by Byron Pitts
I went to every story thinking every other reporter was smarter than me, knew more than me, and had more talent. I tended to fight my sense of insecurity by getting angry, and in my mind Terrell was the standard I needed to beat. I would purposely take offense at the smallest slight. If the police chief answered his question first, I would get angry. If he got more time for his story than I got for mine, I would get angry. But rather than raise my voice or force a confrontation, I used the anger as motivation to improve my performance. Because it often took me a bit more time to read through the press releases or the prep material, I had to apply a different set of skills to my work. Thus, if my competitor interviewed two people, I would interview four. I would always have to do my best to get to the story first. I would also have to make sure I left the story last to pick up any crumbs the other reporters had left behind. Like Terrell, I needed to develop some techniques for nurturing sources. Terrell was tight with all the secretaries in city hall and the police headquarters, so I worked the people in the maintenance department. Terrell knew the hot spots in town and could meet sources after hours, and I would just hang out at the police station at night with the people forced to work the night shift. Terrell had his ways, and I found mine.
At my station, there was a reporter named Ed Hazel-wood. With a thick beard, glasses, and a deep baritone voice, Ed won numerous awards for his investigative work and for any number of reports on the U.S. military. But that’s not what impressed me most about him. It was the notebook he kept with the names and numbers of every contact he ever made. He had them listed by title, profession, spouse’s name, their girlfriend’s phone number, and address if needed. His contacts were always at his fingertips. He’d call people just to check in. He called contacts on their birthdays, their children’s birthday, a bar mitzvah, any special occasion, or just to say hello. In a business where we are often takers showing up at the doorstep in the midst of some personal tragedy, Ed was a giver. He respected the people with whom he came in contact. But that’s not to say they were always thrilled to hear from Ed or were pleased with his reporting—just that he respected his contacts.
If Ed kept names and phone numbers and birth dates, so would I. Somewhere along the way, I picked up the idea of sending handwritten notes to people kind enough to give me their time or an interview. It’s something I have done for most of my career. “Kindness will take you a long way in this life,” my grandmother always used to say. Most people have never written back, but those who have always seemed to appreciate the simple gesture. Besides, a person interviewed today might become a source or an expert the next day, and on a few occasions they have even become a friend. It was one more vital tool for my tool bag, and I knew I needed a good tool bag. I had places to go and things God wanted me to do.
My goal was to make it to the network by age thirty-five. Based on my research, thirty-five was about the median age for a young network correspondent. But my journey required baby steps, or rather two steps forward and one step back. I wanted to become a network correspondent for two basic reasons. For one, it is the biggest stage for a broadcast journalist. That same stubborn child who wanted to read Hemingway now insisted that the most exclusive club in television would someday open its doors to him. The second reason was that it would be the only way my mother and grandmother would ever get to see me regularly on television. From 1982 to 1996, during my career in local news, I changed markets about every two years and worked in cities up and down the eastern seaboard, while my family was mostly based in North Carolina. Occasionally, I would send a videocassette to my mother and grandmother so they could see my work. Somehow, sending them a tape once in a while never seemed to satisfy them. When she did see my work, my grandmother had this sound she would make, like a single grunt, but she would hold it for several seconds, as if it were a song. She would make that sound with a high-pitched voice, and then say, “Baby, you sure look good on my television.” No praise from a boss or a television critic ever meant as much as the sound she made and the smile that followed. She would have appreciated seeing me more often.
However, over the years my grandmother did express concern about how often I changed jobs on my way to the network. “What’s wrong baby?” she’d say with her Southern drawl. “Why can’t you keep a job for very long?” She was talking about my stops in Greenville, Norfolk, Orlando, Tampa, Boston, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C. As I said, I took the long way. I knew I needed a body of work and a wealth of experience to be ready for the network. I didn’t want to end up in the revolving door I had seen for other journalists of color at the network level. I kept track of all the network correspondents, and with a few notable exceptions, I noticed what looked like a pattern for African-Americans who would arrive and then disappear a few years later. When I asked why it happened, I received a variety of explanations, ranging from blatant discrimination to a shortage of opportunities to a lack of preparedness. It depended on whether I was asking a manager or another journalist of color. Since the odds might be against me, I wanted to make sure I was prepared in every possible way. That meant choosing my next jobs with a purpose.
In 1989 I had a chance to work in New York, Chicago, or Boston. I chose Boston, the sixth largest television market in the country. Though it was smaller than New York or Chicago, it was the perfect environment for things I needed to learn. The city had a reputation for producing some of the best writers in journalism, and I knew that one of the criticisms that followed many African-American correspondents at the network was that they couldn’t write a good script. I wanted to polish my writing skills, and Boston was the place to do it. This newsroom was the first where my colleagues spent much of their time discussing sentence structure and phraseology.
I quickly learned one important distinction between the smaller markets and the top-ten newsrooms. There was no tolerance for using emotion as a substitute for good reporting. One of my first big stories in Boston was a house fire with fatalities, and I was the only one to secure an interview with a relative of the victims. The woman cried throughout the interview, and I thought I had done an admirable job in capturing the drama of the event. In my previous jobs I would have been praised for such an emotional delivery—but not in Boston. The next morning the news director called me to his office to chastise me for sensationalizing the story and wasting time with a crying interview when I could have been reporting more facts of the story.
In addition to writing, there was another important reason why I chose Boston. Of the three cities where I could have worked, the Boston station had the least diversity in the newsroom, and I wanted to test my skill and my temperament in such a setting. Within weeks of my arrival, I got what I asked for with a major breaking news story. A white man named Charles Stewart accused a black man of shooting and killing his pregnant wife. As the reporter on the night beat, I covered the initial report for our eleven o’clock newscast. By morning, it had morphed into one of the most sensational crime stories in Boston since the Boston Strangler. Stewart’s depiction of the attack on his wife was chilling, and his claim that a black man was the perpetrator ignited the undercurrent of racial tension in the city. I was called in early the morning after the shooting to attend a special editorial meeting, where assignments were being handed out and where I happened to be the only African-American in the room. A manager turned to me and said, “We need reaction from the black community. Why don’t you go call your contacts?” Since I had been living in the city only for a few weeks, my “contacts” were nonexistent. But his assumption remained: I was black, therefore I had black contacts, and I was to cover the black angle of the story.
I knew I didn’t want to be pigeonholed into covering only race, but I wanted to appear to be a team player. My immediate response was “You want my contacts in Tampa?” (my previous station). There was nervous laughter and the realization that the request might have been ill conceived, given my brief tenure in Boston. But I agreed to take on the assignment and pursued it aggressively.
Eventually, police uncovered the truth, that Charles Stewart had killed his wife and created a mythical assailant upon whom to place the blame. A year later, in the aftermath of that case, many journalists in Boston’s newsrooms were forced to examine how a lack of staff diversity adversely affected the coverage of the Stewart case and how their own biased assumptions about class and race had become part of the coverage.
I will always remember the night a black family had their front door firebombed in one of the city’s housing projects. The photographer and I walked up to three elderly white women. “Excuse me, ladies, my name is Byron Pitts. I’m a reporter from Channel 5. What do you think about what happened to one of your neighbors?” I asked. The women looked at me expressionless when one of them said, “We don’t want any niggers living here. They should have known better.” The photographer I was with turned to me, smiled, and said, “Welcome to Boston.” It left an impression. I fought to make my own reporting more reflective of the population we served. For me, it was a challenging time but a growth experience, working in a racially charged environment, learning to keep my cool but not compromising what I believed to be my journalistic or moral integrity. I ended up spending five years in Boston, covering politics and crime, and doing some investigative reporting.
I have been asked plenty of times if racism exists in the news business. The simple answer is that racism and otherisms have always existed in America. Newsrooms are not immune. Like many people in many professions, I have bumped up against the low expectations of others. Whether you are black, white, brown, or yellow, low expectations can weigh you down like an anvil. For one thing, I was often hired as the “black” reporter. A black male reporter would leave, and then I would show up. I could see on the faces of many of my colleagues, white male colleagues especially, the suspicion that I was the “affirmative action” hire. Maybe in the minds of management, that is what I was. I have worked in many newsrooms where reporters were recruited and handpicked to be groomed for a big anchor job. That never happened for me.
In fact, about halfway through my tour of states and stations, I stuck my neck out and for the first time expressed interest in anchoring a broadcast. It had disastrous consequences. For reasons that will become apparent, I won’t mention which city it was. I was actually up for a weekend anchor job since I had been filling in for weeks, but the station was delaying making a decision. The ratings were good and my work was fine, but the company would not pull the trigger. Finally, I pressed my news director, who was a friend. “What’s the deal?” I insisted. His response shocked me. His boss, a station executive, had said, “A nigger would never anchor one of my broadcasts.” My news director passed on the quotation reluctantly.
“You can sue if you’d like. Then you’ll be blackballed and never work in TV. If subpoenaed by a judge, I’d testify to what was said. You can be angry and let it eat you up inside. Or you can press on,” he said, with a mix of sadness and disgust in his voice.
It is the one and only time I have ever cried about a job. Not to his face, but when I left the newsroom. I had been polite and shook hands with my boss, and we agreed to revisit the subject in a few days. This was the first time I was hit squarely in the nose with racism at work. The first thing I did was call my mother. She yelled and fussed with me, and then we prayed. Next, I called my sister. She yelled and fussed with me, and then we prayed. Next, I called my brother. He yelled and fussed with me, then offered to fly into town and meet the offending TV executive in the parking lot, and then we prayed. (Funny yet reassuring thing about my family, regardless of the crisis, big or small, the response is always the same. Since I was eight years old, my older brother has always volunteered to fight my battles.)
The next morning my mother called me up early. “What have you decided to do?” she asked. Before I could offer an answer, she gave her opinion. “I think you should just get past it. You didn’t go to that job to stay forever. It’s just a stop on the journey. Hold your head up. Push your shoulders back. Learn what you’re there to learn, and move on,” she pleaded.
I knew she was not advocating that I back down. Lord knows Clarice Pitts never shied away from a fight. But, for her, the point wasn’t about a man’s judgment of me; it was about what God had planned. Later that day, I went to my news director, thanked him for his honesty, and asked for his support when the chance came to move along. He agreed. A few months later I moved on.
Perhaps I should rephrase that. I didn’t move on. God moved me along. In fact, most of the jobs I have ever had in television I never applied for. They usually just came along. Trust me, it is not because anyone was beating the bushes looking for me. As best I can tell, I have never been the first choice for any job, rather the second or third choice, but I always tried to reward those who hired me with my best effort, and I thank God for the many second chances He has given me. Like most people, I have sometimes failed to live up to my own expectations. At other times, I have had to work beyond the low expectations of others.
Pretty far along in my career, I was having a pleasant get-to-know-you conversation with an executive at a new station where I had been hired. I had been in the news business for quite a while, had won a few awards, and covered a few major events. It was a discussion about the expectations of the job and where I wanted to take my career. By this time, I was focused on the goal of being a 60 Minutes correspondent someday. For me, it was the promised land of journalism. I could do everything I wanted to do as a reporter, from investigative work to profiles of the famous and the infamous, and it would be a chance to showcase my writing and my interviewing skills. I expressed that wish quite forcefully. The executive’s response surprised me. “Byron, the thing I like most about you is that you are so articulate,” she said.
The bubble over my head asked, “Articulate? Did she just say articulate? That’s it? That’s what you like most about me? Years of television reporting. And it’s not my body of work, my investigative pieces, my writing, or my reporting? You like that I can speak clearly and string a few coherent sentences together?”
For me, and for many people who look like me, the word articulate is code for “We presume most black people can’t speak, but you can.” I have always considered that one of the greatest insults, because it assumes that we would not be able to speak to be understood. I have heard people describe a Colin Powell or a Clarence Thomas as articulate. As if it’s a surprise that a secretary of state or a Supreme Court justice could express themselves. And they are the exception to the rule. I never heard anyone describe as articulate Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton or a single one of my white colleagues. It’s as if the greatest attribute for a person of color is that he can speak the English language.
Did this executive declare this because of some deep-rooted racism? Almost certainly not. Maybe she could not think of anything else to say. Or maybe her expectations for me were just that low. That the best I had to offer was that I could speak English. Granted, given my problems with stuttering, at one stage in my life if a person in a position of authority had labeled me articulate, that would have been a reason to shake their hand and shout Hallelujah. But she did not know about my history. That was not her point of reference. For a seasoned broadcast journalist, such a comment was ridiculous.
But in her office I smiled and nodded and thought to myself: She will set limits that I must overcome. Her expectations of me are so limited that she is just one more obstacle I need to remove from my path. From that day forward, I always outwardly respected her opinion but gave it no value.
At age thirty-eight, I finally knew that I was ready. I was hired to be a correspondent by CBS News to report the national news. I arrived at CBS with a mixture of gratitude and impatience. From day one on the job, I was already three years behind my own career schedule. But I quickly learned that just getting to the network was not enough to guarantee a successful career. Even though a correspondent has been hired, it is still at the discretion of each individual broadcast executiv
e producer to decide if he or she wants to use that correspondent regularly on the broadcast. Executives have their favorites, who might appear five days a week, and then there are some correspondents who appear rarely. The criteria can be very subjective, ranging from writing skill to voice delivery. After being hired, one can experience a continual process of auditioning for work. It reminded me of Dr. Lewes’s lesson in college about learning the style of each professor and then working to please them. I needed to learn what each executive producer wanted if I was going to become a regular part of their broadcast.
Part of that process included establishing personal relationships with the executives. After a correspondent is hired, protocol requires that he or she pay a visit to New York for a sit-down meeting with each executive producer to discuss expectations and any special needs of their broadcasts, from the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather to Sunday Morning to the (then) CBS Morning News (now called The Early Show). Essentially, you are shopping your skills.
When I was first hired in 1998, I was in the process of relocating to work in the network’s Miami bureau. I was brought to New York for meetings with all the executives, and that visit led me to the office of a particular executive producer at CBS News whom I had never met. He had been running the morning program for a number of years. Apparently he was not impressed with what he had seen from me so far. On the day of the appointment, I had shown up at his office a few minutes early. His secretary told me to be seated. We could both hear him on the phone. He took at least three phone calls before finally calling me in to his office about thirty minutes after I had arrived.
“Please take a seat,” he said, with his feet hanging over the corner of his desk. “Just give me another moment,” he said as he made another phone call.
After a few minutes of cackling on the phone, he turned to me and said, “I don’t have much time, so let’s get right to it. I don’t think you’re very good. You don’t write well enough to be on my show, and I want only the best correspondents on my show, and that is not you,” he said, as he spent most of the time searching for something on his desk. He never made eye contact. He went on for a bit longer. When he finally looked up at me and said, “I hope this doesn’t hurt your feelings. I’m just giving it to you straight. Nothing personal,” he said with a smile. “If there’s nothing else, I have some work to do,” he said and stood up, gesturing me toward the door.