Post by wenchie on Jul 12, 2009 16:07:05 GMT -5
Here is an article from Aug. 2004 to pass the time with....
Cinci Magazine by By Linda Vaccariello
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It's HEMMER Time
CNN's BILL HEMMER is best known for:
A. Perfect hair
B. That reassuringly boyish smile
C. Solid, insightful reporting from the battlefields of Florida
(Tallahassee, Election 2000) to the battlefields of Afghanistan
(Kandahar 2002)
D. All of the above, if he gets his way.
An airport terminal collapses in Paris; 18 tornados roar across
Nebraska; a car bomb blows up in Baghdad; and somewhere in America a
frozen yogurt bar arrives in an elementary school cafeteria with the
blessing of the Food and Drug Administration.
At 4 a.m. on a Monday, Bill Hemmer gets up and prepares to tell the
nation about these things. He might like to be in Paris or Nebraska or
Baghdad, talking to locals face-to-face, eating dust and rushing to get
the story on the air. And he might prefer not to exchange banter about
frozen yogurt. But Hemmer, the Elder High and Miami University grad who
went off to work for CNN, is now a news anchor. Specifically, he's the
coanchor of CNN's American Morning, the cable network's bid to capture
the viewing public between 7 and 10 a.m. And when you are a morning
anchor, you're, well, anchored. You sit at a desk and talk long distance
with the correspondent in Baghdad, then you say something like "and on a
lighter note..." and vamp for a few seconds about the frozen yogurt,
transitioning smoothly from death and destruction to banality. It's your
job.
If you are Bill Hemmer you will do all these things with skill,
intelligence, and enthusiasm. But you will also find time in your
morning to ask your producer about who's going to be covering the
Olympics.
"He's pushing extremely hard to go to Athens. He asks at least two times
a day," says Wil Surratt, the CNN producer who is the recipient of the
daily nudging from Hemmer. This summer Hemmer really wants to cover the
summer Olympics — and both presidential conventions, if possible. But
Surratt isn't ready to hand out those assignments yet. "I'm getting
frustrated saying 'I don't know,'" he says.
Despite the fact that Hemmer is a nine-year veteran of the cable news
network, despite the fact that his fine face with its Pepsodent smile
has hung on a 30-foot banner over Times Square, despite his success so
far, Hemmer doesn't call the shots about where he'll go and what he'll
do for CNN. And so what he's been doing in recent weeks is the adult
version of sitting at the front of the class with his hand in the air:
Oooo — me, me, call on me.
"It's impossible to beat the reporter out of him," Surratt says. "I've
tried." Hemmer still wants to be in the thick of things when there's big
news. Which is odd, because he has landed in what looks like a dream
job. He's living in New York, anchoring a morning news show, and
surviving at a network where others have failed. Surely, back when he
was announcing high school football scores at WCPO Channel 9, this is
what success looked like.
But the problem with becoming a success is that you must keep
succeeding. And all this sitting still isn't Hemmer's style.
THREE HOURS IS A LONG TIME to do the news, and a plate of barbeque can
get fairly gamy in that time. Someone gave Hemmer the barbeque earlier
in the day — a day that began when the studio's hired car picked him up
at his place in the West Village and delivered him to the American
Morning studio in the Time-Life Building in midtown at 5 a.m. He didn't
have time to eat breakfast, what with going through the morning papers
and prepping to go on the air at 7. Now it's 11-ish and he's back in his
office, picking at the barbeque between swabbing off makeup and checking
his BlackBerry. "It was better warm," he says, sheepishly.
But that's O.K., it was a big morning. One car bomb had exploded near
coalition headquarters in Baghdad, and there were reports coming in
about another; in Paris, no clue about why that roof collapsed at De
Gaulle; Nebraska was so covered with tornados they hadn't gotten a count
— was it 18 or 19? — and the governor had declared a state of emergency.
He and coanchor Soledad O'Brien each did eight interviews; there was
headline news, breaking news, and the lighter segments, like having to
taste those frozen yogurt bars. Then, after American Morning went off
the air, the two quickly taped promos for the next day and the crew set
up to record an interview with a man in Iraq who had once been Saddam's
translator.
It was like a ballet — cameras sliding into place around Hemmer, a tiny
makeup woman darting past to dab powder on his face, the floor director
intent, listening to the feed from Iraq. Woven into the choreography,
Hemmer and the crew traded disjointed snatches of conversation. "The
dismissal of Sunni intellectuals has created the insurgency..." Hemmer
said, picking up the thread of a previous discussion with a cameraman.
When the remote site was ready, Hemmer greeted the Iraqi interpreter and
directed him to look straight at the camera. Which the interpreter did,
though not too cheerfully. A glowering, impatient man, the interpreter
was most interested in plugging his new book. "I'm showing you the
cover," he said, moving it toward the camera lens. "Do you see it?"
"We'll take care of that on our end," Hemmer said, suppressing a smile.
Back in his office, jacket and tie off, shirt collar unbuttoned, Hemmer
looks much as he did as a fledgling reporter at WCPO in Cincinnati. The
eyeglasses he wears on the air are stowed away for now. There's a
persistent rumor that he wears them to look older, which, he insists, is
not true. "I need them to focus on the teleprompter," he says. He'll be
40 in three months, but his preternatural youthfulness recently prompted
the New York Observer to dub him CNN's "sexy man-boy."
But the man-boy gets around. His office is hung with an eye-level frieze
of photographs and framed mementos. There's a snapshot of him with Jimmy
Carter and Hank Aaron; another with the Bushes at a White House
Christmas party. There's a picture taken when he visited Berlin in 1986
as a college student; another of the Ganges when he was in India in
1992; another taken in Kandahar, where he stayed with the Marines in the
bombed-out mess that served as an airport.
In December 2001, the network pulled him away from Christmas with his
family and sent him and a producer to Afghanistan. The two got across
the border with the help of paid Afghan guards. They stayed for six
weeks, living in the same primitive conditions as the Marines. They
slept on the marble floor of the airport and got up before dawn to file
CNN stories. For Hemmer, it was daily drama in a raw, exhilarating
setting. "The walls and windows were gone and the planes had to land at
night, so we'd wake up in the morning covered with dust.
"This is a shower," he announces, holding up one of the baby wipes he
uses to take off makeup. "This is what servicemen use."
His time in Afghanistan gave him a chance to do what he likes to do in
the field: take viewers to the place where news is happening and make
the issues real and understandable. "I love the road," he gushes,
"getting to witness history firsthand, the constant adrenaline rush."
But in news terms, Kandahar was a long time ago, and Hemmer is palpably
eager to get out more. He admits that he's been pushing to cover the
Olympic games, and, he says, "I'll do the [Republican] convention for
sure."
Apparently there's a disconnect between what Hemmer thinks he'll be
doing this summer and what the CNN front office thinks he'll be doing.
When I talked with the publicist before my arrival, she seemed to
suggest that Hemmer would need to be in New York all summer. I start to
mention this scrap of information, then I reconsider — perhaps I
misunderstood — and skip on to another question. Hemmer grabs it out of
the air like a dropped hankie.
"What did she say?" he asks.
ASK THREE PEOPLE what world event Bill Hemmer would absolutely have to
cover, and you get three different answers.
"If Pete Rose got into the Hall of Fame," says Daryn Kagan, his former
coanchor with CNN in Atlanta.
"Anything in the Middle East," says Jim Zarchin, his former boss at
Channel 9.
"If the Pope dies," says his mother.
Bill Hemmer's predicament is this: He made his name as a reporter in the
field; it's what landed him on American Morning. But now that he's
there, he's having a hard time getting out to report, and it's awkward
to talk about wanting to do the latter without sounding like you disdain
the former. Walking from the American Morning studios at the Time-Life
Building to CNN's huge New York headquarters in the Time Warner Center
at Columbus Circle, Hemmer explains it with careful diplomacy.
"If all I wanted to do was work internationally, I could," he says. "I
could quit the desk and be an international correspondent. But they're
not seeing history every day. International correspondents work hard for
six weeks, then they come back. There are lulls. To be an anchor gives
you a voice. As Bryant Gumbel says, you have the first word on the
news."
Being an anchor also means he has a job that hundreds of his colleagues
would kill for. If he contented himself with being the kind of newsman
who shifts gracefully from interviewing a Nobel Laureate to reading a
news story about a zucchini shaped like Elvis, he would still have
reached a high perch. But Hemmer would like to have the prestige of Tom
Brokaw or Peter Jennings someday, and one school of thought is that
having the first word isn't enough — that someone like Hemmer needs more
time as a reporter to grow in stature.
If that's the case, it may be that Hemmer's ascension to American
Morning could short-circuit his dreams. Channel 9's Denny Janson, a
longtime friend, warned him about that. When there's a huge news event
and everyone turns to CNN, Janson told him, "You'll be anchored to the
desk, tossing to the next Bill Hemmer."
"Being in the situation, that's what makes your name," Hemmer explains.
By "situation" he means reporting in the field, covering something
important. That means doing 12-hour shifts, bringing viewers the news of
the day from the place where the news is being made, providing context
and clarification in times of national emergency or global attention. It
means, he says, "taking in as much information as you can so that it
comes to the surface when you need it." Reporting in the field helps you
become a stronger studio interviewer; it raises your profile as a
journalist; it gives you street cred so that you're regarded as more
than a news reader when you do get back home.
When Hemmer was moved from Atlanta to the anchor desk at American
Morning, reporting from the field was in the plan. "Originally the idea
was [to have] someone to support Paula [Zahn] who could also go out and
bring the story back," explains Wil Surratt. And Hemmer did some of that
at first, covering the D.C. sniper case. But when then-American Morning
anchor Paula Zahn got her own program, Hemmer was elevated to carry the
show. And Surratt says that even if being an anchor has limited Hemmer's
field work, he's still there because he's a reporter.
"To put a correspondent in the anchor role, well, he's not just a face,"
says Surratt. "He's a correspondent and that's what CNN is about." He
insists that Hemmer will be out in the field this summer. "We'll find a
role for him."
One person who won't be in the field this summer is Soledad O'Brien,
Hemmer's coanchor, who is pregnant with twins. Uncertainty about when
she'll go on maternity leave (she's due in August) seems to be one of
the variables in Hemmer's comings and goings. CNN is desperate to catch
up to Fox News in the ratings game, and O'Brien and Hemmer have been
moving the numbers in the right direction, so it's hard to imagine
management being willing to let both be AWOL at the same time.
O'Brien left NBC to join him in the summer of 2003. (They'd never met,
so the day her move was announced, Hemmer came to her office and took
her out for coffee.) What she knew in advance was that he was smart and
hardworking and driven by the same sort of passion as her former NBC
coanchor, David Bloom, who died covering the war in Iraq. And she'd
heard that he was "nice." Such a lame word. But the truth of it smacked
her in the face the first day she stepped on the set. "I found that very
impressive," she says. "If people on the camera crew like you, that says
a lot."
Hemmer has been true to his nice-guy reputation. O'Brien told a
newspaper reporter that when she announced she was pregnant, "he said,
The next seven months are all about you.'" Cue the collective sigh from
women everywhere.
Hemmer's a good-looking guy in a field where there are a lot of
similarly good-looking guys, and like them, he's working on a news
program where there's an unspoken formula for how to speak, smile, and
rest your chin in your hand (just use the fingertips, not the whole
palm, or you'll squish your face). But he's always looking for ways to
distinguish himself. He explains a new segment that he'll be doing.
"It's called 'Political Pop,'" he says. The idea was to have three
political analysts discussing three questions — "One Republican, one
Democrat and one person from the middle. But the producers decided to
have the third person be from MTV." He is clearly disappointed with this
turn of events; it doesn't promise quite the level of discourse he'd
hoped for. "We'll see how much air time he gets."
This is not how Edward R. Murrow made his name. But Murrow never lost
market share to personality-driven Fox News. Hemmer is CNN's homegrown
version of Paula Zahn or Matt Lauer — a news personality. It is not a
description that would have found favor a decade ago, when CNN still
boasted about making news the star. But today news isn't enough: CNN
needs stars. If not stars, at least personalities.
You can see the transformation of the network when Hemmer arrives at the
new Time Warner Center. CNN's New York base is spectacular, and
spectacularly corporate. It is a universe removed from the early,
scrappy days of CNN in Atlanta. On the high wall behind the reception
desk are projected images that come and go and represent all of the
Time-Warner entities. "It's like Minority Report," Hemmer says. In the
movie, signs and billboards were animated, calling out to passers-by,
identifying each one by name as though each person was long-awaited. As
he passes through the lobby, you almost expect to hear a voice say,
"Good afternoon, Mr. Hemmer."
HIS PARENTS, Georganne and Bill, still live on the west side, in the
Delhi house where "Billy" grew up. He's the middle kid in a family of
five; their pictures and their children's pictures cover Mr. and Mrs.
Hemmer's walls. The house has four floors and there's a television on
each tuned to CNN. Not surprisingly, Georganne doesn't feel like her son
is so very far away. If you ask the Hemmers where their son's passion to
see the world came from, they're at a loss.
"I don't know where he gets it," his dad sighs. "It's something that's
built in him." But they do understand it a bit. She's from West
Virginia; he's from Indiana. They moved to Cincinnati on their wedding
day. "Coming from small towns, Cincinnati to us was like New York is to
Billy," Georganne says.
They think that the travel bug bit him as a Miami University student,
when he spent a semester in 1986 studying European politics in
Luxembourg. He traveled all over Europe then, his mother recalls. "He
even went to Chernobyl, even though we told him not to," she says,
shaking her head.
It may have seemed like youthful rebellion once; now it fits what she
understands about her son's nature. "If there's something going on in
the world, he wants to be there," she says. In fact, she's the one
person who seems puzzled that he hasn't become a foreign correspondent.
"I'm surprised he has stayed in the States," she says.
Her husband, on the other hand, is still mulling over another sort of
career for his son. "I think Billy had a calling," he says. "He's so
good with people. We wanted him to be a priest. We've had a zillion
discussions with him about it. But I don't think it will happen."
It does seem unlikely. If the level of female interest in Hemmer were
gauged by the Internet alone, legions of women would block the doors to
any seminary that tried to take him. One fan, citing his resemblance to
Clark Kent, gushes, "I keep hoping he will rip off his shirt, take off
his glasses and turn into Superman."
THE TRIP TO LUXEMBOURG that lit a fire under Hemmer about politics,
culture, people, and travel also taught him about the global hunger for
news. When the Challenger space shuttle blew up, he had to wait days to
get the details. When he went to Moscow shortly after the Chernobyl
nuclear disaster, the bus driver pulled him aside, eager to learn the
truth. "What are they saying in the West about it?" he said.
Hemmer graduated from Miami University in 1987 with a degree in
communications and worked in WLWT Channel 5's sports department until
Dennis Janson and John Popovich lured him away to Channel 9. He hadn't
done much on-camera at the time, Janson recalls. "But we knew him in
professional and personal settings; he was passionate about sports, he
knew Cincinnati and he was capable." Then they got him on camera. "I
wanted to rip his throat out he was so good," Janson jokes.
In the spring of 1992, Hemmer told Channel 9 news director Jim Zarchin
he was going to quit. "He says, 'I've saved my money and I'm going to
take a trip around the world and all my friends think I'm nuts,' "
Zarchin recalls.
Zarchin did not think he was nuts. He cut a deal: The station would buy
Hemmer a camera so he could send back stories they could air, and when
he returned there would be a job waiting for him. Bill said yes, but not
if that job was doing sports. He wanted to do news. Zarchin agreed.
"What you expect and what you get are so different," says Zarchin, who
now is a cable producer in Knoxville, Tennessee. "You look at him and
you figure he's some frat rat who wants to talk about sports. But you're
with him at Willie's Sports Bar and he's talking about Soviet hegemony."
From September 1992 to June 1993 he traveled, backpacking for the first
half of his trip with Denny Young, a friend from his college days. He
explored the isolation of Ho Chi Minh City, saw the beginnings of
capitalism in Vietnam, slept on a concrete bed in Egypt, and woke one
morning in the Himalayas to find that a rat had gnawed holes in his
meager wardrobe of jeans and T-shirts. He volunteered with Mother
Theresa, helping to bathe and feed people living in astounding misery.
Young admits that he went along reluctantly, prodded by Hemmer's
all-consuming passion. "When you're traveling, days can become
monotonous," Young says. "But he got up every morning at 6:30 and was up
every night until 11, talking to people.
"We took a 40-hour train trip to Beijing, and at every stop Bill would
get off the train, run through the village, look around and run back. I
was sure he was going to miss the train and I'd be stuck with his
backpack and no way to reach him. And sure enough, at one stop he didn't
come back to his seat. It was two hours when he finally comes back. He
had jumped back on the train and met a couple guys who spoke broken
English and spent hours talking to them. 'You missed it!' he said."
His enthusiasm didn't falter even under the worst circumstances. After
Denny Young had returned to the States, Hemmer called him in the middle
of the night to report that he'd just been attacked by a pack of dogs in
an alley in Calcutta. What the heck were you doing in an alley in
Calcutta? Young asked blearily.
"I gotta see everything, man," Hemmer said.
The trip is legendary at Channel 9 (and at the Cincinnati Post, where he
filed stones written in longhand). His monthly mailings were like
Christmas presents to the staff. "Everybody looked forward to it," says
Zarchin. When he returned, the material was put together in a
documentary — Bill's Excellent Adventure — which won two regional Emmy
awards in 1993.
Bill's excellent adventure continued when an agent who saw the
documentary signed him and got him an audition with CNN, which offered
him a contract in 1995. He made steady progress, covering news stories
such as the bombing at the summer Olympics in Atlanta before getting his
first international assignment — reporting from a refugee camp in
Macedonia during the Kosovo conflict. Nevertheless, it was a domestic
story that made him a household After pulling an all-nighter covering
returns on Election Night 2000, Hemmer found himself grabbing a change
of clothes and flying to Florida for the re-count. Daryn Kagan, Hemmer's
Atlanta coanchor, is quick to point out that the Florida episode, which
seems like such a Cinderella story, was hardly that; ironically, it came
on the heels of a rather dreary assignment for Kagan and Hemmer.
"[Management] said 'We've got a great opportunity for you. We're going
to send you to seven states a week or two before the primary!'" Kagan
says. The assignment was the broadcasting version of sorting socks —
"really boring," she recalls. Fast forward to election night in Atlanta,
when a producer came up to Kagan and Hemmer in the newsroom and said
that Florida was still in dispute. Hemmer had done the Florida primary
story so he knew the territory. Did he want to go? It sounded like the
situation would be resolved before he got there and there might not even
be much of a story to report. When it materialized into something huge,
Kagan says, "he knocked it out of the park."
He stayed in Tallahassee for 37 days, often on the air in clips from 6
a.m. to 11 at night, talking about butterfly ballots and hanging chads.
It wasn't war, wasn't life-or-death, wasn't gritty. But it was an
American crisis and everyone watched. Suddenly Hemmer was the nation's
"chad lad," a recognizable face and name.
In 2001 he spent weeks at Ground Zero and, in 2002, weeks in
Afghanistan. Last year he coanchored American Morning from Kuwait City.
He was glad to be on location, but he was experiencing the war from a
place that was about as rugged as Phoenix. His colleagues note that
Hemmer would have liked to have been embedded with the military during
the war in Iraq. But anchors don't embed. The downside of Hemmer's
success is that that sort of assignment — dangerous and lengthy — is now
unlikely to come his way.
IT IS 6-ISH, and Hemmer is having an early supper at the Village Bar &
Grill. "It's my Mt. Adams Bar & Grill," he says, and the comparison is
apt: there's a vintage bar, lots of imported beer (he favors the Belgium
brew Stella Artois) and very little fuss made over celebrity of any
stripe.
Hemmer likes living in New York a lot, especially the high-voltage
atmosphere. But his life is fairly circumscribed by work. He has just
finished with his regular 5 p.m. conference call and in an hour a car
will arrive with his research packet for the next day. Sometimes he will
be asked to emcee an evening charity event, sometimes he goes out,
sometimes he even dates. "Sometimes more successfully than others," he
says, looking slightly uncomfortable. (He was in a serious relationship
for about a year, but that has ended.) He says that marriage and family
are "on the To-Do list" but it doesn't sound like they're very high up.
For a while the gossip columns tracked his comings and goings, but he
seems to have been supplanted by the studly but urbane Anderson Cooper
as the CNN guy to watch.
Hemmer says that the nature of the business has conspired to keep his
ego in check. Soon after the Florida recount and "the People magazine
thing" (the magazine included him in their "Top 50 Bachelors" list after
the election), he strolled into a Starbucks in Atlanta wearing jeans and
a ballcap. "Say," the woman behind the counter said, "you look like that
guy on CNN."
Hemmer briefly felt the tingle of his freshly minted celebrity.
"But I can tell you're not that guy," she continued. "He is so obnoxious
and he asks the dumbest questions."
Fortunately for Hemmer, this is not the universal opinion. Writing in
the New York Daily News at the time, David Bianculli singled out his
reports from Kuwait as especially professional; so did TelevisionWeek.
TV Guide's Stephen Battaglio thinks the praise was earned. "I thought he
was good during the war" Battaglio says. "He's quick on his feet and can
do news. And he has a personality that's easy to take."
But he's also taken his hits, such as last August when the on-line
alternative publication Bully Magazine named him Jackass of the Month.
Hemmer was part of a media roundtable about bias in the coverage of the
war in Iraq. When a British panelist noted that embedded reporters often
used the royal "we" as if the reporter was part of the war (i.e. "We
have taken heavy fire"), Hemmer said that CNN didn't use words like
"we."
"Word goes out periodically from senior staff to avoid it," he said. But
Bully cited CNN transcripts where a reporter was using "we" frequently,
and accused Hemmer of "patriotic string-pulling."
So perhaps it's no surprise that when the issue of media bias in Iraq
comes up on this evening in the Village Bar & Grill — did embedding
compromise objectivity during the war? — Hemmer answers with a quick but
studied response.
"It's difficult to suggest that being with a group of Marines would not
influence you," he says. "Does that make it unfair? No." Besides, he
says, the embed program was the only thing reporters had if they wanted
to cover the war in Iraq. "Short of being a cowboy."
Of course, names are made in broadcasting by cowboy-ing, whether it's
Dan Rather confronting Richard Nixon on national television or an
upstart network called CNN broadcasting the attack on Baghdad in 1991.
And news is still gathered that way, just not by morning news anchors.
AT THE BEGINNING of the summer, two events conspired to put Bill Hemmer
in the spotlight again. First, Ronald Reagan died. The former
president's funeral sprung Hemmer from the American Morning anchor desk
for the first time since he returned from Kuwait more than a year
before. He covered the funeral from beginning to end — New York to
California to D.C.; back to California, back to New York. The spell had
been broken; he was back in action again.
The second moment of glory, of sorts, came a couple of weeks later, when
he was included in one of those lists that TV Guide loves to do. This
one was called "Hot New Stars." Bill Hemmer was the only news person on
the list.
PHOTO (COLOR): BILL'S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE Hemmer's ambition has taken
him from the Great Wall of China (his 1993 Christmas card, below) to
Ground Zero (with New York Gov. George Pataki), the U.S. Marine base in
Kandahar, and the American Morning anchor desk (with Soledad O'Brien).
PHOTO (COLOR): Portrait of the anchor as a young man-boy at channel 9.
PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE)
~~~~~~~~
By Linda Vaccariello
_____
Cinci Magazine by By Linda Vaccariello
---------------------------------------
It's HEMMER Time
CNN's BILL HEMMER is best known for:
A. Perfect hair
B. That reassuringly boyish smile
C. Solid, insightful reporting from the battlefields of Florida
(Tallahassee, Election 2000) to the battlefields of Afghanistan
(Kandahar 2002)
D. All of the above, if he gets his way.
An airport terminal collapses in Paris; 18 tornados roar across
Nebraska; a car bomb blows up in Baghdad; and somewhere in America a
frozen yogurt bar arrives in an elementary school cafeteria with the
blessing of the Food and Drug Administration.
At 4 a.m. on a Monday, Bill Hemmer gets up and prepares to tell the
nation about these things. He might like to be in Paris or Nebraska or
Baghdad, talking to locals face-to-face, eating dust and rushing to get
the story on the air. And he might prefer not to exchange banter about
frozen yogurt. But Hemmer, the Elder High and Miami University grad who
went off to work for CNN, is now a news anchor. Specifically, he's the
coanchor of CNN's American Morning, the cable network's bid to capture
the viewing public between 7 and 10 a.m. And when you are a morning
anchor, you're, well, anchored. You sit at a desk and talk long distance
with the correspondent in Baghdad, then you say something like "and on a
lighter note..." and vamp for a few seconds about the frozen yogurt,
transitioning smoothly from death and destruction to banality. It's your
job.
If you are Bill Hemmer you will do all these things with skill,
intelligence, and enthusiasm. But you will also find time in your
morning to ask your producer about who's going to be covering the
Olympics.
"He's pushing extremely hard to go to Athens. He asks at least two times
a day," says Wil Surratt, the CNN producer who is the recipient of the
daily nudging from Hemmer. This summer Hemmer really wants to cover the
summer Olympics — and both presidential conventions, if possible. But
Surratt isn't ready to hand out those assignments yet. "I'm getting
frustrated saying 'I don't know,'" he says.
Despite the fact that Hemmer is a nine-year veteran of the cable news
network, despite the fact that his fine face with its Pepsodent smile
has hung on a 30-foot banner over Times Square, despite his success so
far, Hemmer doesn't call the shots about where he'll go and what he'll
do for CNN. And so what he's been doing in recent weeks is the adult
version of sitting at the front of the class with his hand in the air:
Oooo — me, me, call on me.
"It's impossible to beat the reporter out of him," Surratt says. "I've
tried." Hemmer still wants to be in the thick of things when there's big
news. Which is odd, because he has landed in what looks like a dream
job. He's living in New York, anchoring a morning news show, and
surviving at a network where others have failed. Surely, back when he
was announcing high school football scores at WCPO Channel 9, this is
what success looked like.
But the problem with becoming a success is that you must keep
succeeding. And all this sitting still isn't Hemmer's style.
THREE HOURS IS A LONG TIME to do the news, and a plate of barbeque can
get fairly gamy in that time. Someone gave Hemmer the barbeque earlier
in the day — a day that began when the studio's hired car picked him up
at his place in the West Village and delivered him to the American
Morning studio in the Time-Life Building in midtown at 5 a.m. He didn't
have time to eat breakfast, what with going through the morning papers
and prepping to go on the air at 7. Now it's 11-ish and he's back in his
office, picking at the barbeque between swabbing off makeup and checking
his BlackBerry. "It was better warm," he says, sheepishly.
But that's O.K., it was a big morning. One car bomb had exploded near
coalition headquarters in Baghdad, and there were reports coming in
about another; in Paris, no clue about why that roof collapsed at De
Gaulle; Nebraska was so covered with tornados they hadn't gotten a count
— was it 18 or 19? — and the governor had declared a state of emergency.
He and coanchor Soledad O'Brien each did eight interviews; there was
headline news, breaking news, and the lighter segments, like having to
taste those frozen yogurt bars. Then, after American Morning went off
the air, the two quickly taped promos for the next day and the crew set
up to record an interview with a man in Iraq who had once been Saddam's
translator.
It was like a ballet — cameras sliding into place around Hemmer, a tiny
makeup woman darting past to dab powder on his face, the floor director
intent, listening to the feed from Iraq. Woven into the choreography,
Hemmer and the crew traded disjointed snatches of conversation. "The
dismissal of Sunni intellectuals has created the insurgency..." Hemmer
said, picking up the thread of a previous discussion with a cameraman.
When the remote site was ready, Hemmer greeted the Iraqi interpreter and
directed him to look straight at the camera. Which the interpreter did,
though not too cheerfully. A glowering, impatient man, the interpreter
was most interested in plugging his new book. "I'm showing you the
cover," he said, moving it toward the camera lens. "Do you see it?"
"We'll take care of that on our end," Hemmer said, suppressing a smile.
Back in his office, jacket and tie off, shirt collar unbuttoned, Hemmer
looks much as he did as a fledgling reporter at WCPO in Cincinnati. The
eyeglasses he wears on the air are stowed away for now. There's a
persistent rumor that he wears them to look older, which, he insists, is
not true. "I need them to focus on the teleprompter," he says. He'll be
40 in three months, but his preternatural youthfulness recently prompted
the New York Observer to dub him CNN's "sexy man-boy."
But the man-boy gets around. His office is hung with an eye-level frieze
of photographs and framed mementos. There's a snapshot of him with Jimmy
Carter and Hank Aaron; another with the Bushes at a White House
Christmas party. There's a picture taken when he visited Berlin in 1986
as a college student; another of the Ganges when he was in India in
1992; another taken in Kandahar, where he stayed with the Marines in the
bombed-out mess that served as an airport.
In December 2001, the network pulled him away from Christmas with his
family and sent him and a producer to Afghanistan. The two got across
the border with the help of paid Afghan guards. They stayed for six
weeks, living in the same primitive conditions as the Marines. They
slept on the marble floor of the airport and got up before dawn to file
CNN stories. For Hemmer, it was daily drama in a raw, exhilarating
setting. "The walls and windows were gone and the planes had to land at
night, so we'd wake up in the morning covered with dust.
"This is a shower," he announces, holding up one of the baby wipes he
uses to take off makeup. "This is what servicemen use."
His time in Afghanistan gave him a chance to do what he likes to do in
the field: take viewers to the place where news is happening and make
the issues real and understandable. "I love the road," he gushes,
"getting to witness history firsthand, the constant adrenaline rush."
But in news terms, Kandahar was a long time ago, and Hemmer is palpably
eager to get out more. He admits that he's been pushing to cover the
Olympic games, and, he says, "I'll do the [Republican] convention for
sure."
Apparently there's a disconnect between what Hemmer thinks he'll be
doing this summer and what the CNN front office thinks he'll be doing.
When I talked with the publicist before my arrival, she seemed to
suggest that Hemmer would need to be in New York all summer. I start to
mention this scrap of information, then I reconsider — perhaps I
misunderstood — and skip on to another question. Hemmer grabs it out of
the air like a dropped hankie.
"What did she say?" he asks.
ASK THREE PEOPLE what world event Bill Hemmer would absolutely have to
cover, and you get three different answers.
"If Pete Rose got into the Hall of Fame," says Daryn Kagan, his former
coanchor with CNN in Atlanta.
"Anything in the Middle East," says Jim Zarchin, his former boss at
Channel 9.
"If the Pope dies," says his mother.
Bill Hemmer's predicament is this: He made his name as a reporter in the
field; it's what landed him on American Morning. But now that he's
there, he's having a hard time getting out to report, and it's awkward
to talk about wanting to do the latter without sounding like you disdain
the former. Walking from the American Morning studios at the Time-Life
Building to CNN's huge New York headquarters in the Time Warner Center
at Columbus Circle, Hemmer explains it with careful diplomacy.
"If all I wanted to do was work internationally, I could," he says. "I
could quit the desk and be an international correspondent. But they're
not seeing history every day. International correspondents work hard for
six weeks, then they come back. There are lulls. To be an anchor gives
you a voice. As Bryant Gumbel says, you have the first word on the
news."
Being an anchor also means he has a job that hundreds of his colleagues
would kill for. If he contented himself with being the kind of newsman
who shifts gracefully from interviewing a Nobel Laureate to reading a
news story about a zucchini shaped like Elvis, he would still have
reached a high perch. But Hemmer would like to have the prestige of Tom
Brokaw or Peter Jennings someday, and one school of thought is that
having the first word isn't enough — that someone like Hemmer needs more
time as a reporter to grow in stature.
If that's the case, it may be that Hemmer's ascension to American
Morning could short-circuit his dreams. Channel 9's Denny Janson, a
longtime friend, warned him about that. When there's a huge news event
and everyone turns to CNN, Janson told him, "You'll be anchored to the
desk, tossing to the next Bill Hemmer."
"Being in the situation, that's what makes your name," Hemmer explains.
By "situation" he means reporting in the field, covering something
important. That means doing 12-hour shifts, bringing viewers the news of
the day from the place where the news is being made, providing context
and clarification in times of national emergency or global attention. It
means, he says, "taking in as much information as you can so that it
comes to the surface when you need it." Reporting in the field helps you
become a stronger studio interviewer; it raises your profile as a
journalist; it gives you street cred so that you're regarded as more
than a news reader when you do get back home.
When Hemmer was moved from Atlanta to the anchor desk at American
Morning, reporting from the field was in the plan. "Originally the idea
was [to have] someone to support Paula [Zahn] who could also go out and
bring the story back," explains Wil Surratt. And Hemmer did some of that
at first, covering the D.C. sniper case. But when then-American Morning
anchor Paula Zahn got her own program, Hemmer was elevated to carry the
show. And Surratt says that even if being an anchor has limited Hemmer's
field work, he's still there because he's a reporter.
"To put a correspondent in the anchor role, well, he's not just a face,"
says Surratt. "He's a correspondent and that's what CNN is about." He
insists that Hemmer will be out in the field this summer. "We'll find a
role for him."
One person who won't be in the field this summer is Soledad O'Brien,
Hemmer's coanchor, who is pregnant with twins. Uncertainty about when
she'll go on maternity leave (she's due in August) seems to be one of
the variables in Hemmer's comings and goings. CNN is desperate to catch
up to Fox News in the ratings game, and O'Brien and Hemmer have been
moving the numbers in the right direction, so it's hard to imagine
management being willing to let both be AWOL at the same time.
O'Brien left NBC to join him in the summer of 2003. (They'd never met,
so the day her move was announced, Hemmer came to her office and took
her out for coffee.) What she knew in advance was that he was smart and
hardworking and driven by the same sort of passion as her former NBC
coanchor, David Bloom, who died covering the war in Iraq. And she'd
heard that he was "nice." Such a lame word. But the truth of it smacked
her in the face the first day she stepped on the set. "I found that very
impressive," she says. "If people on the camera crew like you, that says
a lot."
Hemmer has been true to his nice-guy reputation. O'Brien told a
newspaper reporter that when she announced she was pregnant, "he said,
The next seven months are all about you.'" Cue the collective sigh from
women everywhere.
Hemmer's a good-looking guy in a field where there are a lot of
similarly good-looking guys, and like them, he's working on a news
program where there's an unspoken formula for how to speak, smile, and
rest your chin in your hand (just use the fingertips, not the whole
palm, or you'll squish your face). But he's always looking for ways to
distinguish himself. He explains a new segment that he'll be doing.
"It's called 'Political Pop,'" he says. The idea was to have three
political analysts discussing three questions — "One Republican, one
Democrat and one person from the middle. But the producers decided to
have the third person be from MTV." He is clearly disappointed with this
turn of events; it doesn't promise quite the level of discourse he'd
hoped for. "We'll see how much air time he gets."
This is not how Edward R. Murrow made his name. But Murrow never lost
market share to personality-driven Fox News. Hemmer is CNN's homegrown
version of Paula Zahn or Matt Lauer — a news personality. It is not a
description that would have found favor a decade ago, when CNN still
boasted about making news the star. But today news isn't enough: CNN
needs stars. If not stars, at least personalities.
You can see the transformation of the network when Hemmer arrives at the
new Time Warner Center. CNN's New York base is spectacular, and
spectacularly corporate. It is a universe removed from the early,
scrappy days of CNN in Atlanta. On the high wall behind the reception
desk are projected images that come and go and represent all of the
Time-Warner entities. "It's like Minority Report," Hemmer says. In the
movie, signs and billboards were animated, calling out to passers-by,
identifying each one by name as though each person was long-awaited. As
he passes through the lobby, you almost expect to hear a voice say,
"Good afternoon, Mr. Hemmer."
HIS PARENTS, Georganne and Bill, still live on the west side, in the
Delhi house where "Billy" grew up. He's the middle kid in a family of
five; their pictures and their children's pictures cover Mr. and Mrs.
Hemmer's walls. The house has four floors and there's a television on
each tuned to CNN. Not surprisingly, Georganne doesn't feel like her son
is so very far away. If you ask the Hemmers where their son's passion to
see the world came from, they're at a loss.
"I don't know where he gets it," his dad sighs. "It's something that's
built in him." But they do understand it a bit. She's from West
Virginia; he's from Indiana. They moved to Cincinnati on their wedding
day. "Coming from small towns, Cincinnati to us was like New York is to
Billy," Georganne says.
They think that the travel bug bit him as a Miami University student,
when he spent a semester in 1986 studying European politics in
Luxembourg. He traveled all over Europe then, his mother recalls. "He
even went to Chernobyl, even though we told him not to," she says,
shaking her head.
It may have seemed like youthful rebellion once; now it fits what she
understands about her son's nature. "If there's something going on in
the world, he wants to be there," she says. In fact, she's the one
person who seems puzzled that he hasn't become a foreign correspondent.
"I'm surprised he has stayed in the States," she says.
Her husband, on the other hand, is still mulling over another sort of
career for his son. "I think Billy had a calling," he says. "He's so
good with people. We wanted him to be a priest. We've had a zillion
discussions with him about it. But I don't think it will happen."
It does seem unlikely. If the level of female interest in Hemmer were
gauged by the Internet alone, legions of women would block the doors to
any seminary that tried to take him. One fan, citing his resemblance to
Clark Kent, gushes, "I keep hoping he will rip off his shirt, take off
his glasses and turn into Superman."
THE TRIP TO LUXEMBOURG that lit a fire under Hemmer about politics,
culture, people, and travel also taught him about the global hunger for
news. When the Challenger space shuttle blew up, he had to wait days to
get the details. When he went to Moscow shortly after the Chernobyl
nuclear disaster, the bus driver pulled him aside, eager to learn the
truth. "What are they saying in the West about it?" he said.
Hemmer graduated from Miami University in 1987 with a degree in
communications and worked in WLWT Channel 5's sports department until
Dennis Janson and John Popovich lured him away to Channel 9. He hadn't
done much on-camera at the time, Janson recalls. "But we knew him in
professional and personal settings; he was passionate about sports, he
knew Cincinnati and he was capable." Then they got him on camera. "I
wanted to rip his throat out he was so good," Janson jokes.
In the spring of 1992, Hemmer told Channel 9 news director Jim Zarchin
he was going to quit. "He says, 'I've saved my money and I'm going to
take a trip around the world and all my friends think I'm nuts,' "
Zarchin recalls.
Zarchin did not think he was nuts. He cut a deal: The station would buy
Hemmer a camera so he could send back stories they could air, and when
he returned there would be a job waiting for him. Bill said yes, but not
if that job was doing sports. He wanted to do news. Zarchin agreed.
"What you expect and what you get are so different," says Zarchin, who
now is a cable producer in Knoxville, Tennessee. "You look at him and
you figure he's some frat rat who wants to talk about sports. But you're
with him at Willie's Sports Bar and he's talking about Soviet hegemony."
From September 1992 to June 1993 he traveled, backpacking for the first
half of his trip with Denny Young, a friend from his college days. He
explored the isolation of Ho Chi Minh City, saw the beginnings of
capitalism in Vietnam, slept on a concrete bed in Egypt, and woke one
morning in the Himalayas to find that a rat had gnawed holes in his
meager wardrobe of jeans and T-shirts. He volunteered with Mother
Theresa, helping to bathe and feed people living in astounding misery.
Young admits that he went along reluctantly, prodded by Hemmer's
all-consuming passion. "When you're traveling, days can become
monotonous," Young says. "But he got up every morning at 6:30 and was up
every night until 11, talking to people.
"We took a 40-hour train trip to Beijing, and at every stop Bill would
get off the train, run through the village, look around and run back. I
was sure he was going to miss the train and I'd be stuck with his
backpack and no way to reach him. And sure enough, at one stop he didn't
come back to his seat. It was two hours when he finally comes back. He
had jumped back on the train and met a couple guys who spoke broken
English and spent hours talking to them. 'You missed it!' he said."
His enthusiasm didn't falter even under the worst circumstances. After
Denny Young had returned to the States, Hemmer called him in the middle
of the night to report that he'd just been attacked by a pack of dogs in
an alley in Calcutta. What the heck were you doing in an alley in
Calcutta? Young asked blearily.
"I gotta see everything, man," Hemmer said.
The trip is legendary at Channel 9 (and at the Cincinnati Post, where he
filed stones written in longhand). His monthly mailings were like
Christmas presents to the staff. "Everybody looked forward to it," says
Zarchin. When he returned, the material was put together in a
documentary — Bill's Excellent Adventure — which won two regional Emmy
awards in 1993.
Bill's excellent adventure continued when an agent who saw the
documentary signed him and got him an audition with CNN, which offered
him a contract in 1995. He made steady progress, covering news stories
such as the bombing at the summer Olympics in Atlanta before getting his
first international assignment — reporting from a refugee camp in
Macedonia during the Kosovo conflict. Nevertheless, it was a domestic
story that made him a household After pulling an all-nighter covering
returns on Election Night 2000, Hemmer found himself grabbing a change
of clothes and flying to Florida for the re-count. Daryn Kagan, Hemmer's
Atlanta coanchor, is quick to point out that the Florida episode, which
seems like such a Cinderella story, was hardly that; ironically, it came
on the heels of a rather dreary assignment for Kagan and Hemmer.
"[Management] said 'We've got a great opportunity for you. We're going
to send you to seven states a week or two before the primary!'" Kagan
says. The assignment was the broadcasting version of sorting socks —
"really boring," she recalls. Fast forward to election night in Atlanta,
when a producer came up to Kagan and Hemmer in the newsroom and said
that Florida was still in dispute. Hemmer had done the Florida primary
story so he knew the territory. Did he want to go? It sounded like the
situation would be resolved before he got there and there might not even
be much of a story to report. When it materialized into something huge,
Kagan says, "he knocked it out of the park."
He stayed in Tallahassee for 37 days, often on the air in clips from 6
a.m. to 11 at night, talking about butterfly ballots and hanging chads.
It wasn't war, wasn't life-or-death, wasn't gritty. But it was an
American crisis and everyone watched. Suddenly Hemmer was the nation's
"chad lad," a recognizable face and name.
In 2001 he spent weeks at Ground Zero and, in 2002, weeks in
Afghanistan. Last year he coanchored American Morning from Kuwait City.
He was glad to be on location, but he was experiencing the war from a
place that was about as rugged as Phoenix. His colleagues note that
Hemmer would have liked to have been embedded with the military during
the war in Iraq. But anchors don't embed. The downside of Hemmer's
success is that that sort of assignment — dangerous and lengthy — is now
unlikely to come his way.
IT IS 6-ISH, and Hemmer is having an early supper at the Village Bar &
Grill. "It's my Mt. Adams Bar & Grill," he says, and the comparison is
apt: there's a vintage bar, lots of imported beer (he favors the Belgium
brew Stella Artois) and very little fuss made over celebrity of any
stripe.
Hemmer likes living in New York a lot, especially the high-voltage
atmosphere. But his life is fairly circumscribed by work. He has just
finished with his regular 5 p.m. conference call and in an hour a car
will arrive with his research packet for the next day. Sometimes he will
be asked to emcee an evening charity event, sometimes he goes out,
sometimes he even dates. "Sometimes more successfully than others," he
says, looking slightly uncomfortable. (He was in a serious relationship
for about a year, but that has ended.) He says that marriage and family
are "on the To-Do list" but it doesn't sound like they're very high up.
For a while the gossip columns tracked his comings and goings, but he
seems to have been supplanted by the studly but urbane Anderson Cooper
as the CNN guy to watch.
Hemmer says that the nature of the business has conspired to keep his
ego in check. Soon after the Florida recount and "the People magazine
thing" (the magazine included him in their "Top 50 Bachelors" list after
the election), he strolled into a Starbucks in Atlanta wearing jeans and
a ballcap. "Say," the woman behind the counter said, "you look like that
guy on CNN."
Hemmer briefly felt the tingle of his freshly minted celebrity.
"But I can tell you're not that guy," she continued. "He is so obnoxious
and he asks the dumbest questions."
Fortunately for Hemmer, this is not the universal opinion. Writing in
the New York Daily News at the time, David Bianculli singled out his
reports from Kuwait as especially professional; so did TelevisionWeek.
TV Guide's Stephen Battaglio thinks the praise was earned. "I thought he
was good during the war" Battaglio says. "He's quick on his feet and can
do news. And he has a personality that's easy to take."
But he's also taken his hits, such as last August when the on-line
alternative publication Bully Magazine named him Jackass of the Month.
Hemmer was part of a media roundtable about bias in the coverage of the
war in Iraq. When a British panelist noted that embedded reporters often
used the royal "we" as if the reporter was part of the war (i.e. "We
have taken heavy fire"), Hemmer said that CNN didn't use words like
"we."
"Word goes out periodically from senior staff to avoid it," he said. But
Bully cited CNN transcripts where a reporter was using "we" frequently,
and accused Hemmer of "patriotic string-pulling."
So perhaps it's no surprise that when the issue of media bias in Iraq
comes up on this evening in the Village Bar & Grill — did embedding
compromise objectivity during the war? — Hemmer answers with a quick but
studied response.
"It's difficult to suggest that being with a group of Marines would not
influence you," he says. "Does that make it unfair? No." Besides, he
says, the embed program was the only thing reporters had if they wanted
to cover the war in Iraq. "Short of being a cowboy."
Of course, names are made in broadcasting by cowboy-ing, whether it's
Dan Rather confronting Richard Nixon on national television or an
upstart network called CNN broadcasting the attack on Baghdad in 1991.
And news is still gathered that way, just not by morning news anchors.
AT THE BEGINNING of the summer, two events conspired to put Bill Hemmer
in the spotlight again. First, Ronald Reagan died. The former
president's funeral sprung Hemmer from the American Morning anchor desk
for the first time since he returned from Kuwait more than a year
before. He covered the funeral from beginning to end — New York to
California to D.C.; back to California, back to New York. The spell had
been broken; he was back in action again.
The second moment of glory, of sorts, came a couple of weeks later, when
he was included in one of those lists that TV Guide loves to do. This
one was called "Hot New Stars." Bill Hemmer was the only news person on
the list.
PHOTO (COLOR): BILL'S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE Hemmer's ambition has taken
him from the Great Wall of China (his 1993 Christmas card, below) to
Ground Zero (with New York Gov. George Pataki), the U.S. Marine base in
Kandahar, and the American Morning anchor desk (with Soledad O'Brien).
PHOTO (COLOR): Portrait of the anchor as a young man-boy at channel 9.
PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE)
~~~~~~~~
By Linda Vaccariello
_____
