MEDIA The Conscience of KERA

THE INVITED ASSORTMENT OF DECIsion-makers from major area news organizations, gathering to appear on a Channel 13 public affairs presentation, was a festive gang at first.

Panel discussions involving media bosses often rival a Mary Kay awards banquet when it conies to the exploration of new frontiers in self-congratulatory rhetoric.

This group, however, didn’t realize that the show’s genial host, Channel 13 news producer Bob Ray Sanders, had prepared what one of them would later describe as an “ambush.”

Sanders was not about to allow this seminar to deterio-rate into another First Amendment pep rally. The moderator was frowning like a man en route to collect an overdue debt from his no-good son-in-law.

No sooner had the director issued the on-the-air cue than Boh Ray Sanders drew his sword. “Other than religion, there is no American institution more racist than the media,” Sanders began. He contended that local papers and radio-TV operations were guilty not only of unbalanced coverage of minority affairs, but also negligent in personnel policies involving persons hired to present the news.

The gauntlet was dropped and what followed was a ninety-minute litany of denial and dismay from the news executives that ranged from awkward to hyper-defensive, frequently punctuated by an impassioned “harrumph.”

Poor Wendell Harris, news director at Channel 4, seemed to be the victim of sporadic blasts of electricity from a hidden device in his chair. Ralph Langer, executive editor at The Dallas Morning News, performed a series of strange and jittery gestures that looked like a third base coach giving signs to the hitter. Roy Bode, the man in charge of the newsroom at the Dallas Times Herald, was called upon to explain why one of his paper’s sports columnists had made a big deal of the fact that Herschel Walker’s wife is white. And if Channel 8 news director Marty Haag had anticipated that he would be taken to task for the socio-racio-sexio demographics of his “men’s club” prime-time news team, he was not disappointed.

“I don’t agree that I set any ambush for that group,” Bob Ray Sanders would say later. “Everyone on that panel knew what the nature of the discussion was going to be. It was not my intention to make Marty Haag, or anybody else, mad. But Marty didn’t shake hands with, or even acknowledge, me after the program was over. This was probably the last time that particular group will ever be assembled on the air again. So if I made some people upset, then so be it.”

If the news executives were upset, however, Channel 13 viewers were supportive and responded favorably, says Sanders. “The viewers were pretty astute at determining which members of that panel were the demagogues.”

That morsel of programming enterprise was simply another well-played thrust by Sanders, who continues to gather credentials as the area’s ranking media polemicist.

“Controversy is something that is going to be a continuing theme of my programs,” Sanders confirms. “That’s just me. Monica Smith, the president of the Dallas Police Association, for instance, absolutely refuses to appear on my program. She thinks I’m anti cop. I’m not. I’m anti bad cop. But some people perceive me as being anti cop and won’t subscribe or contribute to Channel 13 for that reason.”

Besides being one of the stormiest personalities in the Dallas news community, Sanders perhaps qualifies as this market’s most versatile media operative. Certainly, he is one of the few who has successfully negotiated the precarious tightrope that stretches between print and broadcast news.

It is ironic that Sanders has apparently never been held back by the racial barriers that he complains of on his programs.

“I’d always wanted to be a journalist, at least since the ninth grade [in 1961] when I had a letter to the editor printed in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.”

This was during a time when the only blacks in journalism were working for Ebony magazine.

“I majored in journalism at North Texas, over my mother’s strong objections. She said, ’Why are you studying something they ain’t going to let you do?’

“After my senior year, I was in downtown Fort Worth, in fact, buying cufflinks for my graduation,” Sanders recalls, “and decided to wander into the personnel office of the Star-Telegram.”

A city editor gave Sanders a brief rewrite audition and when he returned home that afternoon, he was astonished to learn from his mother that the paper had called, offering a job. The year was 1969.

Within two years, Sanders was offered the most challenging beat the Star-Telegram’s city desk had to offer-coverage of the Tarrant County Courthouse.

“The editor of the paper warned me that everybody who was anybody at the courthouse was a hard-core racist, and that I would encounter problems” Sanders recalls. “But the various political factions at the courthouse were fighting so bitterly among one another that nobody paid any attention to the fact that I was black.”

After appearing on a Channel 13 news special-“I didn’t realize it at the time, but I suppose that was sort of a screen test”-Sanders was offered a job on KERA’s “Newsroom” telecast. The brash and unusual show was first hosted by Jim Lehrer, who had been a managing editor at the Times Herald.

“Newsroom,” designed to simulate the city desk activities of a daily newspaper, would finally fade away in 1977, after a $400,000 annual grant from the Ford Foundation had run out. Sanders found himself whisked by circumstance into an altogether new environment. Ed Pfister, KERA’s president and general manager, asked Sanders if he wanted to become station manager of KERA radio. “I told him that I had no experience in radio; didn’t know the first thing about it,” says Sanders, “and he told me that no first-time station manager ever had, either. I accepted the job and it turned out to be a dream gig.”

Sanders’s current status as producer of Channel 13 news makes him one of the influential figures in Dallas/Fort Worth media.

This is why it was more than a little bit strange when Sanders made a certain phone call to the Star-Telegram, the outfit that gave the kid with no professional experience his first and biggest break in the news business.

Bob Ray’s message to the paper was this: “Cancel my subscription!”

“I was upset because they printed the name of the twelve-year-old boy who was accused of murdering the Fort Worth school teacher. This was before he was acquitted,” Sanders says. “It was my feeling that if the boy hadn’t been black, they wouldn’t have run his name.

“Looking back, I still can’t figure out why the Star-Telegram hired me in the first place. They didn’t have to. They already had one (black reporter] and that’s all you needed in those days.

“Actually, I only canceled my subscription at home,” says Sanders, laughing out loud. “We still take it at the station.”