What Are the Broadcast Journalists Not Telling Us?
New Book Tells Insider ‘Stories Behind the Stories.’ Go Behind the Scenes and Off the Record with Broadcast Journalists
November 3, 2009: Being on TV sounds glamorous, but the life of a reporter has intense challenges and ridiculously funny experiences they don’t get to talk about on the news.
Emmy award winning TV reporter Elizabeth Sanchez, host of PBS’s national show, A Place of Our Own, has put together a collection of the most personal stories from reporters at networks ranging from Fox News to CBS to local affiliates of the big networks across the country. Sanchez gets fellow broadcasters to tell the funny, terrifying, inspirational, and emotional stories that may have been shared around water coolers in newsrooms and broadcast studios, but never on the air. In a $65 Billion industry no one has covered the reporters until now.
Most Americans (71%) get their news from television, according to the Pew Research Center, and most TV news stories last 90 seconds or less. Broadcast journalists might travel halfway around the world and spend weeks working on a story that will disappear into the airwaves after just a few fleeting seconds.
The new book, Watercooler: Behind the Scenes and Off the Record, the Untold Stories from Broadcasters reveals:
• The most inspiring and horrific moments of covering crime and natural disasters, including Katrina and the LA riots
Rita Cosby, former Fox News Correspondent and MSNBC talk show host, told Sanchez about how she was riding in a media helicopter to survey damage from Hurricane Katrina when the craft suddenly was recruited for rescue efforts. “Our chopper became a crammed aerial ambulance transporting evacuees, some covered in blood from falling debris and broken glass,” Cosby said. “I remember asking a young rescued woman where she was going to go next. She simply responded, ‘Just away from here.’”
• What it’s like to drive through a warzone in an armored car full of bullet holes
CBS News correspondent Barry Peterson tells about covering the war in Sarajevo and trying to catch a flight on “Maybe Airlines.” It was an unreliable United Nations airlift that sometimes dropped off supplies and picked up “hitchhiking journalists and their gear,” unless it encountered sniper fire, bad weather or mechanical problems. Peterson says he still has an old passport with the unique stamp, “Maybe Airlines.”
• Inspiring stories that change a person’s career.
Sanchez even tells one of her own secrets, about the time she lost a job opportunity with radio station KFI in Los Angeles. She was crying in a studio restroom when talk-show host Dr. Laura Schlessinger walked in. “Of course, she quickly noticed my despair and self-pity,’ Sanchez says, “and asked why I was crying. I told her about how I didn’t get the job. Dr. Laura put her arm around me and said, ‘They have you where they want you. Why would they hire you? You’re already an extra reporter for them whenever they want you.’ She told me it’s OK to feel disappointed, but I needed to get off my butt, stop whining and start living. That was the title of one of Dr. Laura’s books, Stop Whining, Start Living.”
• The truly stupid moves some anchors make that get them fired
• How being exposed to injustice prompted some to become activists
• An international journalist’s obsession with airline points
• How reporters grapple with their own feelings, but still remain objective
Before becoming host of the Emmy-nominated PBS TV show A Place of Our Own. She worked as a news anchor and reporter in San Diego, Charlotte, and Phoenix. She’s won multiple Emmys for outstanding investigative reporting. Sanchez also has been a national correspondent for CBS NewsPath and covered the death of Michael Jackson, presidential elections, the Space Shuttle Columbia tragedy, the Kobe Bryant and Scott Peterson court cases, and the White House.
