When the news arrived last week that Pat Warren, long-time reporter and weekend anchor at WJZ-TV, died at age 70, her longtime newsroom colleagues must have recalled the sound of Pat’s voice in full kvetch.
Thank you, Pat, for the sincerity of your kvetch.
She had no patience for B.S. She worked in a business that once seemed to carry great potential for serious coverage of the Baltimore metropolitan area. TV looked like the future. Now, it’s tough to know if anybody’s looking at all.
In her time at WJZ, which lasted nearly 30 years, Warren did solid reporting out of Annapolis at every winter’s General Assembly session. In the years she co-anchored weekend news, the station generally led the local ratings.
She was among the early wave of Black women who broke into major market TV news, and she knew the cultural weight this carried and respected it. And she chafed whenever she was told to compromise her values.
The station’s compromising started to get bad not long after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Warren was one of several WJZ reporters dispatched to locations outside the newsroom to bring home the story.
But her role was an empty one, and it infuriated her. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, the station sent her to Washington, D.C., every night to deliver a 10-second live introduction to network pieces.
The pieces had been put together by some CBS reporter who’d written the script. Then, the station would run Warren’s voiceover with network video footage as though she’d done the reporting herself.
It was cosmetics the station wanted, the look of WJZ’s own reporter standing in front of the U.S. Capitol.
“I’m spending entire days in Washington,” she said in the newsroom one evening, “just so I can do a live, 10-second intro with the Capitol behind me. And even then, he’s angry.”
By he, she was referring to the station’s then-general manager who was just beginning to compromise the station’s reporting. She knew her complaint would get back to the boss, and she was good with that.
“One day the sun was too strong,” Warren complained. “It bleached out the Capitol. People couldn’t see it was there. So I spent the whole day there for a background that nobody could see, and [the general manager] is screaming at people like we can control the weather.”
Why did she tolerate such a charade? Like anybody in her position, she was playing the long game, hoping such decisions were a passing instance of unscrupulous leadership in a momentary emergency.
But she knew better. She saw the future of local TV news coming, with viewership evaporating and local relevance all but gone. And so she let her feelings and her standards known to all.
She was an adult in a business that too often treated stories with a child’s depth. She respected the truth, even when it was inconvenient. And, when she bumped into people who compromised the values of honest journalism, boy, could she kvetch.
Thank you, Pat, for your kvetching.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books.
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