Way back in the days of my youth, about 1980, I graduated from the University of Cincinnati and went in search of a job in the "professional" media.
I was then in the middle of my only marriage, and things were still good between me and the eventually-to-be-ex-wife. She felt free back in the day to offer her opinions, constructive and otherwise, and after she watched me mope around the house for a few weeks, whining about not getting hired at either of Cincinnati's two daily newspapers, not getting hired by the PBS television station, and not even getting an interview with any of the three network stations bringing southwestern Ohio's 500,000 nightly viewers their spoonful of television news, she'd had enough.
"So, Dennis. You send out your résumé and then you sit back here and wait. Why? Because you were the features editor of the school newspaper? Big deal! Those people don't care what you did in college. You've got to bug them."
And so began our Monday ritual. She would drive me downtown, and I would hand-deliver another résumé to six receptionists. I would then ask to see the news editor or news director, depending on whether I was talking to a print receptionist or a television office "gal."
About the fourth Monday I was pursuing this seemingly endless run of humiliation, the anchorman for Channel 9 News, the CBS affiliate, stopped his lobby walk-through and stared at me.
This fellow was locally famous. He'd gone from being a newspaper columnist to a television anchor back in the early '50s. He'd taken a huge pay cut and listened to his old buddies at the morning daily making endless jokes about his 10-minute gig reading the news.
But, as we all know, television news kept coming, and by the time this worthy noticed me, he was making six figures, and none of the $35,000-a-year reporters he'd labored with in the print vineyards felt much like laughing.
"Who the hell are you?" he asked me.
I told him.
He hired me for a two-week trial right there. Within four days he'd waived the trial portion of our agreement and I was pulling down 400 bucks a week to chase ambulances and cops: he put me on the accident and ghetto-crime beat.
Since I played hoop every day in the inner city, I had a lot of partners, mostly black, who were astounded.
"You're on tee-vee, man?"
But once that fact was digested, these guys all started worrying about me: "You're gonna be part of the conspiracy, man. You won't be able to help it." These inner-city cats, wise in so many ways middle-class folks never can be, were naïve in the ways of the corporate world.
There was no conspiracy. The reason the news ignored most of the hoopsters' social concerns was that all the bosses back then were upper-middle-class white men. They didn't meet in dark corners and plan to avoid doing stories about poor people, black people, gay people and those creatures - in Cincinnati, rare as unicorns - feminists.
My bosses and the bosses at the two dailies and two competing television news outfits saw the world the same way, that's all. They'd gone to the same schools. They believed heartily in the "system."
If you weren't making it, it must be your fault.
The five major news outlets covered the same things with almost the exact same spin because they all believed at some level in the same busted-out platitudes.
When I explained this to some of my hoop buddies, they just smiled sadly at one another. I could see they felt sorry for me. I'd been co-opted. I was an unknowing part of it now. A conspirator.
I thought of all this a few days ago when I saw Sheriff Dave Reichert on the front page of both dailies talking to Gary Ridgway, our area's latest Ted Bundy.
I thought, Isn't that odd?
Reichert announces he is going to run for public office. He is an allegedly conservative Republican (although how a party that nationally can turn a budget surplus into a dis-graceful deficit can call itself conser-vative is beyond me), and there he is on the front pages of both papers.
The owners of the two papers are rich Caucasian families, one local, one Bay Area. Reichert is a local lawman and ardent supporter of the status quo.
I thought I smelled that old devil, media conspiracy.
And then I realized that the editors of the P-I and the Times probably never even mention their front pages to each other before going to press.
They just see the world the same way.
Forget the fact that Reichert and his crew took 15 years or so to catch Ridgway.
Forget that Ridgway killed at least the 71 women he admitted strangling (there are probably many more, but it isn't in Gary's interests to admit that in a different jurisdiction where he might be state-murdered himself by a less friendly prosecutor than our own Norm Maleng) before Reichert and his crew caught him.
He's caught now, and Reichert wants to make something out of it: a career in state politics.
Why not? He's got a nice haircut, he seems able to cry on cue, and he believes in everything from bad Saddam to pride in the uniform, whatever uniform.
Don't get me wrong. Reichert's probably a nice guy. And he wasn't a bad cop, according to a lot of reporters and old-line cops I've talked to.
But the papers are making him look like a hero. And we all know too many of the non-reading voters now-adays go solely on name recognition. Most of them can't tell you why they vote for Jim Compton or Jean Godden. They just know the name.
Scary proof of this is that people are coming up to me now and saying, "Dennis, you should run for council."
Because of this column.
Don't worry, I have no interest in political office. I ain't no Arnold.
But it won't hurt Reichert's chances to have his name plastered all over the papers.
He's getting a boost from the media, but I don't think it's a conspiracy. It's just the way things work when most of the people running an outfit belong to the same old club.
Freelance columnist Dennis Wilken, a resident of Lower Queen Anne, can be e-mailed via rtjameson@nwlink.com.
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