Bad news for us all - Pete Noyes is quitting again.

• Author: Saltzman, Joe

Pete Noyes says he's quitting the TV news business again. He's been quitting the TV news business for nearly half a century, almost since TV news began. The reason is always the same: too many people calling the shots who haven't the slightest idea of what news is or what the public ought to know.

You don't recognize his name because he never appeared on camera, so you never saw his face on your television screen. You got to know your local TV news anchors as well as Walter and Barbara and Dan and Tom and another Peter (Jennings). But not the faceless Noyeses who populated television news stations across the country and gave local television news the credibility it had in the 1960s and 1970s. Pete Noyes is an old-fashioned newsman, the kind who created an American journalism aimed at keeping the public informed no matter what the cost, no matter what the obstacles. Every TV station news program that told you the news of the day in a clear, focused form, that explained to you why a councilman or supervisor was not performing well, that uncovered a fraud or exposed a sham, had one or more Noyeses working for it. They were the writers and producers who worked behind the scenes to make sure the on-air reporters and other "talent" had something important and accurate to tell the audience. The term "talent" was coined by the Pete Noyeses to refer to the people on the TV screen who delivered the news. It was a sarcastic term, usually delivered with some bitterness when the "talent" messed up a piece of copy or ad-libbed an inane comment.

I worked for the original Pete Noyes in Los Angeles in the 1960s, now referred to by historians as the Golden Age of Television News. We didn't know it was the Golden Age. Most of us, including Pete, were print journalists who wandered into TV news because the audiences were bigger and the pay was better. All we knew is what CBS anchor Walter Cronkite knew -- that, at best, television news was a headline service. If you really wanted to know what was going on in the world, read a newspaper. That's what we did and, more often than not, the local newspaper was our best reporter, a tip sheet that made it possible for the local TV news show to truly reflect the day's events.

We print journalists were appalled at what TV news looked and sounded like in the late 1950s. And throughout the 1960s, the Pete Noyeses of local TV news went about re-creating television news by trying to wed picture and sound to content...