by Joanmarie Kalter
Joanmarie Kalter is a free-lance journalist based in Montclair, New Jersey.

Television journalists may feel ever more pressured these days to get the big "get," but ABC correspondent Judy Muller, in her witty and perceptive memoir, Now This: Radio, Television . . . and the Real World, celebrates the value of life's "little gets." There are the stories she tells of raising two daughters as a divorced, single, working mom. Or of making the leap from network radio to TV at the age of forty-three, a career move that entailed uprooting her children when they were a junior and senior in high school. Or of finally coming to acknowledge -- and control -- her alcoholism.

Through it all, Muller has cultivated her talent for spotting life's absurdities. She compares herself, not inappropriately, to Erma Bombeck, for her drive to bear snappy, sometimes self-effacing witness to the ironic and perverse. In fact, it is the very power of such storytelling, the power to give content to chaos, as she says, to transform "angst into art or, at the very least, anecdote," that is Muller's true subject. The healing value of journalism is in shaping and sharing our stories, she says, and it's the key to sanity for Muller herself.

Among the many "little gets" recorded here, Muller also makes a few larger points about broadcast journalism. She began in radio, at WHWH in Princeton and KHOW in Denver, back in the mid-seventies when the pressure was on to hire women, and she retains an affection for this medium in which the choice of words still matters most. She moved on to CBS Radio Network, where she wrote and delivered early-morning commentaries and had the sticky task of calling and waking interview subjects at 5 a.m. Almost everyone was polite and willing to talk, she says, from the late Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson to Jesse Jackson to Desmond Tutu; the exception was none other than Dan Rather, who very courteously declined an interview, and then went on to blast her behind her back to the president of the radio news division for calling so early.

It was mostly during these radio days that Muller was lovingly but single-handedly raising two daughters. Every working parent will relate to her tales of "emergency" calls five minutes before deadline -- such as the one from her sobbing daughter that the hamster's eyeball was hanging out of the socket. "Well, shove it back in the socket and call me in ten minutes," she manages to say, struggling to sound at least slightly empathetic when her own eyeball is glued to the clock.

Much as she enjoyed radio, by 1988, covering the Bush presidential campaign, Muller had had it with being at the bottom of the broadcast food chain. She was almost bumped from the press plane in the middle of a blizzard in Montana because CBS was late in its payments (no campaign would ever try to eject a network television correspondent), and reduced to crawling on her hands and knees in a sequined gown through a crowded inaugural ballroom to reach her engineer (while the TV correspondents there could literally look down on her from their reserved camera perches).

So in 1990 Muller accepted an offer from ABC TV to be their West Coast, L.A.-based correspondent, and in the decade since she has covered everything from earthquakes to O.J. to Columbine. She makes some wry observations about the intense pressure to look good in television, and the difficulty of resisting it. At first, she's bemused by the likes of the Lint Lady and the rest of the small army of stylists who buzz in to buff up Barbara Walters between takes of their pre-taped "chat" on 20/20, but before long Muller is having a face-lift herself.

Unlike Lesley Stahl, whose recent memoir of her years at CBS, Reporting Live (cjr, January/February 1999), looked more on the sunny side, Muller doesn't shirk from condemning the commercial pressures she sees undermining serious journalism. To that old question of whether Edward R. Murrow's documentary "Harvest of Shame" would be aired today, Muller has a fresh answer: it would -- as a TV magazine piece by a consumer reporter hyping the question, "Do you know who's picking your lettuce? Are they clean?"

Muller is most piercing when she takes on the shameless and maudlin milking of tragedy that goes on in TV news today. She cites the question a network correspondent asked of Billy Graham after the John F. Kennedy, Jr. plane crash: "Reverend, can you please help us understand how God could do this to us?" To which Muller retorts: "I couldn't believe it. Did she expect God to say, in a deep rumbling voice, 'Pilot error'?"

Perhaps the most painful change for a hands-on storyteller like Muller is the increasing tendency of magazine shows to use the correspondent as merely a "face." She was busy writing a script one day when a colleague advised her that if she wanted to last on that program, where a correspondent could be working on six stories at once, she should airdrop in for interviews and stand-ups, voice the script, and let the producer do the writing. Witness the Peter Arnett debacle at CNN, Muller notes, in which Arnett blithely asserted he had contributed not a "single comma" to his story about America's alleged use of nerve gas in Southeast Asia.

Covering the high-school shootings in Littleton, Colorado, for World News Tonight brought together Muller's personal past (it was near where she had gotten her divorce and fought for custody of her children) with her professional present. And it brought home most clearly the ravages of media excess. There she was, bracing herself to call the parents of one of the murdered students, half hoping they would slam down the phone, feeling sick at the task, only to find, when the father answered, that Dateline and 20/20 already had crews at the house.

Much of what Muller relates here may be fairly familiar. Yet she brings an added depth to her subject when she concludes by musing on the limitations of the very act of storytelling she so extols. She's truly surprised to look back and see how her personal setbacks ultimately propelled her forward and she's at a loss to explain a world in which one day she's covering teenage weight loss, another day teenage lives lost. She realizes, finally, that she is more of a listener than a spinner of these tales, less able to control their course than to simply make a few choice edits now and then.

Pogrund fell under a heavy twenty-four-hour police watch, and his passport was taken away. Eventually he and his editor would be hauled into court and offered a plea if the Mail would print an apology -- which they refused. Both were put on trial and ruled guilty of publishing "false" information about South Africa's prisons.

As the officer in charge pressed Pogrund's fingerprints during booking, the journalist asked about the lengths the government had gone to to get them for publishing the series of prison stories at home and abroad. The saga had taken four years, including an eight-month trial that featured 105 state witnesses.

"You are the enemy," said the officer, Major Johan Coetzee, who would later become the commissioner of police. "We'll stop at nothing to get you." Pogrund was sentenced to six months imprisonment, suspended for three years. Gander, the Mail's editor in chief, was fined $33 with imprisonment of six months if the fine were not paid. The fine was paid; neither served jail time, though the Mail never recovered from the blunt government attack. Gander was fired and Pogrund, the star reporter whose prison series had indeed brought improvements for inmates in the republic, was eased into the chair as night editor. From this ringside seat at the Mail, Pogrund watched -- and, in the most insightful material in the book, shares -- the historic events of modern South Africa, starting with the 1976 Soweto uprising that set the republic irreversibly on the road to democracy under black majority rule.

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