Television newsman Michael Radutzky never needs to be desperate for a story on some New Yorker`s rapid rise, descent and return from an abyss.
If so inclined, the producer of WNBC-TV`s popular 5 p.m. newscast, ”Live at Five,” can simply turn a camera on himself.
Radutzky is a little-known media player in this media capital. But the mere fact that he`s a player may represent a more notable achievement than any attributable to press glitterati such as Deborah Norville, Dan Rather or Chuck Scarborough, a $1.7 million-a-year local anchor here.
Radutzky, 33, is a New York native and University of Wisconsin graduate who had big dreams about journalism. The vagaries of the marketplace forced him to lower his sights and take a job paying peanuts at the West Side Times- Lawndale News, a neighborhood paper in Chicago`s Pilsen area.
He did well enough to gain an internship at the Chicago Sun-Times, where he proved bright, aggressive and very green. His youthful arrogance rubbed some the wrong way, but there were newsroom denizens surprised when the high- energy, if at times abrasive, novice was not offered a full-time position.
With a recommendation from Mike Flannery, the political editor at WBBM and a Sun-Times alumnus, he corraled a job as a researcher for the Howard
(”I`m mad as hell and I`m not gonna take it anymore”) Beale of Chicago TV news, Walter Jacobson.
In an ascent so quick that even loyalists back at the Sun-Times were bemused, he became a news writer, weekend producer, producer of the 5 p.m. newcast, 10 p.m. newscast and, finally, an ill-conceived early afternoon newscast, ”First Edition.” Radutzky, the kid the Sun-Times wouldn`t hire, was a big shot at a very big-time TV news operation.
But it was the entry-level Jacobson stint that changed his life in an unforeseen way.
That`s because of a Nov. 11, 1981, commentary delivered by the seven-figure mighty mite that accused Brown & Williamson Inc. of luring
youngsters to its products through advertising that equated smoking with
”pot, wine, beer, sex and wearing a bra.” The firm filed a libel suit.
”We didn`t take it seriously,” recalls Radutzky, who researched the piece. ”All of us considered it a nuisance suit, the tobacco industry trying to get attention.”
A nonchalant pose seemed justified when a federal judge dismissed the suit. However, an appeals court, led by a conservative powerhouse from the University of Chicago, Richard Posner, reinstated it, prompting lawyers for both sides to converge on Radutzky in the pretrial deposition stage.
Radutzky concedes an immaturity verging on the cavalier as the exhausting process of preparation for, and submitting to, lengthy depositions ensued. He was especially combative and acerbic when the plaintiff`s lawyers accused him of destroying key documents involved in the reporting for Jacobson`s purple-prose piece de resistance on tobacco.
”I was a baby, clueless, and these lawyers were getting to me,” he says.
When the trial took place in Chicago, he became a witness turned into two-legged chopped chuck by Martin London, a very able New York trial attorney and Brown & Williamson`s hired gun. There were discrepancies between his depositions and actual testimony, and he was made to look confused, frightened and not unremittingly candid.
The jury clobbered CBS Inc. and Jacobson for $2.05 million in punitive damages and $3 million in compensatory damages. An appeals court upheld the $2.05 million, and reinstated $1 million of the $3 million, which the trial judge had thrown out. The company, unable to persuade the U.S. Supreme Court to take the case, paid up. Jacobson`s share of the bill was $50,000.
The appeals court was harsh toward Radutzky, contending that he destroyed documents ”in bad faith” and engaged in a ”complete fabrication” at the 1985 trial. For a young soul on the professional make, it was an ignominious, and decidedly public, bashing.
Then, and now, he maintains that the documents were ditched in a routine desk-cleaning. But he doesn`t deny the muddying of his career and life.
”My life was going nowhere,” Radutzky says. ”Drugs damaged my life personally and professionally. Finally, I decided that I could die or do something.”
He had turned to drugs with apparent vigor. His behavior as producer of
”First Edition” became erratic and relations with colleagues and management unraveled. In 1986, then-assistant news director Colleen Dudgeon fired him.
He returned to New York, where he tried independent filmmaking but made ends meet by toiling in a delicatessen.
He entered a New Jersey drug clinic. After several months, he exited and continued treatment as an outpatient.
Believing that he`d cleansed a soiled act, he called Jacobson. His onetime boss made a pitch to former CBS executive John Lane, by then news director at WNBC here, to give Radutzky a chance.
”Jacobson played a major role in helping me get myself back on my feet,” says Radutzky. ”I owe him more than anyone I`ve known.”
He got a somewhat humbling tryout as a low-level newswriter, proved capable and imaginative once more and, as in Chicago, headed onward and upward.
He produced the station`s 11 p.m. newscast when it was No. 1 in the local ratings. Then he took his current job at ”Live at Five,” a show that long has lured a sizable audience because of a mix of news and fluff that made many other newscasts look as intellectually challenging as Ivy League faculty meetings. ”Live at Five” might skip right from a report on a mass murder to an in-studio interview with some half-wit entertainer about her new album. And everybody smiled.
There`s no small irony in Radutzky running this show. It was created by Ron Kershaw, an enigmatic sort himself who moved to Chicago and created the
”Live at Five” knockoff, ”First Edition,” that Radutzky produced for him. Radutzky and Kershaw, who died in 1988 of pancreatic cancer, weren`t chums.
So there he is now, in a WNBC newsroom that`s a closet compared with its ritzy counterpart at Chicago`s WMAQ-Ch. 5, coming up with story ideas, playing editor, double-checking the show`s early lineup and calling Liz Smith, a
”Live at Five” fixture and New York Daily News gossip columnist who covers the Trump saga as Edmund Gibbon covered the Roman Empire`s fall, to see if she has anything to promote for that day.
Although the goal, he says, is the same as in Chicago-”covering stories that truly affect people`s lives”-the topics aren`t. If you had a buck for every crime story they run on New York television, you could easily afford The Donald`s potential alimony obligations.
”In Chicago, (the thrust) may have been politics, patronage and garbage removal. Here, it`s crime and people searching for answers. There`s more coverage of drugs and the root causes of (the society`s) whole
disintegration.”
Radutzky says that scrutiny of him, and resulting embarrassment, during the libel debacle has altered his methods: ”I`m less likely to stick microphones at grieving family members, less likely to exploit a tragedy for a compelling sound bite.”
Radutzky seems a far cry from the callow, frenetic youth who arrived at the Sun-Times as if shot up with caffeine. He`s married and a very expectant father.
And he seems to have buried the hatchet with Dudgeon, now WBBM`s news director.
”He was a very troubled young man,” she says. ”But he dealt with his problems admirably and deserves more credit than I can give him.”
But that doesn`t mean that Chicago-related troubles have ended. A yuppie Lazarus may have risen from the ashes but can`t avoid one professional hazard. ”Live at Five” is No. 2 in the 5 p.m. ratings-whipped by ”The Oprah Winfrey Show.”
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This is an era in which newspapers strive to be ”reader friendly” and can go soft as a marshmallow doing so. It`s thus vaguely reassuring to hear one editor demur slightly.
For sure, the Wall Street Journal is exhibiting a certain editorial softening, replete with theme pages, shorter stories, a heavy accent on entertainment, and page-one profiles of Jane Pauley.
But in accepting a National Press Foundation Award here, Journal editor Norman Pearlstine accented the need for investigative reporting and stories that can conflict with the ”reader friendly” business desires of a paper. In discerning a growing link between advertisers and publishers, he sensed a mounting desire not to offend readers.
He wondered especially whether publicly held publishers, like the Journal (and, he might have added, the Chicago Tribune), ”will be able to commit themselves to the kind of journalism” that he believes is both difficult for readers and ”really fundamental to the republic.”
