Time once again to play “Who’s Hot and Who’s History” at the ever-changing Dallas Times Herald, where more than a year after the John Buzzetta takeover the heads are still rolling and musical chairs is still the name of the game. As always in the case of the Herald, you’ll need a program to follow the action.
The most noticeable recent departee is the Asbestos Maiden, Miz Spunky Herself, Laura Miller, who was not, it turned out, fireproof. The Attila the Hun of Dallas writers was sacked in July by editor-in-chief Roy Bode.
Miller, protege of former editor-in-chief Dave Burgin, says she knew her days were numbered in late June when Bode et al. killed yet another of her columns, this a rather tame one criticizing KRLD newsman Alex Burton for some of his more commercial ventures.
“They said they didn’t want me to become a ’media columnist,’ but they really just didn’t want me to do what I was hired to do,” Miller says. “I’m sad about it, but on the other hand, I just really couldn’t do anything there any more.”
Miller’s critics say her modus operandi didn’t involve just going out and finding something to get mad about. Instead, they say, she seemed to get really good and mad first and then hurry out to find something to write about before she got in a better mood. On a really bad day she could unhesitatingly savage Bambi. You can count the number of positive, laudatory columns she wrote on your fingers and still have one hand left free. In fact, when she said some extremely nice things about Pleasant Grove State Rep. Al Granoff and his work with troubled youth, some people assumed her byline got on the piece by mistake.
And of course the old financial bottom line can’t be overlooked. For the $65,000 Miller was getting per her contract with Burgin, Bode could hire three-or four, or five- general assignment reporters.
But Miller played a role in local journalism that may now go unfilled. A steady diet of her columns sometimes left people feeling like they had a wasp in their ear, but she took big hard swings at big hard players like Ross Perot. It was she who first really put the screws to Walker Railey, convicting him in print, fairly or no. She was playing Chicago-style hardball in a town that likes its journalists to ask polite, soft questions, and that, as much as anything else, was the cause of her undoing.
“I think that people started realizing that I was interested in the underdogs, and in real people,” says Miller. “I got a lot of feedback and story ideas from a lot of people who didn’t feel like they had anyone else to talk to. People getting screwed by developers, screwed by City Hall, that kind of thing. I’ll miss that.”
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