Rolling Stone, February 18, 1993
In the World of Tabloid Television the Truth Is Often the
First Casualty. Take it from Someone Who's Been There.
The Big Sleaze
By Krista Bradford
It is a sultry summer afternoon on the outskirts of Fremont, Ohio, and Gary Offenburg is making love to a woman named Lynn in a two-tone Chevy pickup truck. She is positioned on the seat; he is standing outside, his pants around his ankles. This is not, however, as uncommon a sight as it would seem. Ever since South River Road became a dead-end street, some five years ago, it has functioned as the town´s lovers´ lane, much to the irritation of Randy Powers. This day, Powers, who owns one of the houses on the road, becomes further incensed because, he says, his young children can see. He calls the Sandusky County Sheriff´s Department. The forty-nine-year old Offenburg and Lynn, who as it happens is not his wife, are charged with public indecency and disorderly conduct. This is not a national story, and it never would have become one but for two simple facts: There is video, and there is A Current Affair.
Having been told by the prosecutor’s office that it needed evidence before it could act, Powers videotaped Offenburg indiscretion. A Current Affair bought the tape — and, living up to the double-entendre of the shows name, aired the footage at least twice, to an average audience of 17 million per show. Gary Offenburg was already pretty upset about the effect this might have on his standing in the community and on his job with the state Department of Transportation. He had his hands full trying to answer to his wife and children for his infidelity. His wife, Nancy, later confided to me in a quiet voice that her husband repeatedly said to her, “ Why can´t they just let it die?”
On November 18th, 1992, a little more than a month after A Current Affair aired the story a second time, Gary Offenburg decided to pay his debt to society — beyond the measly $150 fine, $33 in court costs and thirty-day suspended sentence. On this dreary, cloudy morning, he descended into his basement. There he committed suicide with a pump-action-shotgun blast to the chest.
Nancy Offenburg blamed the news media for having gone too far. “I´m angry about A Current Affair,” she said. “I realize it was news, but they didn´t have to keep pushing it. It was eating at him so bad that he couldn´t take it anymore.”
You´ve got to say: “I´m a human being, goddammit, my life has some value!”
— Howard Beale in `Network´
Recently, I´ve felt as if I were channeling the mad-as-hell spirit of Paddy Chayefsky´s creation Howard Beale, the raving TV anchor. After nearly five years in the tabloid-TV business, there came a point at which I concluded I was not going to take this anymore. Shows like A Current Affair are messing with people´s lives — not only the individuals exploited in tabloid-TV stories but the viewers seduced on the other side of the screen.
Beginning in 1987, I worked in the subterranean world of tabloid television, a world where the truth is far less important than the sexy story. I learned that interviews are regularly purchased and that tabloid TV cuts deals, agreeing to cover notorious characters favorably — Manuel Noriega, for instance — and lobbing only softball questions. I´ve overheard conversations in which field producers have threatened celebrities with damaging information if they didn´t cooperate. I have watched reality become fiction in the edit bays as news footage was intercut with movie scenes and music videos and tarted up with sound effects and music.
The world of trash TV is awash in Australian journalists whose perspective on American life is so distorted it´s as if they were standing on their heads. I started first as a reporter and substitute host for A Current Affair, then later became one of five correspondents for the weekly Fox newsmagazine show The Reporters. Following its demise and about nine months of unemployment, I accepted a job as senior correspondent for Now It Can Be Told, a nationally syndicated show hosted by Geraldo Rivera, which aired for about a year until August 1992. It was my latest tabloid experience. Now I´ve decided it will be my last.
Granted, the suggestion that tabloid television drives people to suicide seems far-fetched. But the Ohio story reminded me of one I had reported about five years ago for A Current Affair. I was sent to see a New York City woman who was one of the first rape victims to reveal her identity in an effort to banish the shame associated with the crime. On the way to the location, we received a series of calls from the assignment editor, Bob Young. The woman was disturbed, it turned out, and her story most likely was not true. But Young said go ahead and shoot it anyway. And it ran. When I later learned that this woman killed herself, I felt ashamed and angry. I felt that we had exploited an unstable woman and shared some responsibility for her death (Young disagreed, since our story was part of a media blitz.)
Then I remembered the line that everybody in this business says — as a joke, of course — to themselves and to one another, as a form of absolution: “Don´t let the facts get in the way of a good story.”
Now, I know what you´re thinking: “Hey, lighten up. These shows are meant to entertain, to have a little fun with the news. This kind of TV is all a harmless romp.” But is it? Behind its campy humor, its tits-and-ass raunchiness, its rubbernecking at the oddities of American life, there is something decidedly mean about tabloid television. Because sometimes people get in the way of a good story. And the bigwigs of trash TV don´t really give a damn.
As someone who has worked in TV news since the age of eighteen, I fit in the world of tabloid because I was a misfit. At seventeen, I interned for Joan Lunden at KCRA-TV, in Sacramento, California. I cut an audition tape and hit the road, landing at a Monterey station that had just lost its female anchor. I got the job. I later reported for local news operations in St. Louis, Los Angeles, Denver and Boston. Growing up in television news is akin to high-level exposure to cultural radiation — you don´t mature, you mutate. There is something decidedly warped about being celebrated for your ability to read aloud or for the way you look on TV. It does something to a person. It made me cranky not being taken seriously as a journalist.
In 1986, some ten years after I started my career, I lost my job as weekend anchor and weekday reporter at the ABC affiliate in Boston, WCVB-TV. My contract wasn´t renewed. Looking back, I don´t really blame them, and I don´t really blame myself for what I did next
I flew to Manhattan to consider taking a job as a reporter for A Current Affair. Back then, even the New York Times praised the show, which had not yet gone national: “Forget now the pejorative notions that cling to the phrase,” said the Times. “A Current Affair is tabloid journalism at its best. It is zippy and knowledgeable, and when it falls on its face, at least it´s in there trying.” But instead of spending the afternoon in the show´s Upper East Side offices at Fox TV station WNYW, I was directed to the Racing Club, a dark, smoky bar across the street, where I watched some of my prospective colleagues get pissed — as in drunk, not angry. That´s what these journos called it.
It was in this bar that I met producer Peter Brennan, the mastermind who molded A Current Affair before moving on to produce Paramount´s sleazier son of Affair, Hard Copy. There was something lovable about Brennan — the way he affectionately called everyone Bubba, his pink cheeks and graying hair reminiscent of a fellow who preferred chimneys and soot to elevators. He winked knowingly and nodded warmly his approval of me while he nursed a single drink that day. There was something about my WASPy manner that he liked. Later he told me what it was: that I could make the unseemly appear somehow seemly, that I could wade waist deep through the muck of tabloid and emerge unsoiled. Eventually, ABC´s PrimeTime Live correspondent Judd Rose would give me some more-accurate career advice: “There´s only so long you can be a diamond swimming in a sea of shit before you end up a shit-covered diamond.”
On my first day at A Current Affair, some six months after its debut, I was asked to portray Jessica Hahn in a reenactment of her alleged rape by the televangelist Jim Bakker. I was horrified. I wasn´t an actress, I was a journalist for God´s sake. I was supposed to pretend I was the now infamous “bimbo" Jessica — to “act" like I was being sexually assaulted? I refused.
But aside from that hitch in the beginning, I grew to like the wacky stories, the travel and the adventure offered by A Current Affair. The show had a delicious sense of humor. The stories often feature a Joe Six-Pack who had gotten his life turned so inside out that it was as if he were wearing underwear for a hat — it was nearly impossible not to laugh at the village idiot. There was the guy who faked his own plunge to his death over Niagara Falls. And the forest ranger who was damn sure he saw Bigfoot. And there was Sheriff Corky, who had rented a video camera to make X-rated movies with his wife. Naturally, they returned the camera with the racy video still inside. Naturally, duplicates were made providing endless entertainment to law-enforcement officers across the country and grist for A Current Affair.
Even the grisly murder stories were fascinating at first. I felt like Truman Capote as he was reporting In Cold Blood. I spent weeks psychoanalyzing a murderer and ex offender who was trying to con his way out of prison. I pushed on convict´s buttons enough that he broke down and cried (known as “passing the onion" in the trade). I thought that I just might find the key to what caused these people to kill. But after doing enough of these stories, I eventually came to the conclusion that they killed because they were crazy.
I soon started noticing things I wished would go away — only they didn´t. A Current Affair didn´t like stories about gays, people of color or unattractive women. I drew this conclusion, as did many of my colleagues, based on the standard questions we were asked when we would propose a story: “What color is he/she, mate?" — followed by “Are there pictures?" to confirm the physical description. Stories that were about these unwanted people generally were not pursued. Former Hard Copy reporter Alexander Johnson, who became a correspondent for Now It Can Be Told and now reports for A Current Affair is one of the few blacks in the genre. He does not deny that racism exists. “That´s an area I would not want to comment on," Johnson told me. “It´s very sensitive."
At The Reporters, I worked on a story about violence at the United States-Mexico border. I later discovered that the field producer had negotiated with two brawny young men to videotape American vigilantes beating up illegal immigrants. I didn´t know whether this assignment would incite these strapping gents to rustle up some frightened Mexicans for the money. Hell, I didn´t know if these men would fake an attack. I urged my superiors to reconsider the story. Instead, they gave it to another correspondent.
Spend any time with the Australians or British Fleet Streeters, and their attitude about race makes itself apparent — for their distinctive vocabulary is rife with racial slurs. And it was my impression that they never felt that there was anything offensive about this. Once, on a flight to Los Angeles, I asked fellow correspondent Steve Dunleavy (known as the Dog) to help me with the New York Times crossword puzzle. With all seriousness, he took the paper and puzzled over the clue: a five-letter work for a person of Asian descent. He returned my newspaper with the answer proudly penciled in: slope. (For the record, Dunleavy said the slur is “out of character" for himself and that his recollection of the incident “is diametrically different.")
Geraldo Rivera may be tabloid´s exception to the racist rule. His staff is the most integrated shop I´ve seen. And A Current Affair may be cleaning up its discriminatory act. A November 23rd, 1992, report in Variety said, “Gone, according to a veteran staffer, is the old unwritten rule of what the show wouldn´t cover — gays, urban (read black and Hispanic) America." Right. Gone are most of the managers primarily responsible for A Current Affair´s questionable editorial decisions. They have moved on to other tabloid shows.
While I was preparing this story Hard Copy´s public-relations person, Linda Lipman, send me a compilation videotape, which struck m me as strange, since I had not yet formally contacted the show. Later, Lipman refused me interviews because, she said, the show had heard I was investigating racism in tabloid. With that, I decided to take a look at this mystery tape, and sure enough, Hard Copy had sent me a collection of its stories that featured blacks, as if that were proof it did not practice prejudice. (I contacted all the shows requesting interviews; I was turned down by Hard Copy and Inside Edition. A Current Affair´s publicist limited my request for interviews, none of which ever materialized.)
I became aware of tabloid´s homophobia at Fox when I scripted a story about a woman and two men involved in a murderous love triangle. One of the men was a minister who had been murdered, the other his convicted killer. Peter Brennan told me that he didn't want to reveal that the men were gay until the very end of the story to avoid turning viewers off. But doing that misled viewers into believing the triangle was purely heterosexual.
These managers, however, loved trying to out celebrities to provoke controversy. On The Reporters, Dunleavy asked Mike Tyson if he was gay. And George Michael was popped the question. Steve Schwartz, a supervising producer of The Reporters who later worked as day-of-air producer for A Current Affair and senior producer for Now It Can Be Told , explained why: “ "Because it´s a societal taboo in the vast ocean of the American population, it´s considered to be aberrant behavior, and any kind of aberrant behavior, especially by a celebrity, is noteworthy to a show like this.“
Managers at The Reporters routinely referred to the powerful Los Angeles Fox contingent as "girbils” — the rodents rumored to be gay sex toys. But sadly, the most troubling development it tabloid´s gay-bashing mentality has been its response to the AIDS crisis. “I had some bad experiences, stories that they forced me to do — like the Robert Reed story,” said a field producer for Now It Can Be Told. She explained that a contact in Los Angeles had obtained Reed's death certificate, which stated that he had died of AIDS — tarnishing the pop image of the perfect Brady Bunch father. “It was Geraldo ultimately who wanted to do it,” she continued. “We broke it, and we got a lot of heat. I really felt like a shit about it.”
At first, I felt liberated by the creative freedom tabloid offered to experiment with longer stories — up to twenty minutes instead of the average minute-and-a-half package you see on your local news. We could use music, sound effects and reenactments, and the possibilities seemed inspiring. But now you can consider me a purist. My trouble with sound effects came after Now It Can Be Told producers had edited in the sound of an explosion to accompany pictures of the space shuttle Challenger breaking up in the sky for promotional teasers coming in and out of every commercial break.
The story was about NASA´s withholding information from family members and investigators about the fate of the astronauts. The producers insensitively played the tape over and over again, never stopping to consider the feelings of family members and friends. And the Challenger didn´t explode; rather, it was torn apart by aerodynamic forces, as I explained in my report — but now after having heard the blast, I´m sure most of the people who saw it are certain the Challenger blew up.
While I was a correspondent with The Reporters, the show reenacted the Tampa, Florida, murder of Karen Gregory, showing a photograph of her dead body in the promotional teasers. He family and friends claimed that the reporter, in order to gain their cooperation, promised that there would be no such sensational scenes. “They told us this was going to be good, respectable journalism; we all fell for it,” said David Mackey, a Tampa therapist and friend of the victim´s. Back then, correspondent Steve Dunlop told me he did make that promise, only to be overruled. At the time, Bob Young, executive producer of The Reporters, explained Dunlop´s promise was out of order. That reporter misspoke,“ said Young. "He didn´t have the authority to say that. It never should have been said.“ Young went on to say that the objectionable material was dropped from the story and that he had ”no moral problems“ with the final version.
And that is my main complaint about tabloid television. Rarely do its producers have trouble sleeping. I never heard discussions of ethical delimmas. They do not pause to consider the consequences — for the ratings justify the means. Said Reporters producer Schwartz, "You can´t go into a village of cannibals and say, `I´m a vegetarian, come and be like me,´ because these people have been eating human flesh all their lives.”
So I guess I shouldn´t have been so dumbfounded when I witnessed a producer stab around a child´s feet on an exercise trampoline with a real knife, reenacting how a teenage boy h ad terrorized his younger brother. This same producer later asked Mexican children selling chewing gum at the Tijuana border to stand in the way of oncoming traffic because she felt the shot behind me was empty.
While working at The Reporters, I was given the assignment of flying to Toronto to purchase an interview with disgraced Olympic sprinter Ben Johnson. I was ethically opposed to paying for interviews, and I didn´t care to be responsible for the safekeeping of $20,000 in cash; nonetheless, no other reporter was available to take the assignment, so I did it. Accompanied by a woman friend of Johnson´s who had help arrange the contact, I broke through a crowd of journalists who were camped out at his house (Johnson had gone into hiding after being banished from the Olympics for steroid use). I arrived on his doorstep with a basket of fruit and an envelope of cash. Johnson let us into his home, but then disappeared into a back bedroom and never came out. He did not do the interview and did not take the money. When I asked to see him, I was chased out of the house by a relative of his who was waving a wooden cooking spoon overhead, shouting, “No interviews!” But buying news is a tabloid tradition. Susan Crimp, former news editor of Now It Can Be Told and current Hard Copy employee, told me she would see suited men at press conferences in London. “And they weren´t journalists at all,” she said. “They were called brokers. I was just twenty-one, and I thought naively they were arranging where they could do the interview, but they actually had very large checks on them, and that´s where it all started.” But that´s kids´ stuff compared with the level to which tabloid television has taken checkbook journalism.
Tabloid does not like to admit how often it resorts to buying interviews or cooperation, but all the shows have huge war chests just for that purpose. Why else would many of these people talk to these programs? The charges are often buried in expense reports as “location” or “consulting fees” or “reimbursement for salary lost” during the time spent shooting. According to Murray Weiss and Bill Hoffmann, authors of Palm Beach Babylon, Hard Copy put together an international media consortium and offered nearly $1 million to Patricia Bowman to sit for an interview during the trial of William Kennedy Smith, who she alleged had raped her. (Hard Copy disputes details of this account.) In this instance money didn´t talk; Bowman spoke to ABC for free.
But because it is now common knowledge that tabloid pays small fortunes, people offering to betray friends, neighbors and loved ones are “coming out of the woodwork,” said a source at Hard Copy. Often, these monetary arrangements work against other journalists because they lock in exclusives, making it impossible for other reporters to interview, much less scrutinize, these people. Tabloid TV is pricing the news out of the reach of the general public, and the information is further corrupted as it enters Hollywood´s movie-of-the-week mills, where the truth is interpreted by screenwriters.
Take the Amy Fisher sage — the classic tabloid tale spun off into three network movies of the week, which were so successful that even the networks were surprised. The movies were vigorously cross-promoted in local newscasts: Meet the real Amy Fisher! Meet the actress portraying Amy! Find out how the real people felt about the movies! Find out how the actress felt portraying the real people!
In addition, tabloid has led the trend featuring celebrity interviews to the exclusion of more serious reporting. Said Pete Simmons, a former Now It Can Be Told producer: “When Barbara Walters first started her specials, she was interviewing important people who were movers and shakers. Her ratings sucked. She started doing interviews with celebrities, and her ratings shot up. So guess what she does now? Journalism, true journalism, if it does nothing else, should do one thing — it should bring people the hard facts of life.” But tabloid television would point to its very success as proof that a large number of viewers don´t want that.
In 1990, when I was interviewed by Geraldo Rivera, he promised me that Now It Can Be Told would be an investigative news show. I had my doubts but chose to quell them, foolishly telling myself that journalism´s premiere performance artist at long last wished to redeem himself. My hopes were raised by his first hires, which included, most notably, investigative reporter Roberta Baskin (now with CBS´s Street Stories) and Pete Simmons, formerly of ABC News. Geraldo named Simmons the show´s senior producer. But late in the game, much to Simmons´s surprise, Geraldo also named A Current Affair´s Wayne Darwen a senior producer, claiming the shotgun managerial team would proffer a much needed “yin and yang” effect — in Geraldo´s vocabulary, “the meat,” or substance, provided by Simmons and “the heat,” or sizzle, provided by Darwen.
My heart sank. I had heard stories about Darwen, but not one to believe everything I hear, I invited him to lunch before we even began to work together. At Manhattan´s Water Club, on the East River, the bearded Australian drank and smoked heavily and spoke freely. “There´s something about you which reminds me of...Marilyn Monroe,” he said. “We should use that...I´ve got an idea. Why don´t you take a hidden camera and go to a sex therapist? Tell him you´re married — haven´t been laid in twenty-five years...and we could catch him seducing you. That would be fuckin´ brilliant, mate!” With that, Darwen dragged on his cigarette and checked my reaction, which at this point I´m certain was a blank stare (Darwen didn´t recall those details, and he took discussions at this meeting to be hypothetical.)
By the time Darwen came aboard, I was learning how insensitive Geraldo was to concerns of ethics and sexism. Sue Levit, a field producer for Now It Can Be Told, reminded me about a staff meeting in which Geraldo said, “Oh, what was that chick´s name?” Levit told me, “You and I locked eyes at the same exact moment.” Later in the meeting Geraldo gave a pep talk in which he exclaimed to us, his troops, most of whom were women, “You gotta feel it in your balls.” Said one woman who still works in tabloid, “You know, where are we supposed to feel it?”
Now It Can Be Told senior producer Steve Schwartz explained that during ratings periods,”It was just understood that we had to `tart up´ the show.“ National news editor Maury Terry concurred: “We went through a T&A stage, and that bothers me. I thought it was gratuitous.” Marc Goldbaum, a former field producer for The Reporters and Now It Can Be Told, said it was hard to miss: “If somebody did numbers and figured out how to quantify that, I mean they would be shocking. It´s all tits and ass.”
The field producer who often assembled the raciest pieces for Now It Can Be Told is a woman. “There were several stories I didn´t put my name on”, she told me. “A lot of those A Current Affair-type stories: bikini girls selling hot dogs in G-strings by the highway in Florida. That was something I´m not going to put my name on.”
But I believe T&A to be only the tip of the iceberg — that there is a deeper misogyny at work here. Because tabloid paints in sweeping strokes, women are depicted only as madonnas or whores. Female sexuality is punished — where male appetites are expected or even celebrated. This is obvious in the way tabloid promotes stories: “Cold! Arrogant! Manipulative! The real Lolita!” — tabloid´s description of Amy Fisher, a criminal but also a messed-up teenager.
I mean, who gives a shit about Amy Fisher? Well, the little beady-eyed unwashed television viewers do.
- Pete Simmons, senior producer,
`Now It Can Be Told´
On September 22nd, 1992, at a Massapequa, New York, health club, the young woman who put a bullet in Mary Jo Buttafuoco´s head, Amy Fisher, was laughing and talking with boyfriend Paul Makely about sex in jail and the benefits she hoped to gain from her notoriety. Unbeknown to her, she was being videotaped. Also unbeknown to her, Hard Copy paid for the betrayal.
The show aired the tape, which damaged Fisher´s credibility as the main witness in the case against Mary Joe´s husband, Joseph Buttafuoco, for statutory rape. That night, Fisher reported attempted to kill herself with a drug overdose.
“I think what [Rafael Abramovitz] did with Amy is outrageous, just fuckin´ outrageous — he totally set her up,” said John Parsons, who worked in management at Hard Copy before joining Now It Can Be Told. It is reliably said that Abramovitz negotiated a deal with Makely that he would secretly videotape Fisher with two hidden cameras (one of the failed) for some $6000 to $10,000. You may remember that this bearded fellow with the monotonous voice was involved in the purchase of another infamous tape for A Current Affair — that of the so-called preppie murderer, Robert Chambers, twisting the neck of a doll at a slumber party. Parsons explained why he was so offended: “Rafael and I began in the Fifty-first State [a PBS program], when we were chasin´ the real criminals, and now he´s in bedrooms for a buck. Everything´s for a buck. I told him he made me feel tawdry, made me want to get out of the business. So now he´s not talking to me.”
Abramovitz won´t talk to me, either. I worked with him at A Current Affair and The Reporters, but he was unhappy that I was writing this story. When I called him at home, Abramovitz said why: “I don´t consider you and me on the same level...Never did.”
To be fair, Abramovitz isn´t the only one with his channels in the bedrooms of the masses. More and more, it seems, tabloid television is leaping at the chance to use hidden cameras, invading people´s privacy, regardless of the consequences. As a former colleague at Now It Can Be Told confessed: “When I dialed London and hired a private detective to dress up in Salvation Army gear and go shoot the forgotten cousin of the queen in a mental asylum, I realized I had reached the all-time low in journalism.”
So why, you might wonder, did I stay in a profession so low, so lacking in dignity? Well, I´ll tell you. The pay and the perks were generous. I went to Vietnam, El Salvador, Brazil, Thailand, Cuba and other places. I was asked to do a lot of things, and I did some of them, like trying to buy Ben Johnson´s story. I was upbraided by TV critics for hugging a subject on camera. I did a story on strippers. But gradually I learned how to define and enforce my own boundaries. By the time I reached Now It Can Be Told, I routinely refused what I believed to be unethical or distasteful assignments. But by then, it was too late. I´d been slimed. I was caught in the tabloid trap. Network executives advised me to go back to local news. And I did.
So maybe my five years in the big sleaze has made me a bit oversensitive. All around me I see tabloid´s corrupting influence — in local news, in political campaigns, in movies of the week, even creeping into the staid network newsmagazine shows, which are resorting more frequently to hidden cameras and other tabloid techniques. Not that hidden cameras are necessarily always bad; at least these shows have been known to weigh the consequences of invading people´s privacy.
I wonder if viewers should consider the consequences as well. It´s easy to chuckle over the poor soul who got caught by the hidden camera with his pants down. But consider this: Orwell might have gotten it wrong, mate. It could be the journos of tabloid television, rather unexpectedly, who have assumed the role of Big Brother, watching our every move.