Jamie Costello arrived on Baltimore television screens when it looked as if local TV news was the future of journalism. He’s leaving now, 37 years later, when it looks as if almost nobody’s watching anymore.
He announced his retirement the other day, on WMAR-TV, delivering his farewell with the grace and good humor and a sense of Baltimore broadcast history that have always been his trademark.
And he reminded everybody precisely why he meant so much to WMAR for so many years.
He was one of us. He was a hometown kid who didn’t have to be tutored on how to pronounce “Towson” correctly. He could find City Hall without needing a GPS. He knew the town’s story, its major players and its municipal self-consciousness, like a mantra and brought that insight with him every day.
That’s always been the great misunderstanding in local TV news. From the beginning, in the earliest post-war years, the front office thinkers have brought in professional gypsies from distant cities to tell us the daily business of Baltimore.
Go forth and fake it.
That sense of casting — go for the cosmetics, go for the show biz touch — is just one of the factors contributing to the downfall of local TV news all over the country. The medium never got serious about news. The sheer “look” of drama — the fire in an empty warehouse, the accident on the JFX — mattered more to them than the real social and economic problems facing the metro area.
Costello, who grew up in Baltimore County’s Rosedale area, was a guy who grew up learning all the stuff he’d need to inform a 37-year career.
His last day on the air will be June 14. But in his on-air eulogy for his TV career, he paid tribute to “my saints of Baltimore broadcasting: Jack and Susan [White Bowden], Jerry [Turner] and Al [Sanders], Stu Kerr, Wiley Daniels, Galen Fromme, Johnny Dark, Vince [Bagli], Chuck [Thompson].”
That’s the roll call of a generation of people who not only delivered news and sports here but gave Baltimore a sense of itself.
As a kid on Rocky Mount Road in Rosedale, Costello said, “I used a wooden paddle” as a faux microphone “pretending to be you one day. I hope I did you proud.”
As a reporter, and as the station’s main anchor across so many years, he did himself proud. Part of it was his solid reporting. Part of it was his roots.
There aren’t many others in local TV news with Costello’s close identification with Baltimore.
In one of the great lines from “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” Paul Newman sees the future coming, with its faceless people, and asks Robert Redford, “Who are these guys?”
We knew who Jamie Costello was.
He was one of us.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of seven books, including “Tonight at 6: A Daily Show Masquerading as Local TV News” (Apprentice House). His most recent book, “Boogie: Life on a Merry-Go-Round,” was published by Apprentice House.
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