Remembering Hal Fishman
By Terry Anzur

The phone call I had dreaded for years finally came this morning: KTLA anchorman Hal Fishman was dead and NPR wanted me to share my memories.

I remember Hal with mixed feelings. A mutual friend, Jeff Wald, arranged for me to have lunch with Hal during the summer of 1997. We clicked right away. The following week I was auditioning to be his co-anchor on News at Ten. I got the job, but also a request from a KTLA manager, who happened to be a woman: I was to stand up to Hal and carve out a more equal role for the female co-anchor on the program.

The inside joke about Hal was that he changed his toupee and his co-anchor every three years. My predecessor, Jann Carl, was referred to by the studio crew as “the human cough button,” because she wasn’t permitted to speak until at least eight minutes into the broadcast, usually reading a lighter story at the point where Hal needed to catch his breath. I was the pioneer who was permitted to say my name at the top of the broadcast and then wait my turn while Hal read the top story.

I didn’t mind. As a kid growing up in Los Angeles, I was glued to the flickering black and white images of the KTLA telecopter hovering over blazing brushfires. I got my first byline in the Pasadena Star News at age 8 and dreamed of being a journalist, like Ruth Ashton Taylor on Channel 2’s Big News. I became the political editor at KCBS when Ruth retired and had the honor of doing the morning newscast with the legendary Bill Keene, the Big News weatherman who defined traffic reporting in LA. Anchoring the news at KTLA was another journalistic dream come true and I hoped that my academic and journalistic credentials would earn respect from Hal.

At the same time, I was teaching in a tenure track position at the USC Annenberg School for Communication. I would leave the campus at 4:30 every day and head to the station to begin preparing for the 10 p.m. news. Hal bought dinner for me two or three nights a week and I look back fondly on our conversations. He could be so generous, inviting my family for a Sunday ride in his airplane and allowing my young son to try his hand at the controls. But his generosity stopped at the anchor desk.

Hal will be remembered as the longest-running anchor in TV news history, not just in Los Angeles, but nationwide. But his longevity came with a downside. He was ruthless in his refusal to share the spotlight with anyone, even the great reporter Stan Chambers. It speaks to the rich history of KTLA that, by joining the station in the 1960s, Hal was a relative newcomer. Stan has been there since the station covered the first live, breaking news story in April 1949, when a child named Kathy Fiscus fell into an abandoned well. KTLA’s live coverage was a defining moment that changed television from a curiosity to an essential source for news and information.

As a scholar, I have studied the “good old days” that produced TV news legends like Hal Fishman. In retrospect, those days weren’t so good. There were few women on the air, even fewer people of color. This was obvious during the 1965 civil disturbances that came to be known as the Watts Riots. The broadcasts that are archived in the Museum of Radio and Television and at UCLA give the impression of white men hunkered down in the broadcast studio while the city is being torn apart. A government commission would later blame the lack of diversity in news coverage for contributing to the community resentment that led to the violence. A young Hal Fishman covered the unrest as one of his first KTLA assignments. Narrating over live telecopter pictures of two men struggling to carry a couch they are looting from a furniture store, Hal ad-libbed, “The price was right but the couch was just too heavy.”

Hal didn’t change with the times. He believed the audience would be disappointed if too many minutes went by on News at Ten without a glimpse of Hal’s face, so he limited the length of reporter’s packages and, as managing editor, crusaded against adding depth or context with long-form reporting or analysis, aside from his own commentaries. While his omni-presence was reassuring to the viewers, it made life difficult for the procession of women who tried to share the anchor desk with him. Some went on to bigger and better things, others tried to sue.

In August 2000, despite #1 ratings for News at Ten, my contract at KTLA was not renewed, without explanation. My career in Los Angeles never recovered. Since then, two other women have filled the chair next to Hal. He never attempted to mentor a male successor and kept any possible contenders at arm’s length. So his legacy dies with him. He anchored up until the last possible moment, like he always said he would, and I feel his loss, along with all the viewers who came to depend on him as a familiar and trusted face. I look back with pride on the newscasts we anchored together. With so many choices for news on local and cable TV and in new media, there likely will never be another dominant local TV anchor like Hal Fishman. As I pick up the phone to NPR, I wrestle with mixed emotions and try to decide if that’s such a bad thing.



This web site and the information contained within is copyright (c) 2007 by Terry Anzur