Anybody who needs to know, or simply wants to know, what goes on inside the television news business will have a swell time finding out in the pages of these two dispatches from the front: one a breezy, irreverent memoir; the other a roller-coaster of a novel. Oddly, the late NBC newsperson Jessica Savitch shows up in both: mercilessly characterized in Eric Burns's retailing of his own peculiar career and, en passant, in the novel as a regrettable example of what can go wrong.

First, Burns. He starts as an anchorman in Parkersburg, West Virginia, "the 196th largest market in the United States," where he scrupulously studies -- and tries to counterfeit -- the mannerisms of the Big Leaguers in New York. But his onscreen imitation of Peter Jennings, he writes, comes across as "uncaring, snooty, like a butler announcing dinner to a group of guests for whom he has no particular regard." His version of "the robotically menacing Dan Rather" is even worse: imitating Rather's "loopy grin" causes him to look like "a mental patient who has just been told something he does not understand, but is afraid to let on lest the people who run the assylum delay his release." Tom Brokaw is "like the kids who danced in the background of American Bandstand" -- his technique wasn't worth copying.

Onward to a job in Minneapolis, and then to NBC (the Today show, NBC Nightly News), where his duties included a continuing segment called "Cross-Country," an unabashed knock-off of Charles Juralt's patented "On the Road" format. Kuralt -- "a master at the discovery . . . of the little truth" -- tended to "pander" (writes Burns) to the "classic urbanite fantasy" that small-town America was somehow holy, when all it really had was "a suffocating cultural aridity." And anyway, Burns would do it better (his boss asssured him), and in a few years "people will forget all about" the CBS star. Wrong.

Burns did not prosper at NBC, but he remained long enough to know Jessica Savitch, whose co-workers called her "bitch, usurper, ice queen, bimbo, loon, madwoman, amateur"; who screamed at office mates, threw large objects at the technical staff, and cried "too easily"; and whose heavy cocaine use regularly caused her to forfeit assignments. NBC News narrowly avoided a major scandal, says Burns, since Savitch was considered a top contender to become the first solo female anchor ever at a major network. So much for de mortuis nil nisi bonum.

Moving right along in his cautionary picaresque tale, Burns narrates how he sank in the quicksand of public television bureaucracy after proposing a documentary series about tobacco and alcohol called "Old Habits." After initial wild enthusiasm and lofty promises, "the network for the humor-impaired" (as a PBS exec called it) junked the project, leaving Burns "enraged and outraged." In a boozy monologue to his wife, he pronounces PBS a collection of "hypocrites and frauds" with "the manners of linebackers, the trustworthiness of streetwalkers, and the perceptiveness of judges for the Miss America pageant." No wonder the government won't give them enough money, he rants, and no wonder most people prefer commercial television.

Onward to a job at Entertainment Tonight in Hollywood, where the task of interviewing actress Molly Ringwald triggers in Burns an epiphanic moment comparable to St. Paul's on the road to Damascus. A "protocol of banality" is operative in such enterprises, he decides, in which the interviewer is less a journalist than a batting-practice pitcher, and in which an unspoken conspiracy exists between subject and interviewer to pretend that "yet another person of limited accomplishment" is worthy of our fascination. Hypocrisy in Hollywood, he concludes, is not only a "recognized school of philosophy" but a means of coping with one's own duplicity. Predictably, he is canned from Entertainment Tonight for "skewing elite."

After stints with a local station in Los Angeles and the Arts & Entertainment network, Burns comes to the belated conclusion that perhaps he's not cut out for television, that's he's no longer willing to make the bargain with the devil that requires him to tell other people's stories. A McLuhanoid revelation strikes him: that he has spent too much time learning how to be an appealing messenger and not enough on the nature of the message.

"Maybe I'll write a book," he decides. And he has -- an engaging, honest one.

Steve Friedman, executive producer of the Today show, has penned (with co-author Rosemary Ford) a different perspective on TV news. His heroine in Station Break is sexy, twenty-five-year-old hotshot reporter Mary Reed, who's hell-bent for success in the rumbustious world of local TV news, and who's the betting favorite (like Jessica Savitch) to become the first solo female anchor of a network news broadcast.

The story line defies synopsis, bopping about as it does from a robbery at a security depot to an explosion and killings at the San Francisco Presidio, to an exclusive interview that Mary Reed nabs with a mysterious right-wing terrorist who calls himself Commander Zero and who says things like: "There is a secret pact between the Jews and the blacks. . ." "We white Americans have to claim back to land [of] our forefathers. . . ." "Aren't you sick to your gut of some illegal alien stealing your job . . ., who's making money from selling thirty-dollar tickets to a [basketball] game . . . to see some drug-crazed, hormone-altered, overpaid monkey jump up and down between two hoops?"

It's part fantasy, compounded of Paddy Chayevsky's Network and James L. Brooks's Broadcast News. There's a cast of (what seems) hundreds, leaving the reader to sort them all out as they come and go in a kind of MTV jumble of quick-cut scenes. There's a high-powered Hollywood agent who assures Mary he's going to make her bigger than Barbara Walters. There's Mary's boyfriend who's a bit of a scold and no fun. "That's what it takes to be a reporter these days," he whines. "[Interview] . . . a terrorist killer . . . and then you're made. For God's sake, that's not journalism, it's simply pandering to the worst instincts of a sick society." (One wonders if he has met Eric burns.) Then there's an assortment of anchormen, reporters, producers, detectives, robbers, and cultists. Ted Koppel makes a cameo appearance when he interviews Mary Reed for Nightline; so does ABC New president Roone Arledge, who encounters her at a movie premierre and invites her to dinner.

It's all not meant to be taken terribly seriously (at least I don't think it is), and the prose is merely serviceable. Some of it reads less like a novel then a treatment for a novel; the omniscient, unnamed storyteller inflates the yarn with more summary and backstory than we need. But the offscreen frenzy of producing local TV news programs in moments of crisis is faithfully rendered. There's excitement and suspense in the narrative and a rollicking good scene at the end -- involving commander Zero, Mary Reed, and a shootout right in the anchor studio -- that brings it all to satisfying closure. Stripped to its essentials, it might make a nifty movie starring . . . well, how about Molly Ringwald?

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