Where's Ed Newman When You Need Him?

I was in London last week when news came of the death of the great NBC
newsman Edwin Newman, 91 years old. Turns out he and his wife had been
living in England since 2007 to be close to their daughter, but I
suspect part of him chose to be there for the same reason the late
American humorist S.J. Perelman migrated to the UK back in the 1970s.
The courtesy may be only skin deep, he said, but that's deep enough for
me.

Disillusioned, Perelman wound up coming back to the States; Newman did
not, which is a shame for the rest of us, as our bickering, divided,
slaphappy nation could have used more of his perceptive objectivity,
dry wit and profound sense of fair play. We certainly need all of those
qualities now.

He was that rare thing, a gentleman, although "genteelly rumpled" and
"genially grumpy" as his New York Times obituary described him. He also
held an unusual record -- the only person in the world who had hosted
two presidential debates and two editions of Saturday Night Live.

Ed and I got to know each other in the late eighties when he hosted a
PBS documentary series I wrote and co-produced on the history of
television. He also wrote the introduction to my book on the same
subject. We spent a lot of time together, both in a post-production
studio as he recorded narration and later on the road as we jointly
traveled around the country promoting the TV series.

A strict grammarian and authority on the English language -- he wrote
two best selling books on its use and abuse -- the only argument he and
I ever had was on the difference between the words "perimeter" and
"parameter." Ed, of course, won.

To him, precise language and journalistic accuracy were essential; part
of what made him such a good reporter. In his life after retiring from
NBC News in 1984, he enjoyed playing himself as a newscaster in movies
and sitcoms. But he told me how incensed he was when the producers of
The Golden Girls handed him a script in which he referred to Russian
leader Mikhail Gorbachev by the wrong title. He kept correcting it, yet
the producers insisted on keeping it the way it was, because, they
argued, it was a dream sequence and the character having the dream
wouldn't know the difference. I thought Ed's head would come to a
point.

Newman's first full-time job in journalism was as a dictation boy in
the Washington bureau of the old International News Service,
transcribing stories reporters phoned in from the field.

The wire service was owned by William Randolph Hearst and Ed loved to
tell the story of the day one of Hearst's deputies showed up at the
bureau while the movie Citizen Kane -- Orson Welles' devastating,
satiric portrait of a Hearst-like publisher -- was playing at the RKO
Keith's movie theater just around the corner.

"Any of you boys seen Citizen Kane yet?" the man demanded. Ed and the
other newsmen fell over themselves proclaiming total ignorance of the
film.

Hearst's deputy looked around the room and said, "Too bad. Damned fine
portrait of the old man."

I suspect that even the legendary Hearst, who was no stranger to
exploiting xenophobia and fear to peddle papers, would have been
flabbergasted by our current toxic diet of hate radio, Fox News and
Internet hyperbole. And I know Ed Newman would have been appalled, as
illustrated by a story told in his Washington Post obituary.

On the Today show in 1971, Newman interviewed the 73-year-old comedian
Georgie Jessel, one of those older entertainers like Bob Hope, Martha
Raye and Kate Smith who were staunch supporters of Richard Nixon and
the Vietnam War. During the interview, Jessel compared the Post and The
New York Times to the Soviet government newspaper Pravda.

"You are a guest here," Newman told him. "It is not the kind of thing
one tosses off. One does not accuse newspapers of being Communist,
which you have just done."

Jessel responded, "I didn't mean it quite that way... I won't say it
again."

Newman replied, "I agree that you won't say it again. Thank you very
much, Mr. Jessel."

Jessel said, "I just want to say one thing before I leave." Newman
said, "Please don't," and cut to a commercial.

As the Post reported, "When he came back on the air, Mr. Newman said
television had a responsibility to uphold 'certain standards of
conduct.'

"'It didn't seem to me we have any obligation to allow people to come
on to traduce the reputations of anyone they want,' he said, 'to abuse
people they don't like.'"

Alas, since then, as the progressive historian and journalist Rick
Perlstein has written, "Conservatives have become adept at playing the
media for suckers, getting inside the heads of editors and reporters,
haunting them with the thought that maybe they are out-of-touch
cosmopolitans..."

There was a time, he continued, when "the media didn't adjudicate the
ever-present underbrush of American paranoia as a set of 'conservative
claims' to weigh, horse-race-style, against liberal claims. Back then,
a more confident media unequivocally labeled the civic outrage
represented by such discourse as 'extremist' -- out of bounds."

Such was Ed Newman's time -- and that of many other print and broadcast
journalists with the knowledge, experience and bravery to speak the
truth. Their erudition, skill and dedication to separating fact from
fiction, right from rant and legitimate grievance from bellicosity are
woefully absent from all too much of today's misshapen, mainstream
media.

Years ago, when we were promoting that PBS series and my book, he and I
often would autograph copies together. One night in Seattle, a woman
who had just gotten Newman's signature was trying to make up her mind
whether mine was worth having as well.

"Are you Ed's sidekick?" she asked. Sidekick? I thought for a moment
and answered, proudly, "Yes."