Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [46]
“I was news director at WJZ and I hired Oprah after seeing a demo tape that she had sent,” Gary Elion said in 2007. “It was very impressive; she had a compelling delivery, and we hired her on the basis of that tape.”
The newsroom was aghast. “It did not matter that Oprah Winfrey from Nashville, Tennessee, knew nothing about Baltimore, or that she was twenty-two years old, or that she had almost no reporting experience,” recalled Michael Olesker, a former print journalist who became WJZ’s on-air essayist. “For television news Oprah was perfect.… Why? Because in television news, journalism has always been considered optional.”
At the time there were only a few black women on television in Baltimore, despite the city’s large black population. Maria Broom, a dancer with little experience in journalism, had been hired by WJZ to be the consumer reporter before Oprah arrived. “I was black, and I had a nice bush,” said Broom, who achieved national recognition in the (2000–2008) HBO hit series The Wire. “It was a time of big Afros. I was a picture of the modern black woman. So it was like a movie. They said, ‘We’re going to make you a star,’ and then they did.… I was what they gave the black people.”
Sue Simmons had arrived in 1974 to work at WBAL. She stayed two years before moving to Washington, D.C., and then to New York City, where she has anchored the news at WNBC for more than two decades. Upon leaving Baltimore, a reporter asked what her strengths were. Simmons replied, “I’m pretty and I can read.”
In 1976, for any woman—black, white, yellow, or brown—to share the throne of Jerry Turner was to receive a crown never before bestowed.
“Getting that … news coanchor job at twenty-two was such a big deal,” Oprah said many years later. “It felt like the biggest deal in the world at the time.”
When it was announced that a young black woman from Nashville had been anointed, even Baltimore’s major television critic was taken aback. “That they have this much confidence in a new face for Baltimore is interesting,” Bill Carter wrote in The Baltimore Sun. “It must be considered a risk anytime the news is handled by anyone other than Turner at Channel 13.
“But if Winfrey can be established as a popular news person, the station will have a big leg up when it finally does get its act together and puts the full hour news on the air.”
WJZ immediately began working with Mayor William D. Schaefer’s office to develop a series of feature stories about Baltimore neighborhoods that Oprah could present each night during the forty-five-day City Fair between July and September.
“It’s good P.R. for me,” she told reporters, admitting she did no research or reporting for the series. She simply showed up at a different neighborhood each day with a camera crew to interview whomever had been selected by the community association. “It was a great way of introducing me to the city. I probably know more about the neighborhoods now than anybody else at the station.”
Her comment irked some in the newsroom, particularly Al Sanders, a black reporter who had effectively anchored the news in Turner’s absence and expected to be considered as his coanchor. “For up to three years before we went to the hour format, there had been talk that if a coanchor situation were to come along I would be considered,” he said. “When it did come along, no one at the station was considered. Someone was brought in from the outside.”
Still, the deck was stacked against Oprah. “Even before she hit town, WJZ ran a childish series of promotional spots, asking, ‘Do you know what an Oprah is?’ ” recalled Michael Olesker.
“ ‘Ofrey?’ the people in the commercial would answer.
“ ‘Oprah? What’s an Oprah?’
“In hindsight no one could imagine CBS introducing its anchor years earlier by asking, ‘Do you know what a Cronkite is?’ The spots demeaned Oprah and the entire notion of news anchors as serious figures.”
Oprah saw the promotion as anticlimactic. “The whole thing backfired,