Out of My Mind

by Andy Rooney

  The list of remarks begins: “I like big cars, big boats, big motorcycles, big houses and big campfires.”

  It continues:

  “I believe the money I make belongs to me and my family, not some governmental stooge with a bad comb-over who wants to give it away to crack addicts for squirting babies.”

  “Guns do not make you a killer. I think killing makes you a killer.”

  “I have the right NOT to be tolerant of others because they are weird, different or tick me off.”

  Some of the remarks, which I will not repeat here, are viciously racist and the spirit of the whole thing is nasty, mean and totally inconsistent with my philosophy of life. It is apparent that the list of comments has been read by hundreds of thousands of Americans, many of whom must believe that it accurately represents opinions of mine that I don’t dare express in my writings or on television. It is seriously damaging to my reputation.

  The only good thing to come out of this incident is the dozens of letters I’ve received from people saying they know me well enough to know I didn’t write the comments. There must be many more, however, who are ready to believe I did write them.

  I have tracked the e-mail back to an address in Tucson and a Web site called CelebrityHypocrites.com, which is owned by a man named Dave Mason. Mr. Mason lists as his address, 405 East Wetmore Road, No. 117 PMB 520, Tucson, AZ 85705. I was in Tucson recently and foolishly went to that address thinking it might be Mason’s home or business. I’d like to know more about Mason, but the address was a commercial mailbox business and I didn’t wait around for him to show up so I could confront him. If it is Dave Mason who has stolen my name, I demand that he put out a retraction that reaches as many people as his fraudulent e-mail did.

  ON LIKING YOUR WORK

  Over the years, I never cared much for some of the most popular television comedians. Milton Berle never got to me and I couldn’t stand Jerry Lewis. Until I saw him in action firsthand, I had been lukewarm about Bob Hope.

  Enthusiasm isn’t listed as a virtue in the Bible but it’s one of the most attractive attributes a person can have. An entertainer who loves to entertain has a big head start appealing to an audience, and no one ever loved being on stage more than Bob Hope. Every time he got up in front of a crowd, he had a good time and it was catching; his audience had a good time, too.

  I met Bob Hope several times. For five years of my life, I wrote for Arthur Godfrey. In 1955, Godfrey was at the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago broadcasting his hour-and-a-half morning radio show. He heard that Hope was also staying there and told me to go to Hope’s room and ask him if he’d come to Godfrey’s suite and do the show with him.

  I was uneasy about my mission because I couldn’t imagine that Hope would want to spend an hour and a half doing a radio show for nothing, but I was wrong. When I told him that Arthur wanted to talk to him on the air, he didn’t hesitate. “Sure,” Hope said. “What room’s he in?”

  In the hotel room that day, it was apparent that it didn’t matter to Bob Hope whether he was on television playing to 20 million people or in a small room with four. When he was on, he was happy.

  Arthur greeted him and Hope sat down, took the microphone in his hand and immediately reached into his file-catalog brain for Chicago jokes, hotel room jokes and President Eisenhower jokes.

  “I was in The White House last week. Ike misses the Army. He wants them to set up a tent in the Oval Office.”

  On hotel rooms:

  “The house dick knocked on my door last night,” Hope began. “He said, ‘You got a woman in there?’ I said, ‘No, I got no woman in here,’ and he said, ‘Sissy!’ ”

  Before Hope left Godfrey’s room, he had rattled off, with machinegun speed, dozens of jokes that had us all in stitches. We all had a great time listening to them because Bob Hope had such a great time telling them. He was his own best audience.

  On the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day Margie and I sailed on the Queen Elizabeth to Normandy for the celebration. Bob Hope and his wife were aboard. I talked to them several times and was ashamed of myself for being surprised to find that Bob’s wife, Dolores, was so charming, attractive and talented.

  Although I think they might have been able to afford to pay for the trip, each of them performed in front of a small audience in the ship’s first-class dining room. I assume they were singing for their supper—and stateroom.

  With an orchestra in the background, Bob, then ninety walked to the middle of the swaying ship’s floor and had a great time rattling off a hundred or so predictably funny jokes. He seemed to remember them without any trouble. The orchestra leader had worked with Bob a lot over the years and when I saw his lips moving twenty feet behind Bob, I was puzzled. It turned out that it wasn’t music he was holding in front of him, it was pages of Hope jokes. Bob had a small radio receiver in his jacket pocket attached to an earpiece. The orchestra leader read a few lines of a joke, Bob remembered the rest of it and told it, just as if he was ad-libbing, to the roaring approval of the crowd.

  Bob Hope got back as much as he gave in his performances to American troops around the world but he was one of the most genuinely entertaining entertainers who ever lived.

  FREE SPEECH

  It isn’t good form for a writer to use what he puts down on paper to further his own interests but I want to make an exception. For more than two years I tried to collect money owed me by a speakers bureau called The Program Corporation of America in White Plains, N.Y.

  I spoke at Indiana State University in Terre Haute. The embarrassing thing I have to reveal is that I was to be paid $20,000 plus expenses. That’s more than I was paid for the whole first year in my first job.

  It’s fun to go to a college town and interesting to meet students and some of the faculty. I am amused to assess college presidents, too. They should be smarter than I am and I try to determine whether or not that’s true. Sometimes it is but occasionally it isn’t.

  Instead of calling me directly to ask if I’d come there to speak, Indiana State officials made the mistake of going through the speakers bureau, headed by a man named Alan Walker.

  To get to Terre Haute, I paid $386 for taxis and my airplane ticket, flew to Indianapolis and drove to Terre Haute, where I had an interesting lunch with twelve people at the president ’s home. Later, I spoke to a crowd of about 1,000 people. I’m not a great speaker, but I wasn’t bad and it was a satisfying experience. Money was the last thing on my mind.

  Five weeks later, I was paying the American Express bill for my plane ticket and it occurred to me I hadn’t been paid. I felt it was beneath me to beg for money myself so Susan Bieber, who works with me, called the university. They had sent Alan Walker their check for $30,000—not the $20,000 he had told me. I had not known that he was taking an outrageous $10,000 off the top. It wasn’t smart of me or Indiana State University.

  A month after my inquiry, I got this letter from Walker: “My accounting department is now processing the payment which will go out to you no later than June 2.”

  Over the next few months I received half a dozen letters or phone calls from Walker. He most frequently called at 7 or 8 P.M., after he was sure I’d left, and he’d leave a message that he had tried to contact me. On June 11, at 8 P.M., he said: “A check will hopefully be going out next week . . . certainly it will be no later than the week after . . . so keep a lookout for it.

  “$2,500 will be issued to you in July and $2,500 in August. In September, we will send you the remaining amount to fulfill our financial obligation to you.”

  On Aug. 18, a letter signed, “Assistant to the President,” sounded as if he wrote it himself. It said: “Mr. Walker is out of the country on a business trip to the Middle East and is scheduled to return at the end of the month. I have put a check on Mr. Walker’s desk waiting for his signature to be sent to you . . . ”

  At a convention in Tucson, I met Mike Leonard of the Bloomington Herald Times. Mike wrote a column about my problem that went out on
the Internet and I was besieged with phone calls from news people who were also owed money by Walker. Lynn Scherr from ABC News and Linda Ellerbee both called. Charlayne Hunter Gault of CNN had sued Walker for $78,000. Linda Greenhouse, who covers the Supreme Court supremely for the New York Times, had flown from Washington, D.C., to Washington State to speak and was never paid.

  I drove to White Plains with a camera crew one day and parked outside Walker’s house. I was going to do a Mike Wallace. There were five cars in the driveway. With the camera rolling, I knocked on his front door. I planned to say simply, “I came to get my $20,386.”

  No one came to the door and we left and drove to Walker’s office. He wasn’t there, either. I had failed my Mike Wallace confrontation test. We were able to determine that the registration on several of the cars in the driveway had expired. So too, I’m afraid, have my chances of getting paid for my speech at Indiana State University. All I got for my work was that free lunch at the university president’s house.

  There was finally an end to the story in 2005. Alan Walker was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison.

  NO NEWS IS BAD NEWS

  It’s dismaying that most Americans get their news of the world from television because television gives them so little of it. There has been a relentless chipping away of the quality and quantity of news broadcasts in general, and foreign news has suffered the most.

  In the beginning of television—I’m old enough to have been in on it—news was offered almost as a public service. Men like William Paley at CBS, David Sarnoff at NBC and Leonard Goldenson at ABC, who founded their networks, were businessmen but they seemed to have a sense of obligation to give something back for what they were getting that doesn’t exist among media moguls today. They gave the public news in exchange for their licenses to make hundreds of millions on their entertainment shows.

  Time taken from the news content of broadcasts to make way for commercials and network promotions for other shows has doubled. The news broadcasts at every network and local station are minutes shorter than they were. Without the commercials and promos, 60 Minutes is 41 minutes. The half-hour evening news broadcasts are really only 19 minutes long. Nineteen minutes is the time they have to tell us what has happened in the whole world. Is it any wonder that Americans are ignorant of what’s going on?

  Jim Lehrer’s NewsHour on public television is good, but the broadcast has limited facilities and not many reporters of its own.

  The networks all subscribe to services that tell them what news their audiences want to see and hear. This accounts for why there are more stories about miracle cures in the world of medicine, spurious though they may be, and fewer stories about what’s happening in the world. It accounts for why the sick story of Michael Jackson and small boys dominated news broadcasts in 2004 on the day our President was making an important speech in the British Parliament. Americans tell the pollsters they aren’t interested in foreign affairs so news broadcasters don’t give it to them. At one time, CBS, NBC and ABC each had bureaus in a dozen foreign cities. The reporter in Moscow lived in Moscow and knew Russian. The correspondent in Berlin, Buenos Aires or Tokyo knew the country and knew the people. Now, all the foreign bureaus seem to be in London. The television correspondent flits to where the story is for the day, has his picture taken in front of some landmark that Americans associate with the country he’s in while he says his piece. The reporter is more of an expert on travel than on Afghanistan, Seoul, or Taiwan.

  The number of network reporters stationed in foreign cities has been sharply reduced because reporters and bureau offices are expensive. One network that had ninety-seven reporters twenty years ago, has fifty-one now and that includes some who are more news readers than reporters. Without their own reporters, network news broadcasts borrow shamelessly from newspapers that do their own foreign reporting.

  Broadcast news should be separate from entertainment and separate from business. Information for the American public is too important to dismiss as an expensive sideline to the amusement from which the money flows in.

  News is vital to a democracy if citizens are going to know what they’re talking about when they talk, or what the issues are when they vote. There must be ways to pay for so essential a service without resorting to the stultifying commercials we get. I always return to the same thought: Broadcast companies using the public airwaves should be forced to provide news in exchange for the privilege they have of making millions on entertainment.

  News might be paid for by a foundation established for that purpose by all of us. Pooling our money to pay for a service we need is not a new idea. Our postal network wasn’t organized to make money for carriers. Our judicial system isn’t designed to make judges rich. Our police forces aren’t paid by the cases they solve. News organizations should also be free of the need to be profitable.

  A REPORT ON REPORTING

  A few weeks after I first appeared on 60 Minutes, I got a call from a drug company selling aspirin. They asked if I would do a commercial for them because, they said, my voice sounded just right for someone with a headache.

  This was the first time I ever realized I had a nasal, vaguely unpleasant-sounding voice. The money they offered was interesting but I told them I was a journalist and that journalists didn’t do commercials.

  Although I’d never dream of doing any commercial, I often make a sales pitch for journalism. I like the news business and intend to say good things about American journalism and the reporters and editors who work in it whether for broadcast or print. My desire to tell you how highly I regard reporters and editors is prompted by several negative stories that have appeared in recent years about dishonest reporting. The stories are dismaying to all of us who work in news. We know they reinforce the negative opinion many Americans have of us. We want to be loved and respected.

  USA Today announced that, after a thorough investigation by a committee under the leadership of distinguished journalist John Siegenthaler, it had determined that one of USA Today’s star reporters, Jack Kelley, had invented many of his stories from war zones. He’d also borrowed information from other newspaper reporters and often added quotations he’d invented to make his stories livelier.

  USA Today did the wrong thing when it kept Kelley on the job long after some of its own staff members suspected he was a fraud, but did the right thing when it had the matter investigated. I don’t recall offhand any other company selling a product that paid to have an investigation conducted of some aspect of its own business and then made public the details of what it did wrong. The report said Kelley’s stories had often been dishonest and that the editorial staff had been lax in not finding this out sooner. Half a dozen newspapers recently have fired reporters for dishonest or unethical reporting.

  While USA Today has never been a paragon of editorial excellence, it has capably filled the gap left by good local newspapers in towns and small cities across the country that don’t pretend to cover national and international events. Many people who buy USA Today buy two newspapers.

  Believe it or don’t, but I can tell you that newspaper or television reporters, working at USA Today or elsewhere, are more concerned about the ethical standards of their profession than the people in any other business. I don’t think car dealers, manufacturers or clothing store operators worry much about the impact of their life’s work on fellow Americans. Journalists think of themselves as belonging to an exclusive club and are proud of their membership.

  The fact that news has become a profitable venture for large corporations has not always been good for people in the business. The disappointing fact is that a large part of the American public reads a newspaper and watches television news more for entertainment than information. This has contributed to the profit-driven companies’ tendencies to deal less seriously with the truth in favor of entertainment. The truth is often less interesting than rumor or gossip and our good newspapers are to be congratulated for their imperfect resistance to being ente
rtainers.

  I’ve met hundreds of news people during my sixty years in the business. In World War II, I lived in a press camp with twenty-five and met my first bad apple reporter. He wrote for a news magazine and was ostracized by the others because he regularly put quotes in the mouths of anonymous soldiers he had not interviewed and described events he had not seen.

  There’s one in every crowd, but what I want to say in this commercial for journalism is this: Reporters are more honest and ethical than the people in any other line of work. It’s just very difficult to get the whole truth and tell it accurately.

  DON’T STOP THE PRESSES!

  The American public is not so enthusiastic about either news or the people giving it to them these days. In 1988, 58 percent of the public didn’t think television news reporters showed any political bias. In 2004, only 38 percent of viewers absolved them of that charge. Even fiftyeight percent isn’t very good.

  The use of doctored papers in a Dan Rather report to question George Bush’s Air National Guard service was seriously wrong, but I hope the public gives CBS News management credit for having appointed an independent panel to look into what it did wrong and who did it.

  The charge is that CBS was out to hurt the President and derail his re-election campaign. That reporters or anchormen have often made apparent their liberal political opinions is true, but it’s interesting that there isn’t any evidence that their liberal views had any influence on public opinion. If journalists are liberal and people are influenced by them, how do you account for President Bush’s election and re-election?

  Television viewers are ambivalent about those who write or tell them what the news is. They think of anchormen as special because, like authors and actors, they’re celebrities. On the other hand, many people don’t trust them. Dan Rather’s fame exceeds his reputation.