Bright Spot in the Lone Star State

In any discussion of television news eminence, a handful of stations invariably crops up: San Francisco's KRON for its special projects; KCNC in Denver for its market dominance; Wichita's KAKE for its focus on award-winning photo journalism; KDKA in Pittsburgh for its reputation as a solid news operation of long standing; Boston's WCVB for chasing stories all over the world. But if there's one station that stands out among the half dozen exemplary TV news operations around the country, it's probably WFAA, the ABC affiliate in Dallas-Fort Worth.

WFAA occupies a low-rise building in downtown Dallas a few blocks from Dealey Plaza, the Kennedy assassination site. The station shares a central driveway with The Dallas Morning News. Both WFAA and the Morning News, probably the best newspaper in the Southwest, are locally owned, by the A. H. Belo Corporation.

What the viewer sees on an WFAA Channel 8 newscast looks little different, at first glance, from newscasts across the country. The four anchors sit behind a desk; they engage in friendly patter between stories; they offer news, weather, and sports just like any other newscast. So why does the station so thoroughly dominate the market, the eighth largest in the nation, that it often equals the market share of the other two Dallas-Fort Worth network affiliates combined?

The differences begin to come clear over more extended viewing. A certain steady professionalism suggests a TV version of The New York Times rather than, say, USA Today. Channel 8 avoids the "if it bleeds, it leads" approach to newsgathering even during sweep periods, when a station's ratings are set. Its stories are frequently longer, more enterprising, than the typical TV news story.

Cathy Creany, who became the station's general manager last February, recalls tuning in to a Channel 8 newscast in her hotel room when she was in Dallas for one of maybe a dozen interviews for the job. A reporter was doing a piece on opera in Dallas. Creany, who at the time was vice-president and general manager of WTVH-TV in Syracuse, New York, a CBS affiliate, remembers thinking, "'Man! That lady has been talking about the opera for two minutes now." I was in shock. The last thing I thought of was Dallas as the intellectual capital of the world. I kept thinking, 'Are they ready for this? Why are they watching this broadcast?'"

No doubt, viewers are watching for a combination of reasons. Channel 8 news at 6 P.M. serves as a handy lead-in for the ever-popular Wheel of Fortune. Or they could be watching because there's something reassuring and reliable about the Channel 8 cast of characters. After all, WFAA's anchor at 6 and 10, Tracy Rowlett, has been in the same spot for eighteen years, and several reporters have been around for nearly that long; so has popular weatherman Troy Dungan.

Or they could be watching because they've grown accustomed to the station's distinctive quality. Ed Bark, television critic for The Dallas Morning News, observes that Dallas-Fort Worth viewing audiences have always preferred what he calls "cheesy shows" -- except when it comes to news. Even before WFAA's news operation began to dominate, area TV audiences preferred serious newscasts.

To do what WFAA does means dispatching reporters and a satellite truck to West Texas to cover a little town destroyed by a tornado, while its competitors are still relying on wire-service reports. It means devoting time and resources to investigative pieces on such complex, difficult-to-report issues as the savings and loan scandal, a scandal with enormous implications for Dallas. In the football-mad Metroplex, it means sending sports anchor Dale Hansen to London to cover a Dallas Cowboys preseason game. It also means a willingness to jump headlong into an investigation about egregious corruption in the football program at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, stepping on the toes of some powerful people in the process.

"We want to own the story," executive news director John Miller says. "We want to be all over it."

Jim Moore is the Austin bureau chief for Houston's KHOU-TV, a sister station to WFAA. On a Friday morning at the tail end of summer, on what promises to be a slow news day, he calls up on his computer screen assignment sheets for his own station and for WFAA. He counts nineteen WFAA reporters working on stories for that day's newscast; KHOU has ten.

In addition, Moore says, "on any given day WFAA has as many people working on not-for-today stories and people off as we have people working." Moore mentions his WFAA counterpart in Austin, Robert Riggs, who has been doing eye-opening investigative reports on a scandal involving a convicted murderer named Kenneth Allen McDuff and alleged bribery at the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles. "Riggs spent over six months doing his investigation on McDuff," Moore says. "It was great stuff. He wasn't on the air full time. I could never do anything like that, because they need us on the air every single day, sometimes twice a day."

WFAA's reporters have the gifts of time and money. The four-person reporting team that WFAA sent to Mogadishu to cover the arrival of American troops last year ended up staying four weeks in Africa, enough time to produce a five-part series called "Visions of Africa." The aim of the series was to give viewers a more comprehensive view of the continent, something beyond wars and famine.

An immensely profitable TV station, WFAA spends money not only on good reporters and on-air talent but on equipment and technology as well. "John [Miller] said I would never get in trouble for chartering a Lear jet to cover a story," news operations manager Craig Harper says, "but I would get in trouble for not chartering a jet."

As Harper puts it: "We've got all the toys." He mentions the station's satellite truck, equipped with two editing systems and capable of two feeds at once; it is one of the largest satellite trucks ever built. The station's helicopter, a French-made Aerospeciale, is the Rolls-Royce of TV-station choppers. WFAA was the second customer to buy BASYS, the state-of-the-art newsroom computer system (CNN was the first). It is the only non-ABCowned station to cooperate with ABC in operating a news bureau out of its facility. WFAA was the first station in Texas to staff a capital bureau in Austin; for the last ten years it has operated the only Texan single-station bureau in Washington. Houston's KHOU is opening one in January.

The WFAA news operation wasn't always this way, and it hasn't always been successful. For years, Channel 8 frequently finished a dismal third in the battle with its two network-affiliated competitors. The relatively few people who watched received a steady diet of spot news -- car wrecks, fires, drownings, shootings, robberies, and assaults.

The station's rise to the top began in 1973, when Belo executives committed themselves to finding a miracle worker. Their search led them to Herman Martin Haag, Jr. -- Marty Haag (pronounced with a long a) -- a high-energy assistant news director at WCBS-TV in New York City. In the late 1950s, Haag and his roommate at the time, a fellow named Jim Lehrer, as in The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, had worked as reporters at The Dallas Morning News.

"I came in with very strongly held ideas about what local news should be," Haag says. Those who have worked with him say "strongly held" is an understatement. Haag's ideas about dominating coverage, about the beat system, about doing longer trend stories and investigative reporting, are fiercely held. His drive and his hair-trigger temper were notorious during his tenure as news director, but his approach got results.

Miller, who inherited Haag's position in 1989 when Haag moved up the corporate ladder, adheres to Haag's basic principles. "This station is known far and wide as a reporter's shop," Miller explains, "but that's too narrow. It's an idea shop. There's very little top-down assignment. At most stations, the assignment desk drives coverage. Not here. We can't predefine what the news is going to be. We can't impose our vision on the reporter." WFAA's reporters, in turn, do not see themselves as in a constant race with competitors to the next emergency, the next visual and accessible piece of news. They see their principal competition, in fact, as print.

WFAA lives and dies by the beat system, which gives reporters time to cultivate both sources and their own expertise. A surprising number of the station's reporters have been at Channel 8 for more than five years, giving them a feel for the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

Shortly after his arrival at WFAA, Haag tracked down Tracy Rowlett, Byron Harris, and Doug Fox, three reporters from Oklahoma known collectively as the Oklahoma Mafia. All three had quit KWTV-TV in Oklahoma City in protest after management killed Harris's investigative series on allegedly crooked auto dealers in Oklahoma City. The dealers were, of course, important advertisers.

"We were blacklisted in the business," Rowlett says. "General managers got together and decided we were malcontents. Marty called us up, and we became the core of what he was trying to do. And all three of us are still here."

By mid-1975, Haag felt his kind of news operation was up and running at WFAA, but the station was still mired in third place in the ratings. A consultant brought in to fiddle with WFAA anchor combinations suggested pairing Rowlett with a young black reporter from Tucson named Iola Johnson. Dallas focus groups responded enthusiastically to the chemistry between the two. So did viewing audiences. Within a year, the new team was number one at 10 P.M. and challenging for number one at 6. Johnson eventually moved on after a contract dispute, but Rowlett, after eighteen years, remains one of the most popular anchors in the Metroplex.

If there was one story that solidified Channel 8's position, it was the crash of Delta 191 at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport in August 1985, a crash that claimed 137 lives. At Haag's insistence, WFAA pre-empted regular programming and broadcast live from the crash site for almost six consecutive hours. "The other stations were slow to react," Ed Bark of The Dallas Morning News recalls. "WFAA's coverage cemented the perception that if anything is going on, you turn to Channel 8."

Another crucial factor was the work of the late Dave Lane as president and general manager. Lane secured the wrap-around programs that assured the newscasts a sizable ready-made audience. He picked up Oprah as Channel 8's lead-in to the 5 o'clock newscast and insured that Wheel of Fortune followed the 6 o'clock show.

The lead-in for the 6 P.M newscast is, of course, ABC's World News Tonight with Peter Jennings, which, as Bark points out, is a big advantage. And on Mondays during the fall, the lead-in for the 10 P.M. broadcast is Monday Night Football. "With lead-ins like that," Bark says, "I don't think they could put a monkey up there to read the news, but it might be an interesting experiment."

Over the years, WFAA has collected a lot of prizes, including a Peabody and five DuPont-Columbia awards. It has also won its share of critics.

Bark, among others, questions John Miller's commitment to investigative reporting. He points out that one of WFAA's last full-time investigative reporters, Charlie Duncan, left the station three years ago, with lawsuits trailing in his wake. One of those was a $ 58 million libel suit won by a Waco district attorney, Vic Feazell, in 1991. As Bark sees it, that fiscally chastening experience may have made Miller less than eager to replace Duncan.

"It's not true that we're leery of investigative reporting," Miller says. "We've never had an I-team. Marty [Haag] used to say that every reporter should be doing investigative reporting. Obviously, when you lose a $ 58 million lawsuit, you try not to let that happen again. Although we would always like to do more, we think we do fine with our investigative reporting."

It's difficult to disagree, particularly when Miller ticks off a list of recent investigative work. He mentions Robert Riggs's investigation into the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles. The eighteen-month investigation uncovered a parole-selling scheme and has led to major changes in the Texas criminal justice system. He points out that it was WFAA, along with the Detroit Free Press, that broke the story about problems with gas tanks on GM pickups built between 1972 and 1987. And he mentions a continuing investigation into an organ transplant association that seems to have lost track of more than $ 1 million.

Although every news operation, both TV and print, could probably be doing more long-term, in-depth investigative reporting, WFAA seems more enterprising than the vast majority of local news operations. What the station could do better, given its ratings dominance and its personnel superiority, is what Marty Haag calls "trend stories." Although "trend" suggests a fluffy piece, Haag has in mind a journalistic approach closer to a sociological investigation, a piece that has context and perspective, as well as analysis. A trend piece, as Haag defines it, is probably more difficult to do -- and to do well -- than a traditional investigative piece on corruption in government, say, or scams in the savings and loan industry.

A story on racial tension in Dallas would be an obvious trend story, although, ironically, WFAA might have to be part of the story. The most common complaint about WFAA has to do with race and with what some perceive as Channel 8's reluctance to reflect a diverse urban community. It's been a contentious issue for at least five years.

"Have you heard what WFAA stands for?" Bob Ray Sanders asks. Sanders, who hosts a public affairs program on KERA-13, Dallas-Fort Worth's public broadcasting station, has been a persistent critic of what he perceives as arrogance and insensitivity on the part of the WFAA news operation. "WFAA," he says, "stands for White Folks Are Alright."

Black anchor Iola Johnson has been gone since 1985, and for years Sanders contended that the four middle-aged white men who anchor the 10 P.M. newscast reflected a deliberate strategy on the part of WFAA -- a subliminal appeal to North Dallas, to the overwhelmingly white, more affluent, better-educated part of the city.

"It's true, we've had 100 percent white guys with ties at ten," Creany said late last summer. "But we will evolve." The evolution took tangible form in November. WFAA announced that John McCaa, an African-American, and Gloria Campos, a Hispanic, would be sharing anchor duties with veteran anchors Chip Moody and Tracy Rowlett. That same month the station announced that a new Sunday night show, Impact, would start in January and "address current issues facing the African-American community with new and creative solutions."

The man who shaped the WFAA news operation no longer prowls the frenetic Channel 8 newsroom. Since 1989, Marty Haag has been vice-president of news for Belo's broadcast division; he works out of an airy sixteenth-floor office in a modern drill-bit-shaped building across the street. At sixty, Haag has mellowed, he says. These days he serves as consultant and coach to the five news departments in the Belo TV family (in Houston, Tulsa, Sacramento, and Norfolk, as well as Dallas), and develops new programming. He's particularly interested in reviving the documentary format.

"It's important that we don't get out of the documentary business," he says. "The networks have discarded it, so local stations should pick it up." Haag is also the executive producer of Channel 8's new Prime Time Texas, a weekly hour-long newsmagazine hosted by Tracy Rowlett. Prime Time Texas debuted in October, when Channel 8 vetoed NYPD Blue. Of the approximately forty ABC stations that rejected NYPD Blue, Channel 8 is the only one to introduce a news program in its time slot. One recent show ran the gamut from teenage sex to Dallas jazz to a look at Mexico City and the young civic-minded developers who want to make their megalopolis more livable.

Prime Time Texas is a reflection of Haag's belief that a television station has an obligation to be "a news service and a community leader. I'm an idealist," he says. "I believe that if you don't insult the people's intelligence, ultimately you're going to win."

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