Fighting for Air: In the Trenches with Television News (Volume 1) - Softcover

Trotta, Liz

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0826209521 ISBN 13: 9780826209528

Publisher: University of Missouri, 1994

Synopsis

In this piercing look into the grit and the glamour of television news, award-winning journalist Liz Trotta traces her career from the early days of broadcast news to the slick superficiality of today. The first female television correspondent in Vietnam, Trotta tells the searing truth about being a woman in a male-dominated industry and recounts many of her most fascinating stories, from the scandal of Chappaquiddick to the campaign trail of George Bush. Filled with candid, often stinging assessments of the movers and shakers in the industry, Fighting for Air is the story of an uncompromising woman and of television news coming of age--told from the trenches.

About this title

About the Author:

Liz Trotta is the New York Bureau Chief for the Washington Times. A veteran of two decades with NBC News and CBS News, she is the winner of three Emmys and two Overseas Press Club awards. An alumna of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, Trotta has taught at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communication and at New York University.

From Kirkus Reviews:

A feisty memoir by politically conservative and personally brash TV foreign correspondent Trotta. Trotta begins her network news career at NBC during the Vietnam War, and her war at home is the battle to become the first woman TV war correspondent. She wins a six-month tour of the war zone in 1968, after two reporters get wounded, one goes crazy, and the network's ``cannon fodder was getting scarce.'' In Vietnam, she's at her best, dodging bullets with her cameraman and the boys. Trotta believes that the only thing wrong about the war is ``the U.S. government's half-hearted commitment to it,'' and she sympathizes deeply with the soldiers while being attacked by antiwar superiors at NBC, including John Chancellor. Her later assignments are also plums: civil war in the Philippines and Ireland, the Iran hostage crisis, the invasion of Grenada, and even the Claus von B low trial. She takes them all on with a growing sense of bitterness and disillusionment with TV news, and a temper that has her pushing and bullying her way to a story. Finally, her aggressiveness gets her demoted at NBC just after she wins an Overseas Press Club Award for a series on famine in Africa. She then goes over to CBS, where she is eventually fired at age 41, in part for being ``too old.'' Here is her chance to get even by releasing tidbits like the fact that WNBC anchorman Chuck Scarborough has no books in his office, and that Dan Rather's starting contract as an anchor was for $20 million instead of the $8 million reported. Well drawn, exciting, and biting, but in the end Trotta's seeming vindictiveness overwhelms her story. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Missouri
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0826209521
• ISBN 13: 9780826209528
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 400