10 April, 2000
Los Angeles Times

An ABC Reporter's Lively Views on News
By HOWARD ROSENBERG


ABC News reporter Judy Muller is not only one of the best, most honest journalists in the business, she also writes a funny book. A very, very funny book.

So much so that I whipped through it during a 3 1/2-hour flight, at times laughing so loud that other passengers probably wondered what was in my tomato juice. Just ice, honest.

The book is the Los Angeles-based Muller's new memoir, "Now This" (Putnam, $24), the title echoing what radio commentators often say before going to a commercial. Some newspaper columnists too.

Now this. . . .

Muller's book deserves this commercial. It's a grand hoot that reflects her acute eye for the absurd in news reporting and her personal life. She writes, for example, about once working for a radio station covering "Cut-Em-Up-Lou," a murderer whose victim's body parts began surfacing all over town:

"Our news director told us that we were to break into programming with a bulletin every time another body part turned up somewhere. Fortunately, there were not enough body parts to give the story legs, as it were, so we never got to the point where we developed a promo along the lines of, 'When a body's cut up, we cut in. . . .' "

The book is also a glimpse at Muller's pain. "But no more pain than the average schmo," she said the other day. "That's what the book says. Everybody has these challenges in life to get through. This is how I did it."

Not that the average schmo is a recovering alcoholic or survivor of a bitter custody battle for two daughters (Kristen and Kerry, now grown), minefields through which the divorced Muller has perilously maneuvered en route to the normalcy she has attained while entering her 50s.

Make that relative normalcy, for is this woman a maven for all seasons or what?

A former high school English teacher and TV and radio reporter for CBS News, Muller now contributes to ABC's "World News Tonight With Peter Jennings,""Nightline," "20/20" and "Good Morning America," writes an Internet column for ABCNews.com and is a regular commentator for National Public Radio's "Morning Edition."

All this while being an Everywoman who loves poking fun at herself, even on topics as serious as her boozing, which increasingly overlapped her career when she went from the regular hours of radio to less predictable TV. "If a story broke late at night," Muller writes about transferring, "you were expected to cover it, an idea that did not jibe at all well with my drinking schedule."

Now it's no problem. Muller has been sober for a decade.

Although this is no tell-all book, Muller does mention her run-in with CBS News anchorman Dan Rather when she was a relatively obscure CBS radio commentator on deadline and had her producer call Rather at 6 a.m. for his sleepy response to a court case that he and the network had just won.

She writes that Rather stormed into the newsroom three hours later, protested angrily to her boss and demanded "punishment" for her and her producer. Luckily, they were spared. "Of all the people we had ever awakened, from Nobel Prize winners to convicted felons," Muller adds, "no one ever expressed such outrage."

Although Rather didn't speak to her for a year afterward, Muller said recently, they're now friendly. And her oldest daughter, Kristen, works with Rather as an associate producer on "60 Minutes II," making mother and daughter news rivals, another irony that Muller treats amusingly in "Now This."

Muller's eclectic reporting pedigree at times places her in the frantic epicenter of the circus. The Jennings show sent her to Littleton, Colo., in the aftermath of the Columbine High School shootings, for example, and she relates in her book her tug of war there with her own network's "20/20" over an interview subject. She also covered both O.J. Simpson trials for"Nightline."

"While we like to think we took the 'high road,' reporting only on what transpired in court," she writes, that's "a fairly relative term when the low road is located somewhere between the Mariana Trench and the Continental Shelf."

* * * Speaking of low roads, what about today's mushroom cloud on the media's radar, Elian Gonzalez?

"I wrote a column about that when CBS said it was going to do a TV film about the case, which to me was appalling," said Muller. The overcooked reporting, she added, "points to the worst of what we do."

Which extends beyond the present spectacle that is drawing armies of media to Elian's doorstep. "In any of these stories, what bothers me is the quantity," Muller said. "I wish we could find a way to do pool coverage so that there weren't row upon row of satellite trucks in front of someone's home. It's just so over the top."

As was coverage of John F. Kennedy Jr.'s death, Muller writes, which began sanely enough before degenerating "into a weeklong wailing and gnashing of newsteeth, punctuated by the reporting of each successive sign [a floating suitcase, a medicine vial] confirming the obvious, i.e. that they were dead."

Most of the media didn't know when to stop, she adds. "But surely a good place would have been long before the exchange between a network correspondent and the Rev. Billy Graham, in which she asked him this existentially absurd question: 'Reverend, can you please help us understand how God could do this to us?'"

Muller couldn't believe it, writing: "Did she expect God to say, in a deep rumbling voice, 'PILOT ERROR'?"

Muller's most terrifying experience as a reporter came during the Los Angeles riots following the first Rodney King trial, when a man, breaking into a service station in the mid-Wilshire district, came after her with a baseball bat as she was stopped in her car for a traffic signal. "I remember wondering if I should run this red light," she recalled. "As if the laws of civilization counted."

Her most memorable quote, described in the book, came from King several years after he was savagely beaten by Los Angeles Police Department officers. "Do you sometimes wish it had never happened at all?" Muller asked King, who she says smiled broadly and replied, "Are you kidding? I wouldn't have all this!" Then, Muller writes, King motioned to his soon-to-be-released CD and winked.

I wondered what disgusted Muller most about what she does. "Having to interview people who have just gone through something terrible," she replied.

And when is she most invigorated? "This will sound real corny," she said, "but when I'm in the field talking to people telling their story. And when I was doing a story for 'Nightline' on stolen Indian artifacts while standing on top of a mesa in New Mexico, looking at pottery shards hundreds of years old, and just being hit by the awareness that this is one of the best jobs you could have."