The Next Big Story: My Journey Through the Land of Possibilities
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Ysabel Duron is the weekend anchor. She went to school with Geraldo Rivera on a Ford Foundation grant aimed at increasing the number of minorities in TV news. She seized the opportunity given her. She won an Emmy in 1974 for covering the Patty Hearst kidnapping. She is from an era when women didn’t get to cover that stuff and she did it anyway. She also covered the Harvey Milk murder and Ronald Reagan. She was a female first more than once, a Latina first. At KRON, she does a series on the son she gave up for adoption. The reporting is forceful, rich with emotion. There are not many women. Not many minorities. It makes such a difference to see someone make it who looks like you. I look toward Ysabel, and dream.
I try very hard but I need to be better. After two weeks, I am sent out on my first live shoot. I completely flub it. The San Francisco Giants are in the playoffs. I go live from a bar where everyone is drunk, and just as I begin my report someone grabs my ass. I freeze. I stare into the camera like an idiot. They go to my tape of happy people talking about the Giants. They come back to me to close out my story. I mumble. It’s over quickly, though it feels like a lifetime. Back at the station the boss calls me into his office. I am so ashamed as I walk through the newsroom. He suggests I quit. I should try Santa Barbara; go make my mistakes in a smaller market. I call Bob Bazell from a pay phone, where no one can hear. He makes me take a deep breath. He says, “Don’t quit. No matter what, stick it out. Those jobs are hard to get.” He’s right so I stick it out.
I review every tape I shoot to see how I look on camera. Every thirty minutes I do live shots before Today comes on. Five times a day I do short news updates. I live on the air. I can tell I’m improving. I’m young and paid a pittance. That is the moment of opportunity in any business. I am not naturally talented and I know it, but I am willing to work harder than everyone else. Someone suggests I pretend that Brad is the camera. I find that so ridiculous I laugh, even though I am so stressed. My friend Sara James from NBC tells me to pretend the live shot is a call to my own mother. “Remember, she is not stupid but she can’t see what you are seeing. Explain with clarity and detail.” As if I’m not stressed out enough, I’m thinking about my mother. But I try it.
I learn to stop trying to say too much. Just focus on the three lines I’m trying to deliver. I wear black too much and I don’t like being on camera. I feel awkward doing a stand-up—the break where the reporter addresses the audience. Why am I talking into the camera in the middle of a story about someone else? I listen to my own voice and I hate it. It doesn’t sound like me. I stick to the three lines. I pick someone to talk to. I just say what is happening. I keep it simple. One day, mercifully, I stop hearing myself and I just talk.
I have always hated the way I look on camera. I don’t feel authentic. I feel like an insert, an extra, one of those annoying people who step into the camera and wave when they’re not supposed to. I long wanted to be a television reporter, but one who didn’t have to be on TV. That’s crazy, of course. But it’s true.
I am reporting a story about the dangerous high winds on the Bay Bridge and I urge people to stay away. Later at the grocery store an elderly woman tells me she is praying for me and says she hopes I get a job “inside.” I go to the ninetieth anniversary celebration of the City of Richmond in California. I attend as the event’s emcee, wearing a dress with a green velvet top and a black skirt. When I arrive they don’t recognize me and won’t let me in. I’m the main speaker and they can’t find my name on the guest list.
Years later I’ll walk the red carpet at the Costume Ball at the Met in New York as a network reporter. There will be over two hundred photographers shouting my name and taking flash photos and pushing Brad out of the way. I push forward a toe and flash that smile created for the glow of paparazzi. People recognize me but I still feel like the girl in the green velvet top—a little bit over my head. Next to the willowy models I don’t think I am particularly pretty, but I focus on looking appropriate. The runway photos look like an ego moment, but they are not. They never appear anywhere. I’m not fashionable enough or controversial enough ever in my career to be the instant photo pick. If I sit next to Uma Thurman, I get lucky if they don’t cut me out. Looks are something that can help you out or get in the way. Good looks betray you.
There is an aspect of TV that is an extension of the beauty industry. Because we are journalists everyone avoids talking about it. I feel confident I was picked to go on air because of my abilities, but looks always play a part when it comes to TV. That means I have to make sure my looks work for me, not against me. I have to walk around life looking like I believe I am smart and confident, that I am beautiful but that my looks are not my main focus. I need my attitude about my looks to get out of the way so people listen to what I am saying.
The good news is that in this country, anyone can qualify for good-looking because there is really no American look. There is something unique about American beauty in that it allows for beauty by circumstance. The blue-eyed blondes from the toothpaste commercials may declare themselves on top. But there is room for Barbra Streisand and Lena Horne. They sing beautifully so they are beautiful. There is room for Nancy Kerrigan and Michelle Obama and Jessica Tandy—or at least their career-high moments make for the sudden recognition of their beauty.
In America, success is beautiful, as is notoriety, power, exposure, attitude, accomplishment, and smarts. Beauty in America is not just blue eyes and a mane of blond hair. I walked through high school as this nerd living in a place where race was the third rail of dating. I was sunk when it came to good looks. But once I left my hometown my looks became exotic. The difference wasn’t me. It was about the audience, the timing, the moment of my big unveiling. The look of a mix of races and ethnicities combining spoke of the promises of racial peace and social harmony. I had, just by circumstance, the face America wanted to reflect its soul. This was a moment for people who looked like me to stand out.
In 1993 I’m doing live shots for KRON and feel like ducking when the camera goes live. By 2000, I am a weekend anchor at NBC and I’m named one of People magazine’s “Most Beautiful.” It feels a bit like it is just my turn. They declare me the portrait of America’s multiracial future. By then I’m pregnant and I have gut-wrenching morning sickness the day of the photo shoot, which seems comical given that I’m being photographed for my beauty. They offer me grapefruit juice and red jellybeans and make me feel much more lovely than I am feeling that day. I wear leather pants with alluring zippers and curl my long hair. I’m cute enough, not crazy beautiful. I’m certainly attractive enough to report the news.
But in my early days at KRON, it’s attitude that counts. I walk into KRON each day like a ray of sunshine. I never appear to be unhappy. I complain about nothing. I say yes to everyone. I love reporting so I focus on that. The camera crews like me. I work hard and I am willing to carry the gear. That’s key in TV—an experienced photographer can teach you everything you need to know about reporting. I keep at it with the punishing live shots at dawn. Not many people are watching, but I really invest. I try and try to get better. I begin walking around like I actually belong there.
Then one day I am walking down the hallway and see a huddle of people. There is another young reporter who is also working four days a week, like me. She’s kind of my competition in the new arrival category. Everyone is making a joke about the affirmative action hire. I smile and walk by. They are having fun. But suddenly they look embarrassed. It’s me. I’m the hire they’re talking about! I am so incensed. I want to remind them of my resume. I had been a network producer. I’ve worked so hard and achieved so much and now I’m mad. I’m embarrassed. It didn’t even feel racial; it was just nasty.
I sink into myself. At twenty-six, I am always in fast-forward. I get lost in the story or at least the little piece of it I can grab for myself. Polly Klaas is kidnapped at knifepoint from her own slumber party at age twelve. Thousands of people search for her and the TV news plays a central role. The police happen upon he
r suspected killer when his car gets stuck in the mud, but they let him go. They later discover the little girl has been strangled. We report the breaking news. They find the suspected killer and I report it on TV. These kinds of stories become the bread and butter of my working life.
Within three months I am named bureau chief for the East Bay. Or, more accurately, they move me to Oakland, and I am the lone reporter in the bureau so by default I name myself bureau chief. Brad is starting business school at Berkeley, so it brings us closer. I report for three solid years. Really get my arms around the job. I tell Brad I am confident we are going to be married. He says he feels like he is the guy, but I think my attitude kind of scares him. We drive all over California in his Honda: Sonoma, Napa, Tahoe. I tell him I’m in California because of him. He is running his own business, so he’s busy. We never live together: That’s the way I was raised. My parents visit and we clean up any signs he even stays there.
We are low-drama people. So one night over dinner I tell him I feel like he’s about to propose. He is. It’s like a dance between us until he does. Then fast-forward a year to 1995 and there are 135 people on my parents’ lawn in Smith town and it’s ninety-eight degrees and scorching hot. I am in a white bead gown. My mother is slightly annoyed that I’m not wearing panty hose in church but okay with Brad refusing to wear a tux. The crowd reflects what my life is becoming. Bob and Jeanne are both there and my colleagues from California fly in. My adult life is standing on the lawn of my childhood home all dressed up. Brad had been living in Menlo Park and I leave my apartment in San Francisco. We get our first apartment together in the East Bay on Mandana Boulevard right on Lake Merritt. I am loving being in Oakland and loving every minute of my life. I am suddenly very happy.
CHAPTER FOUR
FINDING MY VOICE
O akland is the second-most-diverse place in America, and when I move there it’s also the momentary epicenter of crack cocaine, rap music, and earthquakes. My bosses never expected me to move there, but Oakland is the place I have to go live if I’m going to cover the community like Jeanne has taught me to do. This is the kind of place where interesting stories are happening, but there is definitely a sense of amazement from the higher-ups that I want to live there. One day the East Bay Bridge is out and all the execs complain about how they have to drive through Oakland to get to work. I’m supposed to be covering the community objectively and my bosses look down on the inhabitants. It feels slightly racist, but it’s more like a division based on class. The fact is, many of these people are poor. I speak up. I remind everyone that the people who live there are the people I’m covering. They roll their eyes.
Even so, I walk into my own apartment every night and glance into the living room to see if my TV is still there. The neighborhood is wonderful, but it’s also rough. I am glad I can live in it because it helps me understand my community, but it’s complicated. I walk outside and love the chaos of cultures coming together at one moment. I cringe when I see them clashing fiercely the next. I am here for a reason. They can call my beat whatever they want, but I am covering poverty, life in the inner city, the punishing existence of the have-nots, the many injustices heaped on vulnerable people by urban life.
A guy wearing a pink dress knocks over a Wells Fargo truck and I’m leading the news with the report. He has guessed correctly that people will only remember the dress. Children scream as they are pulled from their parents by Child Protective Services. I am there to do a story. Fires rage in the middle of the night. I am there. This is what much of America looks like, but it is nothing like my cozy little suburban Smithtown. For so many people in this country who look like me, this is real life.
Oakland is like any one of a number of American communities that flower in darkness. The folks who drive through it see only urban ills, but there is immutable beauty left behind from another time. Towering redwoods were replaced by racing street-cars and sprawling rail yards that gave way to suburbs. Little villages sprouted up when immigrant groups from China and Latin America planted their flags. Where some folks see modern ghettos taking root there are also leftover redwoods and the timeless lake in the park. I love the cultural stew of the people. I jog around the waterfront and wave at Jerry Brown. I feel the bay breeze lift the heat and catch the smell of flowers.
At KRON, some reporters see poor people in poor neighborhoods behaving like animals. A number of people are saying the station’s best days are slipping by and it’s stuck in this lazy pattern of reporting stories off press releases and staged photo ops. I catch one every day or get sent out overnight for the latest fire. I do the live shot on the familiar serpentine roadways that guide people past the slums. I want to get into the neighborhoods where families wage battles for safety and education and basic services. But I’m a young reporter practicing her live news delivery without the clout or wherewithal to sell those stories effectively.
Meth labs are everywhere in Oakland, or at least that’s how the KRON assignment desk makes it feel. I cover meth labs and meth busts and meth fires. Methamphetamines are a gross drug. They trick the brain into overproducing dopamine. To make them, people cook nasal decongestants with ephedrine using toxic chemicals like lithium they get from batteries. The process produces powder, little rocks called “ice.” It’s so easy that kitchens and garages become drug labs. The problem is these labs can suddenly blow up if you mess up the process. I find myself covering lots of these fires. The methamphetamine rush is not a poor people’s rush. It’s a rush craved by anybody who wants to escape life’s downs. It’s cooking in Oakland but it’s an equal opportunity American high. The reporting makes clear we don’t effectively treat drug addictions or try to lift people out of the lows that accompany life’s burdens. But we enforce our drug laws with the ferocity of hungry lions. Police hold press conferences announcing their latest bust like gladiators holding high a severed head. I feel like there is much more to this story.
KRON is not the kind of station that does stories about the plight of poor people. Most local stations are not. We cover the police, the schools, the missing children, and crime. I try to make the point at KRON that we need to do more than report the latest tragedy. Lecturing people is always a bad idea. I get nowhere and I’m still too young at my craft to just do it on my own. Those stories intrigue me but I have no idea how to tell them or pitch them or do them. I have no mentor close by. I feel lost and angry some days. People who deserve more from their local TV station surround me.
The neighborhoods of Oakland divide by class more than race. Or at least it’s easier for people to divide them that way. It’s part of America’s ambivalence about the poor, the struggle over whether to pity or despise someone who is down on their luck, especially when they lash out. There are middle-class black people who hate poor people, working-class Latinos who hate poor people, and so on. The poor get layered. There are the working poor and the criminal poor and pecking orders within each. People are so much more multidimensional than how much they earn, but it counts for a lot in a place like Oakland. It counts for everything to people watching Oakland from outside. I want my reporting to explain why police disproportionately focus on the guy cooking up crap in a meth lab but won’t prosecute the middle-class cocaine user who goes to work each morning.
I feel the limits of my abilities and it is frustrating. I need to get there. I’m too young to hurl my anger at anyone. I just carry it around until it turns into frustration. I get really pissed off by what people at work say. But I don’t explode. I try to save my fire. I know if I lose my temper then people will begin to work around me. I rephrase my arguments but I end up outside yet another fire, yet another murder. I concentrate on the stories. I practice getting better. I am getting better but I need to get good, really good.
I feel like I come into my own as a reporter during the teachers’ strike of 1996, a five-week walkout that begins over salaries and class sizes. At first over 80 percent of Oakland’s fifty-two thousand schoolchildren and nearly 70
percent of its teachers stay home. The schools try to stay open by hiring strikebreakers, scabs in the eyes of the union. The strike is heartbreaking. The teachers are so obviously underpaid. The kids are being taught in oversized classes. They are some of the worst performing students in the country and the schools have no money to teach them? The result is teachers not teaching and kids not learning, a standoff that paralyzes Oakland.
I camp out and bring donuts to both sides. Neighborhood kids with nothing to do come spend time in my office. I buy them books from the local store and several tell me they have never owned a book before in their life. The parents try to teach their kids in churches and community centers. Oakland plays tough and bans them from public buildings. Teachers begin teaching out of their homes. This is where living in the community pays off. This meltdown is happening around me. I can see the parents racing around in the morning, trying to figure out what to do, fretting that their kids’ subpar education has been replaced by no education at all. I see the teachers trying to survive making $30,000 a year. For the first time, I am dug in deeply enough with both sides of a story and feel confident enough in my skills that I get beyond just reporting a headline. I report a nuanced story of the politics behind why education is failing urban kids. The contract settlement hikes minimum teacher pay to $30,524. This is a story where no one wins. The story of the Oakland schools is the story of so many urban schools, underfunded and understaffed and searching for ways to teach the kids. Parents will ask the question here and in so many places around the country: Why is it too much to expect to get a basic education at my local public school?