Edward Asner's Lou Grant character inspired me to consider journalism. The Fund for Investigative Journalism awarded me a grant the next year to investigate TVA, Howard Baker and East Tennessee coal monopoly and pollution issues.
Later, I met Ed Asner at two parties in the garden at the Stewart R. Mott House, 122 Maryland Avenue, N.E., in Washington, D.C., where many liberal events are held. I told him what his character meant to me. I also told him that I never had a journalism course, and read a college textbook on it on the plane to East Tennessee on June 22, 1981, to start the Appalachian Observer.
When our first issue appeared, the Anderson County Assistant DA, Jan Hicks, said it resembled The New York Times. I thanked her, but she said it was "not a compliment" -- "you're writing for hillbillies."
But those hillbillies, and some of the 900 Ph.D.s in Oak Ridge, read what I wrote and voted out elements of a Courthouse Gang, while supporting my efforts to investigate Oak Ridge nuclear weapons plants' environmental pollution and workplace toxic exposures.
Lou Grant helped inspire me.
Ed Asner, R.I.P.
From The Washington Post:
Opinion: As Lou Grant, Ed Asner gave us comedy, drama and an indelible portrait of a hard-working journalist
t
A whole way of life was packed into those few seconds. Today, anyone with a wireless link can get into the journalism game. Before the digital age, though, table stakes were enormous: enough capital to build a content company attached to a manufacturing operation attached to a last-mile distribution business attached to an advertising shop.
The barriers to entry, as economists say, were high. The need for deep pockets and risk tolerance had the odd effect of making newspaper proprietors simultaneously more powerful and more accountable than today’s online publishers. They were powerful enough to get away with tossing the paper in a puddle now and then. But accountable in a way that only people with sunk costs and fixed addresses are accountable.
“Lou Grant” was something rare in TV history: a weekly drama spun off from a weekly comedy. Lou was born as a middle-aged television news director in “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” a brilliant sitcom that ran from 1970 to 1977. Fired from that job when new owners bought the Minneapolis station, the itinerate newsman landed as city editor of the fictional Los Angeles Tribune in the hour-long series that bore his name.
Ed Asner played Lou in both series, becoming the first actor to win Emmy awards for the same role in both a comedy and a drama. That tells you something about the depth of the character and of Asner’s portrayal — for what is more true of human existence than its inseparable tangle of comedy and drama?
Asner died Aug. 29 at age 91. His acting career included other memorable roles. He played a no-nonsense Santa in the modern holiday classic “Elf” and gave voice to Carl Fredricksen, the animated hero of the Pixar triumph “Up.”
But Lou Grant was his defining creation, an epitome of the gruff editor with a heart of gold — though also something more, something deeper. Lou was not clever, but he was wise. He had learned some things, and — though he never quite put these things into words — he was determined to survive long enough to carry what he knew into the uncertain future.
“Lou Grant” was a very good show, if not quite as good as its magical progenitor. Within the straitened limits of network TV formats, the series tried genuinely to plumb the dilemmas of journalism at a time when newspapers still set the nation’s agenda. “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” was not really about TV news, but “Lou Grant” was entirely about newspapers and what it means to create a version of the world in the space of a few hours, always getting it wrong in some way but trying again tomorrow and every day forever.
The first episode, which aired Sept. 20, 1977, dealt with an issue now known as “media capture”: the very human tendency for deeply experienced reporters to become protective of their sources. The special place of youth in the news business is subtly unpacked — not just the energy of youth, but its monstrous moral clarity. Everything is black and white with the young, which makes for great copy — and sometimes for ruined lives.
Episode 2 plunged into the problem of insufficient information. A young man portrayed as a thug on one day’s front page turns out to have been innocent — but world events overtake the story and the truth gets pushed inside the paper. “Lou Grant” went on like that for five years, riddling the moral dramas of imperfect humans trying to do good work when their only tool was a sledgehammer.
Perhaps the show — and Asner’s death — strikes a chord with me because it captures the moment I entered my first newsroom. As at the Trib, we still banged typewriters at old metal desks. (Lou warily eyes a computer, ready for installation, on his first day at work.) Everyone knew big changes were coming, but we couldn’t say exactly how they would play out.
This much is not changed: Tension arises when fallible people set out to deliver something called truth. Stuff always goes wrong. Whether it comes by typewriter or by Twitter, good journalism requires honor, humility and a thick hide — the qualities that defined Ed Asner’s masterpiece.
No comments:
Post a Comment