Title: Broadcast blues
Subtitle: dispatches from the twenty-year war between a television reporter and his medium
First published: 1993
Description: There have been memoirs by television anchorpeople before, there have been intellectual critiques of the medium, but there has never been a book like Broadcast Blues. In this smart, scathing, and very funny account of his years on the air, former NBC News correspondent Eric Burns exposes the distortions and pretensions of television journalism by showing us how it works, how what we see on our screens gets there, and freely confesses his role in all of it. Broadcast Blues records the transformation of a TV-obsessed teenager ("American Bandstand was my homework, and I was the most diligent of students") into an accomplished journalist with unique qualifications to skewer his profession. Burns writes trenchantly of his rapid rise from WNOW-TV in Parkersburg, West Virginia ("America's 196th-largest market"), where he fretted about his blinking rate, overbite, and general appearance ("so thin that when I wear a bow tie I look like a swizzle stick"), to his dream job as a correspondent for NBC News, where his duties included being the next Charles Kuralt and substituting for the drugged-out Jessica Savitch as anchor of NBC News Digest. He paints a withering portrait of PBS, thought by so many to be the medium's salvation, and offers a hilariously revealing account of his stint on Entertainment Tonight, prime organ of the celebrity culture ("As Samuel Johnson might have said, when a man knows he is about to interview Molly Ringwald, it concentrates his mind wonderfully"). He is equally perceptive about his own motives and powerfully describes the "early-life crisis" that ultimately led him to see his journalistic self as "a three-card monte dealer, simultaneously delighting and impoverishing the people at home by my clever shuffling of events. Unlike other critics of television journalism, Eric Burns addresses the issues with the lucidity and sophistication of an insider who made it to the top and walked away.
Subjects: Television journalists, Television broadcasting of news, Biography, Journalists, biography
Places: United States
People: Eric Burns
LC classification: PN4874.B846 A3 1993