Journalism may be one of the last professions in the world that still has an air of romanticism. This feeling is sometimes inspired by films like those from AU's recent Reel Journalism Film Festival, which highlighted the dedication of journalists like Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward in uncovering the Watergate scandal, and of Sydney Schanberg in the midst of the Khmer Rouge in war-stricken Cambodia.
These films and the people they are based on have continued to inspire new generations of budding journalists to have a live-and-breathe journalism mentality, and a life consumed with curiosity and adventure, risking life and death and having just a little luck.
Journalist Susan Zirinsky, a '74 AU alum, represents one of these journalists, whose lives are emulated on the big screen. She is a dedicated journalist who still believes honest and objective journalism exists. Most importantly, she still believes that "the ethics, values, and standards in journalism are still in the right place with the right people," despite the criticisms of today's media.
While Zirinsky was producing segments in China in 1989, she helped smuggle out a dissident leader who was harassed by the Chinese government for instigating the student revolution in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. The risk she took could have resulted in her, and her co-workers, being terminated, she said.
She never told CBS in New York that she was hiding the man for several days. However, as the days progressed, she became nervous that the secret police was on to them and scared they could have been thrown in jail.
Zirinsky called her friend, a CIA agent at the embassy and in cryptic language she kept saying that she had to deliver a package. After her communiqu?, the CIA agent came up with a route that delivered the dissident to the American embassy, where he resided for almost six months until he was given asylum in the United States.
While Zirinsky didn't see the Tiananmen Square massacre, she was there for the first day of the student demonstration and saw the change in atmosphere as the government began to feel threatened by students who were advocating for democracy.
Although she was thrown out of the country, the massacre brought her back for several more months where she continued to report on the corruption and abuses of the Chinese government.
"We had to stand up in a press conference, trying to find out what happened to these kids," said Zirinsky, who adopted a Chinese daughter in reaction to what she saw during her experience in China. "The Chinese to this day deny that there have been major deaths at the hands of Chinese soldiers. The world press stood there, question after question after question, and it was totally repressed."
While this experience is certainly one of a lifetime, it is only a single event in Zirinsky's progression from a simple intern at AU to a media player at CBS.
These days, Zirinsky finds herself far from the world of violent suppression of free speech and smuggling Chinese dissidents through the CIA. Today, instead of being kicked out of countries and worrying about getting back in, she worries about her incredibly packed schedule. "I only know what I'm doing up to 6 p.m.," she responded to a question of her future plans.
As the executive producer of CBS's "48 Hours Investigates" she barely has any downtime. The producer has worked on stories from elections to the Olympics and with colleagues like Dan Rather.
"There isn't a minute someone isn't at the door, I'm on the phone," Zirinsky said. "I actually had to put into my schedule, 'go to lunch in the cafeteria.'"
Life at AU
The pioneer for the broadcasting program at AU, Ed Bliss, who once worked with broadcast legends like Edward Murrow and Walter Cronkite, once pulled Zirinsky into his office and told her that she might want to consider finding a new profession because she wasn't a strong writer. She was "panicking, sweating and nervous" as Bliss took out of his pocket a tiny piece of paper that had been folded 50 times in a tiny square and slowly began to proceed to read it.
"It was my story that I had written," Zirinsky said, "and he said, "I think you should seriously think about another career."
However, Zirinky still laughs about the memory that she remembers fondly.
"God rest his soul ...He would come to CBS in Washington with a group of kids, point at me," Zirinsky said, "and say 'see that young woman, that woman is a true person who makes me say don't believe everything I say because I am not always right.'"
While still a communications student living in Anderson Hall, she began working for CBS as a weekend production clerk, and by her junior year she was hired full-time.
She had been working on Capitol Hill for Rep. Ed Koch (D- N.Y.), working at CBS, shooting movies on the side and editing.
"AU afforded me the platform to do everything that I wanted to do," Zirinsky said. "[The University] was my facilitator and practical knowledge came in the field."
By her senior year, Zirinsky was working full-time and decided to work independently in class, since her professors at the time agreed the opportunity of a lifetime was in front of her.
The political atmosphere of the '70s and Watergate was exploding around her, and she was witnessing it from the middle of the CBS newsroom in the Washington bureau .
Broadcast news
Zirinsky looked down at her watch and told her husband, with whom she had eloped that she had to meet with director James L. Brooks in 45 minutes, whom was gathering information for his film "Broadcast News." In fact, she bowled over the Academy Award director of films like "Terms of Endearment" and "As Good As It Gets," when she told him that she had just been married less than three hours before, she recalled.
The film, based on real events from Zirinsky's CBS experience, explored the lives of a quirky and driven producer, empty-headed but handsome anchor, and dedicated but pushed-round reporter in a Washington TV network news bureau and the trials they face while heading to the top. Intertwined in the movie are issues of ethics and the role of journalists.
"He really tried to capture a mood or feeling with what was happening at the time," Zirinsky said. "It was a time of ethics, a time where ethics was being questioned. It was a time, where the good guys weren't always winning. A time then the economy was tightening and the quality of what we were doing was being questioned."
For Zirinsky, the reality and the fiction often collided. She was faced with as many as 30 people being fired in her real job at the CBS Washington bureau. For her, the experience was surreal.
However, she still never agreed with the character of William Hurt, who she said could have not succeeded in his position in the real world. The good-looking anchor, who proved to have few ethics and lacked a reporter's education, was sent up the ladder of success.
"Broadcast News was a very accurate portrayal of some of the issues that we were going through as television journalists," Zirinsky said.
Risks in journalism
Zirinsky believes that the journalists in America do not face the amount of elevated danger that exists in other countries. She highlighted women in particular who have struggled in the press world and remembers in particular the stories she has heard from those who have won Courage Awards from the International Women's Media Foundation.
"You are blown away by the risks people take to report reality," Zirinsky said.
She points out that in this country, the White House might faze you out from asking a question or a photo opportunity but essentially it is not going to stop you from publishing. In Bulgaria, a woman who was reporting on corruption was standing at a bus stop one morning waiting to go to work when a car drove up. A gallon of acid was poured over her face. The woman appeared at the Coverage Awards several years ago, an event that she had never forgotten. She also points out Veronica Guerin, a journalist in Ireland who suffered consequences after reporting on Ireland's drugs and corruption.
"We have to, in the world, stand up for the truth no matter what the consequences are," she said. "There are crises all over the world. We are not rubbed out or acid isn't thrown on our faces. It's like our world is a very different world. The world is not a place where freedom exists in other countries. There are lots of places in the world where you are dulled and maimed trying to tell the truth."
Reality of today
"I've been to war. I've seen governments change hands. I've been to the Soviet Union in crisis times. And I have a conclusion ... prime time is real hell," Zirinsky said.
Zirinsky says that the difference between prime time and hard news (morning, evening and weekend) is that prime time shows like "CBS Hours Investigates" and "60 Minutes" are held to entertainment standards.
"I have to compete with shows that cost a million dollars whereas we're on a news budget. It's a very bizarre position to be in with the advent of reality of where people feel like they're exhausted with news, and so while prime time is discretionary in terms of what it covers and what stories it goes after, I think it's very difficult."
She poses the question: "If it's a journalistically sound project, journalistically interesting story and no one comes to watch, have I done my job?" She answers her own question saying that 10 years ago she would have said yes, but today she says no because we have to live in a world of entertainment, where ratings do matter.
"People are getting reality from reality shows and that's not really reality, that's manipulated," Zirinsky said. "The news magazine world that I now work in is suffering because of it. It's kind of like dealing with the devil every day of my life"
