BY JON KATZ
Katz is a contributing editor of CJR. His first novel, Sign Off, was published in February (see Short Takes, page 62).

Liz Trotta is an orphaned child of broadcast journalism -- accomplished, abused, betrayed, and finally abandoned. In her autobiography she bears powerful and eloquent witness to the tortured state of modern-day TV news, with a voice nobody in television really wants to listen to but everyone should hear. Viewers, network executives, reporters, producers, and aspiring journalists alike should be dragged kicking and screaming to Fighting For Air and forced to read its every angry and riveting page.

The first female to cover a war for television, Trotta has had enough important journalistic currents flowing through her reportorial life to keep one of those public television media panels going for months. It was her good fortune to be assigned to some of the biggest stories of recent years -- the Kennedy assassination, Vietnam, the Yom Kuppur War, Chappaquiddick, the McGovern campaign, the hostage crisis in Iran, the von Bulow trial, the invasion of Grenada. Her misfortune was to almost always be the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time.

She was a woman in a male-dominated business who refused to market herself as a glamourpuss; a conservative among predominatly liberal colleagues; a print-trained reporter floundering amidst the sometimes dubious values of local television. She was an old-style field reporter in a business increasingly corrupted by glitz and flash. She was an independent-minded television reporter in an era of increasingly powerful producers, and a blunt, hot-tempered pain in the ass in the medium that requires political and diplomatic skills. (At CBS News, where Trotta sometimes worked on the CBS Morning News, of which I was then the executive producer, she was perceived as a tough, reliable, and ferociously aggressive reporter and as a combative and abrasive colleague covally contemptuous of executives.) In another age, Trotta's journalistic credentials would have long ago earned her a respected niche. But she never had that kind of luck. Trotta is out of broadcasting now, a victim of the mindless bloodletting that has decimated the three network news divisions since their takeover by hotel and real-estate conglomerates, light-bulb and weapons manufacturers, and slick local television entrepreneurs.

When she returned from a trip back to Vietnam on the tenth anniversary of the end of the war, a CBS News vice-president took her to lunch to echo a columnist's praise of her reporting. "He's right. You were the only reporter there who told the truth," he told her.

"I was elated," Trotta writes of the lunch. "The weeks of summer melted away before I saw him again. And when I did, he fired me."

In many ways, Trotta is the foremother of her still-conflicted successors, many of them still struggling to reconcile professional images and personal lives with television's brutal and still male ethos -- Diane Sawyer, who vamps in Vanity Fair while still seeking journalistic credibility; Connie Chung, whose fertility problems are marketed by her employers to put her on magazine covers; Deborah Norville, unfairly cast as the wicked home-wrecker busting up the happy Today Show family; and, most recently, Meredith Vieira, forced to choose between a threatened fetus and one of the most glamorous jobs in TV news. Anyone left wondering how women are faring in broadcasting has only to ask this: Are there any wellknown men in TV journalism in these kinds of pickles?

Trotta went first, paid dearly, and is still paying. The challenges, indignities, and humiliations she suffered as a woman, in the newsroom and in the field, are too numerious to list. Typical was Trotta's opportunity in 1967 to do a piece for the NBC network -- no small matter to an ambitious reporter working for the local New York affiliate -- on the dress to be worn by Lynda Bird Johnson at her wedding.

When a network producer asked her to do the story, Trotta writes, she remembers blinking. "Then, recklessly, I blurted out, 'But I don't do weddings.'

"His eyes narrowed. 'I'm talking about a network special,' he replied, leaning on the word network.

"Oh, I don't mean to be rude,' I sailed on blithely, 'but I don't work on women's stories.'" When her displeased and incredulous boss asked her about her response the next morning, she pleaded: "Don, don't you understand? I want to cover a war -- not a wedding."

Eventually, she did.

She began as a newspaper reporter in the early 1960s, working for the Chicago Tribune and Newsday. WNBC in New York hired her in 1965 after the station's news director received a directive from an NBC executive to "find me a girl reporter." She went to Vietnam in 1968, worked for NBC News for thirteen years, then for CBS News until she was fired in one of the news division's ongoing rounds of budget cuts in 1985. She was shot at in Vietnam and pursued by mobs in Teheran; she faced danger innumerable other times so that one employer after another could air good pictures of big stories. She won three Emmys and two Overseas Press Club awards.

Her immigrant father, Trotta tells us, had urged her to be a lawyer or doctor, warning her against journalism, "because it will break your heart." Early in the book, Trotta quotes her mentor and friend, former New York Times reporter George Barrett: "Being a reporter means leaving airports with no one to say 'Good-bye,' and arriving at airports with no one to say 'Hello.'" In Trotta's work, she encountered the additional isolation of often being the only woman around, mistrusted and resented by many of her bosses, patronized by politicians, soldiers, and camera crews, under continuous pressure to compete with women willing and eager to be valued for their looks. When it got lonely, Trotta says, she would recall Barrett's words "as a bargain struck," a bargain she says she's never regretted.

Readers will have to decide for themselves whether that bargain was a good one. Fighting For Air is, in many respects, a bleak book, filled with disappointment, struggle, and betrayal. Too many of Trotta's friends and colleagues wind up dead -- at least three are suicides -- defeated, disappointed, or unemployed. Trotta started fighting when she landed her first television job and has yet to stop.

Trotta acknowledges that she clashed frequently with producers and that executives often had to intervene. But temperamental behavior wasn't fatal to everyone, she points out, citing the day Dan Rathers "stormed off the set when a tennis match cut into his broadcast, leaving the network black for six minutes. Tantrum for tantrum, I couldn't match that."

Still, Trotta's anger sometimes gives the book a vengeful, even vicious edge. She ridicules her tormentors' looks, wardrobes, and characters, calling one executive she disliked "ferretlike." In her view, few of those who disagree with her do so for any but the crassest and most venal of reasons. Self-criticism is grudging, self-awareness occasional.

Furious at the new generation of managers responsible for ousting her and hundreds of others from CBS and the other networks' news divisions, she skims over the forces that brought them to power and unraveled the proud traditions of network news.

The waste that often made netowrk news inefficient, the arrogance that sometimes made it blind, get scant attention. Instead, Trotta offers portraits of one duplicitous, craven, ovine executive after another. Journalistic bitching about bosses is a cherished news tradition, but after decades of rage she has lost some of her professional distance.

The soul of Trotta's journalistic life, however, and the heart of Fighting For Air, isn't her struggle to get even. It is her haunting sojourn in Vietnam. Just when Trotta's anger and score-settling begin to grow wearisome, her journey into that heart of darkness revives and enriches her book and makes much of her fury comprehensible, even appropriate. It is here that Trotta's journalistic self most vividly emerges, that her writing grows powerful, her story most wrenching. Her description of landing under fire in the midst of a battle she had rushed to join: "Into the grass, ducking the rotors, running at a crouch, making for the tree line. Head down, waiting for the liftoff and dreading the silence to follow. no more umbilical cord. Soldiers and newsmen, lone on the ground left to the noiseless forces of the jungle. Would we get out that night? In a few days? At all? And what was I supposed to look for? Oh yes, the tripwires connected to the booby traps that rip your legs off. But where were they? . . . Walk through the muck of the rice paddy, not on the bordering dikes, or one of Charlie's punji stakes will rip a hole through your sole. Did I take a malaria pill?"

She dealt as well with sniper and mortar fire, leeches, giant mosquitoes, suffocating heat, hostile army public affairs officers, the dread of being captured, and daunting obstacles that made getting her tape back to New York an arduous, two-to-three-day process.

As a female broadcast war correspondent, Trotta was in uncharted territory. "By instinct and then by hard-learned habit, I worked out how to minimize the sex issue. It was crucial to know when to become invisible, as on that day at a base camp up north when a marine general and I unexpectedly ran smack into 300 of his men -- out in the open taking showers. I pretended not to notice; it would only have made it an episode." As to her toilette -- not a word Trotta would ever use -- "I developed the refined technique of 'thinking dry,' keeping toilet trips into the bush at a minumum, even though the guys who stood guard -- to make sure Charlie wasn't around -- usually didn't mind."

As a conservative, Trotta was especially adrift, uncomfortable with what she perceived as the growing liberal bias of her colleagues against the war. She is disdainful of journalistic and civilian opponents of the Vietnam War, dismissing them as woolly-headed poseurs, suggesting that the military -- many of whom she befriended and admired -- could have won the war if not for interfering politicians, liberal journalists, and raunchy hippies.

Ten years and countless stories and ominous career signals later, she returned to cover the ghostly anniversary of America's defeat. "I always knew I would go back to Vietnam," writes Trotta at the opening of the book. "It was a compulsion, a resolve to return to the place where I had endured the worst -- and some of the best -- moments of my life."

But Trotta candidly acknowledges another reason for going back: she knew the wolves were circling at CBS News. On her return, she entered into the familiar network news ritual -- checking in with the anchorman, in this case Rather, to see where things stood. "You know, I realize we live in times when a young pretty face counts for a lot," she quotes an enigmatic Rather as saying. "But Dan Rather is only interested in first-rate news coverage." According to Trotta, Rather then warned her that she had "a problem" with at least one member of the new regime coming in to help the then-struggling CBS Evening News. Another vice-president seconded the warning, urging her to find a safe haven before the new management discovered she was past forty.

Once more, Trotta's reportorial instincts turned out to be sound. Shortly after her return to Vietnam, she was out of CBS, out of network news, and out of work. She had one day to clean out her office.

Throughout Fighting For Air, Trotta's voice is her own: the timeless, wise-cracking voice of the hard-bitten reporter. She is rarely overtly emotional about herself. Yet the book brings the reader close to tears more than once -- for Trotta, whose father was right after all, for the long line of lonely, defeated journalists whose memories she invokes, and for television news, which has descended into a dark age of shallow, wasteful cruelty.

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