Lucky 7

Life is a progress, and not a station.

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you want to make enemies, try to change something.

– Woodrow Wilson

Things were so simple before the big Miami TV switcheroo of January 1989. We (WCIX Channel 6) were an independent station, with a low-rated 10PM newscast. Channel 4 (WTVJ) had been a CBS affiliate for four decades. Channel 10 (WPLG) was ABC’s South Florida home, and ditto for Channel 7 (WSVN) and NBC.

But then NBC rocked the boat by buying WTVJ Channel 4, the long-time CBS affiliate. Everyone just assumed CBS would turn around and buy Channel 7, since it was losing its NBC programming. But NO! WSVN owner Ed Ansin played hardball with the big boys, potentially leaving CBS without a home in South Florida… unless it bit the bullet and bought our low-rated, signal-challenged station. (See more on that HERE.) With the sale becoming official, WSVN looked like it was the big loser, destined to scramble for cheap, crappy programming, and destined to sink into the depths of South Florida ratings hell. At least that’s what conventional wisdom would have had us believe.

No one ever told Ed Ansin, GM Bob Leider, and news director Joel Cheatwood about conventional wisdom! While the rest of us thought Channel 7 was about to bury itself, the boys in North Bay Village were dreaming and scheming, thinking so outside-the-box that the box practically burst. If WSVN had to become an independent station… well, why can’t it be the number one indie station in the country? So promised GM Leider, as you’ll see in the following video clips from 1988. Damn if he wasn’t right.

This was before Penny Daniels and Sally Fitz had become hyperbolic; before Rick Sanchez became a lead anchor; when folks such as Bud Fraga and Marianne Murciano still did news the old-fashioned way. This was before Channel 7’s Inside Story further blurred the lines between journalism, infotainment, and tabloid trash. You will hear Carmel Cafiero say “I will miss NBC”, but that sentiment would not be echoed by the station’s brain trust. Their creative, inventive, provocative, compelling, sleazy, salacious approach to news not only changed WSVN forever, but this market as well. This ain’t the 80s anymore. Roll over Wayne Fariss, and tell Richard Whitcomb the news!

(Also see our previous entry about WSVN here.)

You Better Not Shout...

“YOU LIE!”

Congressman Joe Wilson’s shout heard round the world has made him either a hero or a villain, depending on your view of President Obama and his health care reform bill. To me, there was something unsettling about those words. About an hour after his outburst, I found myself repeating those two words, but changing the inflection, making them sound angrier… scarier… OMINOUS (to use a Neil Goldstein term). I had no clue why I did that… at the time. But now I know. It turns out Wilson was not the only person to shout those words (or words that are very similar) at someone who had the floor during an official proceeding.

It happened in Miami… in a courtroom… in 1985. An angry man listened as his young bride accused him of sexually molesting a 5-year-old boy. With rage building and his patience dwindling, the man stood up and screamed “Liar! YOU ARE A LIAR!” In the words of the Gainesville Sun, his wife “shrieked and shirked back into her chair, her mouth twisted in pain, as if she had been shot”. She then told the prosecutor, “get me out of here”, as a stunned jury watched. That man’s name is Francisco “Frank” Fuster Escalona, operator of the infamous Country Walk Babysitting Service, and the center of Florida’s most famous child abuse case. That outburst painted Fuster as some kind of a monster in the eyes of the jury, and most assuredly played a role in his ultimate conviction.

I’ve written before about how former WCIX news director Larry Lyle squelched our initial investigation into Fuster and the Country Walk case, barring it from the air until Channel 10 finally broke “our” story. That’s not the only reason I still have such an interest in the Fuster case. I met the man. It capped one of the most bizarre days in my career at Channel 6.

I was working on an investigation into yet another child abuse case, with anchor/reporter Giselle Fernandez. Our investigation, titled “Devil In Our Church?”, would lead us to several unsavory places, and include interviews with some rather unsavory people. On February 1, 1990, it led us to Florida State Prison in the town of Starke, which had been Frank Fuster’s home since his conviction.

Giselle, Rafael “Ralph” Murciano, and I boarded a plane for Gainesville that morning. We didn’t know it at the time, but rock ‘n roll legend Bo Diddley was also on board that plane. As we headed for the gate, Murciano noticed Diddley, and called out his name. In the chaos, I bumped into the singer-guitarist. Literally! Diddley noticed the TV camera, and pulled out an 8 X 10 photo, which he promptly autographed (with Murciano capturing the moment). He also wrote his phone number on the back, in the hope that we’d be interested in an interview. Well, of course!




(Autographed by Bo Diddley at the Gainesville Airport. Click the image to view it full size.)



We had a little time before our appointment at the prison, so we had breakfast in Waldo, Florida, and checked out a thrift store or two. We noticed a yard sale going on near the prison, so we stopped there too -- just long enough for Giselle to buy a pulp paperback for 10 cents. Its name? Ravaged. Giselle thought it would be fun to read us some of the steamier passages from the book, using her best breathy, orgasmic voice. This went on while driving, while waiting at the prison, and even on the plane ride home. She had us in stitches!

To me, Giselle Fernandez was a blast to work with. Some people at the station disliked her, because she could get bossy, downright ornery, and could be a real prima donna. Those are just three reasons why I thought she was great! Do you think it was easy being a strong female journalist, two decades ago? Giselle knew what she wanted, and was always determined to get it. The two of us made an amazing team.

Finally, it was show time at Starke. Giselle put Ravaged away, and we were led to a special area. There we met the “monster". He did not have horns or a long tail. He was just a man. Model prisoner Fuster was now using the surname Escalona, further distancing himself from his infamy. For hours, he professed his innocence, outlining every hole in the case that it was humanly possible to find. He was SO convincing that Giselle promised to research his claims, and possibly help him, should she find that his story checked out. I do not know if Fuster did the things that Janet Reno’s office, his own son, and several kids in his care accused him of doing. I do know from personal experience how convincing child molesters can be. I was a victim of sexual abuse when I was a young teen, and no one believed me at the time. After all, the hospital worker that attacked me was “such a sweet man who would never do anything like that”. I’m still surprised I was able to carry on a rational conversation with Fuster, and even shake his hand. Guess it was just the journalist in me, trying to do my objective best.

With Janet Reno constantly in the news throughout the 90s, it was only natural for the media to investigate one of her Miami office’s biggest victories. Even Frontline joined the “was Fuster railroaded” fray. Giselle Fernandez made some calls, and corresponded a few times with Fuster, but decided not to pursue his claims. His interview was not used in “Devil In Our Church?”, but instead aired separately, as an Action News update. Several hours of interviews were condensed into a two-minute piece that concentrated on the parts that made Fuster look scary and threatening. Yes, it was Fuster’s fault for uttering scary and threatening remarks, when he knew the cameras were rolling. It would have been irresponsible for us NOT to include that part of the interview, but it may have also been irresponsible for us to make that the focus of the piece. It made for compelling TV, which in that consultant-driven environment, really was the name of the game.

I was rarely paired with Giselle Fernandez during her final year at the station. We were just too strong together. I often was paired with unmotivated anchors or reporters, who needed a push to get the maximum out of our assigned news series. The Jeff and Giselle team did not like to take no for an answer, and could sometimes get insubordinate. Managers don’t like that. We would put a story together, and then tell our bosses that we did so. It would have driven me up a wall, too, had I been a manager. But the thing is – our stories kicked butt. The topics were compelling, and Giselle’s on-camera style always made for great TV. I never enjoyed working with anybody as much as I liked working with Giselle. I even watched her on “Dancing with the Stars”, even though I despise that boring waste-of-time TV show.


(Click the image to view it full size)


When Giselle left Channel 6 in September 1991, I gave her a special present: a book. A dog-eared pulp paperback. It was Ravaged. I’d kept it.

As for Frank Fuster… well, he still maintains his innocence. You can’t help but wonder if his case might have turned out differently had he not shouted those words in court. The jury saw a scary, imposing figure, when he raised his voice and shouted “YOU ARE A LIAR!" Congressman Joe Wilson will have his jury, too: the voters of South Carolina. His judgment day will arrive soon enough.

CBS To The Rescue

We were incredulous. Sure, we’d heard the rumors that big bad CBS was going to buy our low-rated, signal-challenged independent TV station, but get real! They’d backed a winner in WTVJ Channel 4 for the past four decades, but now NBC was buying Channel 4, changing everything. We’d all speculated on what could happen if we were actually taken over by the Columbia Broadcasting System, but few of us really believed it would happen. But it did! The announcement came down on 8-8-88. It may have appeared 8’s were wild that day, but for us, everything was coming up 6’s. The takeover would become official come the new year. The ant that thought he could move a rubber tree plant finally had more than just high hopes, as the new owners planned to spend money, make improvements, and do anything they could to justify their investment. Bring it on, we said. Make us a contender!

Who at Channel 6 wasn’t affected by the change? For some, it was time to move up. For others it meant moving out, as the network boys brought in lots of new blood. For me it meant a move to the new special projects unit, and a chance to produce specials, series, and what have you. Anything besides the newscast grind (although I still had to produce the Saturday and Sunday newscasts.) I had the “pleasure” of producing the first Saturday 6PM show in Channel 6’s history. Unfortunately it followed basketball, and the game ran long, which meant… Channel 6’s first accordion show! That’s when the show has to be sliced, diced, then sliced-and-diced some more (depending on how little time was left between the end of the game and the start of network news at 6:30 sharp). Just one of the fun new things we had to get used to. The change meant more newscasts, expanded coverage, and much higher expectations – all good things, especially when you consider what a busy first month it was: Overtown civil disturbances. Miami’s first Super Bowl in ten years. Ted Bundy’s execution. An influx of Nicaraguan refugees, enough to fill Bobby Maduro Stadium to capacity. The first George Bush’s inauguration. Whew, we were busy. But help was on the way. We had already stolen Al Sunshine away from WTVJ, and soon some shiny new anchors would join the team. By April, J.D. Roberts (now Fox’s John Roberts) was brought in from Canada to anchor the news with Barbara Sloan (sending Jim Dyer to the weekends). Giselle Fernandez joined the team the following month, followed a little while later by John Hambrick, who had been WTVJ’s star anchorman. The new anchors raised the bar even higher, and so did the new management team.

CBS brought in Jay Newman, who presented a blueprint that would be hard to follow – but we sure tried. Newman mandated that anchor tags follow every reporter package. Producers were not allowed to change anchors between stories, without an on-camera tag as a transition. Every block of news had to have a light “ender”, to set the mood before the tease that followed. And all teases had to have at least two pieces of video in them. Lofty goals. By March the station had hired Ron Tindiglia as our consultant, to further refine our newscasts and make more mandates. Some of us called Tindiglia “The Guru”, because of the way he would hold middle management spellbound through the years. Tindiglia’s word was like the word of God around that newsroom. Thou shalt write to video at all times!

That first year under CBS brought rapid changes to our humble newsroom. I spent part of January training our two newest producers, Brian Jones and Zahir Sachedina. I was supposed to be part of the special projects unit, but didn’t get a sniff of a news series until April. Sachedina’s ulcer, and Jones being thrown into an in-depth series about the Overtown disturbances (“A Search For Answers”) kept me tied to the producer’s desk for several extra weeks. During this time I became close friends with one of our new associate producers, Marty Hames. It was then that I learned that when it came to our new owners, there was way more than meets the eye.

Hames, it turns out, wasn’t just an A.P., and she wasn’t hired by our Miami management team like the rest of us writer/producer types. She was personally placed at our station by CBS honcho Eric Ober. By the time she was introduced to us, her ticket to stardom had already been punched. Unbeknownst to us, she was here to learn the ropes of writing, and the ins and outs of news, before being placed in an anchor’s position somewhere in the CBS empire. (There was even talk about renaming her Rosario Velasco, to capitalize on her mother’s Latin heritage.) It turns out there were other secret apprentices. Our new anchor hires were all seen as future stars, and Miami was pretty much just a stop along the way. Hey South Florida, don’t get too used to these folks! The anchor-as-celebrity was already germinating on our airwaves, and the old guard – the Jim Dyers – was being pushed aside. That’s show biz, as they say. And show biz, it was. J.D. Roberts and Giselle Fernandez were terrific anchors and personalities, but I doubt if WCIX ranks high on their resumes. But they would give us the visibility we needed to make the transition from afterthought in the Miami market, to a future player.

Just the way the network planned it.

Credit Where It's Due

(Click image to view full size)


Once a week the folks behind The Ten O’Clock News would receive on-air recognition for their roles in making the newscast happen. As the Chyron operator (or “Super” Man), I often had to leap tall buildings in order to find out exactly who did what in a given week. Typing, and “rolling” the weekly credit roll was part of my responsibilities. I had to get it right (including spelling), or feel the wrath of whoever might have been left out.

The sheet above is one of the templates that I worked with. If you look carefully, you’ll notice that “film processing” was originally part of our credits. After we finally switched to tape in 1982, that antiquated credit finally went away. It was long overdue!

It’s fun to see all these names again. We really did have quite a team.

Up next: Mighty CBS purchases WCIX Channel 6.

They did what??

A WCIX Reunion?

So who’s up for a Channel 6 reunion? Seriously! The old WTVJ Channel 4 gang held a reunion recently. So did folks from WFUN, WWOK, and other local radio stations, with a giant 70s & 80s South Florida radio reunion planned for October 24. So why not us?

Yeah, I know, it’s a logistical nightmare, but it doesn’t have to be. The WFUN reunion was pretty informal, renting out an area at Tony Roma’s and taking it over for an evening. Of course we’d need a nice video set-up to show old skit reels and a photo presentation. Too bad we don’t have any video professionals to facilitate that. Just kidding, guys. Of course it can be done. If we could air instant specials on a wing and a prayer, and a newscast night after night with skeleton staffs, we can pull off a reunion of the hardest-working team in showbiz. Or was it the lowest-paid team in South Florida television? Yeah, that’s it. Five percent, pass it on!

How would this work? Would the 60s & 70s team feel comfortable with the 80s & 90s guys? I think so. Would the stories about Brickell bore the Doralites, or is it all meat on the same bone? What would be the cut-off? Would we exclude WFOR newbies, or throw it open to everyone? I don’t have the answers, but these are some of the questions. What else would need to be worked out in order to make this a reality?

Should this happen, I would be glad to help publicize the event and pass along information, but since I no longer live in South Florida, I do not see myself being part of the organizing committee. Others would need to take the ball and run with it. I can tell you that behind the scenes of this blog, the number one question I’m asked is “any chance of a reunion?” People want this! The question is, do you want it badly enough to help out and make it a reality? I know of folks who are willing to travel from all over the country to attend such a reunion, but where do we go from here?

Please leave comments and let me know what you think. Do it here, on this post. If you contact me via e-mail or Facebook, there’s a chance your message could be lost somewhere down the line. Send this link to your Channel 6 pals, and let them chime in as well. In the immortal words of former executive producer Jeanne Antol-Krull: “GET GOING!”