SUMMER / SPRING 2011

REVIEWS

“NewsLady, by Carole Simpson” by Jill Nelson

284 pp.
AuthorHouse, 2010

Reading “NewsLady,” Carole Simpson’s memoir of her forty years as a radio and television reporter, most of them as a national correspondent at NBC and later as a correspondent and weekend anchor at ABC, is like being in the trenches with a fierce, tireless warrior queen. Even at moments when the battle appears won, or victory unlikely, or you’re just plain exhausted and ready to throw in the towel, there’s no choice but to stick with Simpson. This is a woman with ambition, smarts, ego, charisma and strategic cunning  to spare, one you want on your side and whose side it’s wisest to be on. During her career she scooped up nearly every “first” imaginable when it came to being a woman, and a woman of color, in radio and television. First woman to broadcast radio news in Chicago, her hometown; first African American woman to anchor local news there; the first African American woman to work as a national network television correspondent; first African American woman to anchor a national network newscast, and on and on and on. At the same time she was pushing down doors and making sure she was the first person through them, Simpson had time and energy to marry and sustain a marriage for soon to be 50 years, successfully raise a daughter and son, nurse her mother through terminal lung cancer, mentor young people, support organizations working to bring more African Americans and women into the media business, support training of female journalists from around the world, and generally speak up in a business where silence, except during newscasts and especially from women and colored folks, is usually golden. Did I mention that her hair, make-up, jewelry and clothes were always impeccable? The word “pioneer” hardly describes Simpson. Suffice it to say that if the Donner Party of 1846 had been the Simpson Party, they would have made it over the Sierra Nevada ahead of the snows, without casualties or cannibalism and doubtless looking fabulous.

“NewsLady” dispenses with Simpson’s family, upbringing, and personal history in the first few chapters. Her father, Lytle Simpson, worked for the U.S. Postal Service and ran a small repair business on the side with his brother. He wanted to an architect, but there was no money for college. Her mother, Doretha Wilbon, stayed home, took care of Carole and her older sister, and worked a a seamstress and clothing designer. Like most of their generation, their lives and aspirations were proscribed by racism and Jim Crow and the stories - of Doretha being taken from school and sent from Georgia to Chicago after a white man demanded the girl be given to him; of Lytle painting supermarket signs for pay - “Roast Beef, 15 cents a pound” - instead of designing buildings; of her mother telling a 9-year-old Carole how her father took her and her brothers to see the burnt hulk of a car and the four charred bodies inside so that she would know what a “nigger-hating, white lynch mob can get away with in Georgia.”
By age 13, Simpson was already using the No’s and racism that defined her parent’s, her own, and Black lives in general as motivation. “I decided that while I might not be as pretty as the white girls, someday I would be smarter and more important than they would ever be,” she writes. Simpson figured out early on the power of “No” to crush spirits and deny dreams, and refused to have any part in it. Instead, she transformed being told “No” into fuel for the fire of her ambitions, a canny move that motivated her to work harder, longer, smarter and helped her both get where she wanted to go and made it impossible for her to be complacent once she got there.

Simpson worked hard, excelled in school, and didn’t take no for an answer, including from her parents, who thought her idea of becoming a journalist unrealistic, to put it mildly. Chosen one of 25 students to take college prep classes in high school may have been Simpson’s first first, and she made the most of the opportunity. Apparently born a savvy observer, skills she was later to put to good use as a journalist, Simpson threw herself into academics, extracurricular activities, and an after school job at the public library. In junior year she joined the staff of the student newspaper. By senior year she’d decided to become a journalist.

Even though Simpson was the only one in her University of Michigan class of graduating journalism majors without a job and ended up at Tuskegee Institute, working in the public relations department, teaching a journalism course, and advising the student newspaper. Simpson spends two years in Alabama - where she has her first of many experiences with sexual harassment in the workplace - before she gets herself back to Chicago and a job as a reporter at radio station WCFL. Ten years later she’s been offered a job at NBC’s Washington, D.C. bureau and moved herself, her daughter, and her housekeeper there. Her husband, Jim Marshall, has left his job, found a new career, and moved too. While Simpson periodically gives him his props, this reader wanted to know more about Marshall, who clearly was able to put his own ego and ambitions on the side or back burner in deference to his wife. Marshall’s voice is almost wholly absent from “NewsLady,” and this is a pity, though his DNA is definitely welcome in the Good Black Men Who Love Strong Black Women Clone Bank.

As a journalist, Carole Simpson wanted to tell the news stories that went untold, stories that illuminated the lives of regular people struggling to cope with sometimes extraordinary, sometimes ordinary events. Like many Black journalists of her generation, it was the Watts riots in 1965 and growing movements for social change that forced segregated media outlets to hire Black reporters in order to effectively cover the news. In late 1965 Simpson left graduate school at the University of Iowa just shy of her degree and took a job at WCFL Radio in Chicago, where she was the first woman to broadcast the news. She was on, and off! Over the next forty years, Carole Simpson, with her creamy, authoritative voice and clipped enunciation, first on the radio and later as a familiar voice and face on television, was present at many of the crucial events of the last 30 years of the 20th century. She worked hard to get there. Simpson spent the night on the floor of his hotel in order to interview Martin Luther King, Jr. and break the story of his Chicago campaign. A very pregnant Simpson covered the trial of the Chicago 7 in 1969.

Throughout her career Simpson grappled with the demons of racism and sexism and, by the 1990s, ageism. The attacks ranged from the childish and ridiculous to the dangerous and reputation damaging, and came before there were legal protections and recourse for women in the workplace. Simpson was assigned what were then known as “women’s stories” as opposed to hard news; sent to non-existent news conferences and addresses; and had a typewriter thrown at her by a news director. She was victim of rumor mills that branded her lazy and incompetent; regularly sexually propositioned; had her interview tapes stolen; was denigrated and sabotaged to management by co-workers and vice versa. Covering a major trial for NBC affiliate WMAQ TV in Chicago, Simpson writes, “I had to stand and deliver my report, and while the artist’s sketches of the courtroom scenes were on the screen, the anchorman got down on his knees, reached under my dress and used both hands to fondle my behind. Did I shriek? Did I mess up? No, my delivery was smooth because I had learned not to be distracted by what was going on around me and to me. Thanks to those shenanigans from my early radio days, I was able to finish any live report, whether I was talking in the midst of gunshots, surrounded by riot police beating black protestors, or walking in a minefield in Angola. So, all of their efforts to mess me up made me a stronger broadcaster. Throughout my career nothing has been able to interrupt my concentration thanks to the men who conspired to make my work unbearable.” Over the years Simpson developed strategies for workplace success: she supplied cold drinks to unwilling technicians; worked harder than anyone else; and seldom complained. Yet when the honey and velvet glove weren’t effective, Simpson didn’t hesitate to call, or curse, someone out.

In the course of building the career that she wanted, a career that eventually took her to 48 states, dozens of countries, that had her sharing coverage of the release of Nelson Mandela from prison after 27 years with Ted Koppel in South Africa; covering vice president George HW Bush, and serving as ABC’s weekend anchor for 15 years, Carole Simpson was the first woman and the first Black woman to force open many of journalism’s doors. Never self-sacrificing or self-effacing, Simpson always put herself and her career first. Yet the time, circumstances, and her experiences demanded that the doors open for others as well. Simpson paid the price in time spent away from her children and family; in stress and anxiety attacks toward the end of her career; in a blow from a South African policeman’s rubber truncheon after a sermon by Archbishop Desmond Tutu at Johannesburg’s Anglican Cathedral. The critical but also frightening and lonely position of being a “first” and a “pioneer” were mitigated both by Simpson's personal success and the growing presence of women and Black people in newsrooms across the country.

Yet just as Simpson was present when the doors of journalism were forced open, she was also at ABC when it was bought by Disney in 1996, news became infotainment, and the beginning of the end not only of Simpson’s career but the careers of most serious journalists began in earnest. America Agenda, a series for World News Tonight with Peter Jennings that Simpson worked on for six years was cancelled. “Focus groups, Simpson writes, were “...asked which stories they liked and didn’t like, and what topics most interested them. It turns out they didn’t like stories that upset them, like those about the poor, the sick  and the homeless. The Congress and the environment were’t particularly interesting. They wanted to see more stories about health, business and feature stories about animals or interesting people. Celebrities? Probably.” Given today’s landscape, where in depth news and diverse analysis is almost completely absent from television and news consists of endless coverage of celebrities whose only talent is to have figured out how to become famous and get paid for being without talent, Simpson’s description of the demise of serious news at ABC almost sounds like the good old days.

“NewsLady” is a snappy, fun read, chockfull of great stories, anecdotes, and, because Simpson, probably for legal reasons, often doesn’t name her adversaries, an element of who’s who. At times this reader wished Simpson were less self-reverential and more revealing, that she’d slow down and tell us more about what she was thinking and feeling and how her family and relationships were impacted by her career driven focus. Simpson writes about the onset on anxiety attacks in the early 1990s and successfully finding treatment, but the assignment of these attacks to the beating in South Africa, a carjacking at the grocery store, and a terrible plane flight seems simplistic and glib. There is a price for failure and success, and would that Simpson had revealed more about the emotional and psychic toll. Surely four decades of working in a medium where she had to be and look perfect; working with and for white men many of whom made no secret of their lack of respect; daily covert and overt manifestations of racism, sexism and ageism; maintaining a husband, a household, two smart children, one of them dyslexic; and carrying the burden of both her own aspirations and as a representation of two groups, Black Americans and women, cost her. In most battles, Simpson was the Little Engine that Could - and Did. It would have been equally inspiring and enlightening to know more about what she felt on the hard way up and around all those mountains.

In the end, these are quibbles. “NewsLady” is a smart, funny, informative book, a memoir not only of Carole Simpson’s journey but of a time in American journalism when journalists believed that telling untold stories and sharing information would enrich and strengthen the fabric of the nation. That we now live in a world where more people know who Charlie Sheen is than can locate Afghanistan on a map; where Rutgers University pays a higher fee for a speech by Snooki from MTVs talentless crackerfest, Jersey Shore, than to Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison; and the superficial and proscribed narcissism of Facebook and Twitter have replaced actual human communication, makes Simpson’s book that much more timely and compelling.