Liz Trotta. Simon and Schuster, $22.95. This is a book laced with bitterness. Trotta is bitter about the discrimination she suffered as she fought for recognition in the "man's world" of network news. She is bitter about the hazing and the slights, the inferior assignments, the double standards for accomplishment and conduct, the lack of recognition she suffered. And she is bitter that when the networks finally woke up to the need to be equal-opportunity employers, the women given big chances often were not the ones, like Trotta, who had slugged it out in the trenches, learning the craft and paying their dues, but young femmes fatales who wouldn't have known the press center at Danang from Germaine's restaurant on Wisconsin Avenue.

Ah, Liz, perhaps you're entitled: Lord knows it's true that the business has discriminated-and still discriminates-against women. But as one reads this book, the question keeps nagging: Did Trotta's constant disappointments stem from her sex or from other factors?

In 1965, Trotta went to work for the NBC affiliate in New York. She had worked in print and makes no secret of her view that print reporters are the true journalists of this world. She soon won a network spot and took all the tough assignments of her day, including Vietnam; she was the first woman television reporter to be stationed there. Trotta is at her best recounting war stories from her coverage of Vietnam and other trouble spots. While there is no doubt that she shared all the hardships, braved all the dangers, and scored all the deadline beats the world's hell holes had to offer, her career at NBC never really took off.

Trotta seems to have idolized Chet Huntley (odd for a no-nonsense print reporter, since Huntley was strictly a studio broadcaster). She suggests that her big troubles with NBC management began in earnest with Huntley's departure. Trotta blames her problems on sex discrimination, management philistines, and the everyday incompetence of many NBC staff members. But she also admits she was "difficult" in temperament and behavior. I am not one to complain about that, except to say I don't know any other reporter who has purposely slammed a metal microphone into the jaw of someone attempting to bar her from a story. True, NBC's Andrea Mitchell once dug her elbow into an offending cameraman's ribs as she jockeyed for position on the White House rose garden colonnade, but that was more or less en famille. Trotta struck a civilian who promptly sued NBC, which didn't help Trotta's reputation with her bosses. For whatever reasons, by 1979 she had been forced out.

CBS soon hired her. There, she adored Walter Cronkite and disliked Dan Rather, whom she paints as vain and duplicitous. Her assignments soon became mediocre. Granted, she was assigned a presidential candidate in 1984, but George McGovern? Trotta writes of this insult, "It wasn't enough that I had loathed every position McGovern had taken as the Democratic nominee in 1972, particularly against the war, but now I had to record weeks of his prissy moralizing, his yappy delivery." To her credit, I believe, she also writes that she "grew to like him enormously, admiring his grace and subtle humor, his old-fashioned decency." However, whether she liked him or hated him, she didn't get on the air with him. CBS let her go during a budget cutback the next year.

In summarizing her feelings about her 20 years in TV, Trotta finds that a Gene McCarthy quote about politics and football applies neatly to TV news: "Those who run it are smart enough to understand the game and dumb enough to think it's important."

For those who don't like television news and simply want their suspicions about its superficial style, nonprofessional habits, and sex discrimination confirmed, this book is perfect. Trotta accurately pinpoints certain conditions (and certain people) that deserve skewering. But for page after page, one is led to believe that television news is predominantly the product of selfish flim-flam artists in management and, on screen, know-nothing anchors more interested in their hair spray than their facts. In this book, Trotta's "good guys" always seem to finish last. For a more balanced, and, I believe, more accurate look at the TV network news business, we'll have to wait for books by Diane Sawyer, Lesley Stahl, Cokie Roberts, Andrea Mitchell, Rita Braver, Carole Simpson, Katherine Couric, and a host of other women who also suffered the slights while paying their dues but who persevered and went on to assignments equal to or better than those attained by their male colleagues.

Liz Trotta fought the good fight. She deserves credit for that. It's just too bad for her-and now for her readers-that her fight was a losing one.

-Sam Donaldson