Rich on the Road

By now, most of you are aware that CNN's Jack Cafferty has become China's Public Enemy #1.  You've probably also seen the quote from Cafferty that prompted CNN to apologize to China's government.  If not, here it is:

"We continue to import their junk with the lead paint on them and the poisoned pet food and export, you know, jobs to places where you can pay workers a dollar a month to turn out the stuff that we're buying from Wal-Mart. So I think our relationship with China has certainly changed. I think they're basically the same bunch of goons and thugs they've been for the last 50 years."

The "goons and thugs" part of it seems to be especially irritating to the Chinese, who are busy trying to convince the world that they're really not the way they were, that they are eager and ready to join the rest of the developed world, please come to our Olympics party this summer  -- and that all those nasty things the Western media is saying about Tibet and human rights violations are just biased propoganda.

That's the set up.  This blog is really about the sometimes small fraternity that is television journalism.  Jack Cafferty gave me my first full time reporting job -- in 1976 at the NBC affilliate in Des Moines, Iowa (not my favorite place but that's the subject of another blog).    Jack was the evening anchor and managing editor at WHO-TV in Des Moines.  I'd been working as a photographer/reporter at KROC-TV/AM/FM in Rochester, Minnesota.

I've, thus, always followed his career.  He was a good guy.  Funny and fun loving.  Decent newsman too, though I don't believe he had a college degree.  He'd had some success in business before he went into TV, as I understood it.  He had the looks and the voice and the presence that, especially 30 years ago, news executives were looking for.  When he left the station, the guy who replaced him turned out to the worst news director I ever had -- absolute disaster, but that, too, is the subject of another blog.

Jack left WHO for a weekend anchor job at WNBC in New York and made a splash, almost immediately, by using the word "sucks" on the air.  It was an ad lib about the weather, as in "the weather sucks" (if I remember right) and the New York tabloids jumped all over it.  But, as these things often go, the "bad" publicity turned out to be good publicity because, suddenly, everyone in New York knew who the new guy on NBC was -- the one that said the weather "sucks."   Not long afterward he became the weekday anchor on the station's "Live at Five' newscast and had a long run there.

I suspect this latest gaffe may turn out the same way.  People who never watch CNN now know the name Jack Cafferty.  It will probably improve the ratings on his show, at least in the short term.  He said what a lot of Americans still believe to be the truth.  I haven't spoken to Jack since the late 1970s.  But, I hope he's doing well.  And, that it all works out for the best.

Rich