Fighting for Air: In the Trenches with Television News.

• Author: Donaldson, Sam

Fighting for Air: In the Trenches with Television News. Liz Trotta. Simon and Schuster, $22.95. This is a book laced with bitterness. Trotta is bitter about the discrimination she suffered as she fought for recognition in the "man's world" of network news. She is bitter about the hazing and the slights, the inferior assignments, the double standards for accomplishment and conduct, the lack of recognition she suffered. And she is bitter that when the networks finally woke up to the need to be equal-opportunity employers, the women given big chances often were not the ones, like Trotta, who had slugged it out in the trenches, learning the craft and paying their dues, but young femmes fatales who wouldn't have known the press center at Danang from Germaine's restaurant on Wisconsin Avenue.

Ah, Liz, perhaps you're entitled: Lord knows it's true that the business has discriminated-and still discriminates-against women. But as one reads this book, the question keeps nagging: Did Trotta's constant disappointments stem from her sex or from other factors?

In 1965, Trotta went to work for the NBC affiliate in New York. She had worked in print and makes no secret of her view that print reporters are the true journalists of this world. She soon won a network spot and took all the tough assignments of her day, including Vietnam; she was the first woman television reporter to be stationed there. Trotta is at her best recounting war stories from her coverage of Vietnam and other trouble spots. While there is no doubt that she shared all the hardships, braved all the dangers, and scored all the deadline beats the world's hell holes had to offer, her career at NBC never really took off.

Trotta seems to have idolized Chet Huntley (odd for a no-nonsense print reporter, since Huntley was strictly a studio broadcaster). She suggests that her big troubles with NBC management began in earnest with Huntley's departure. Trotta blames her problems on sex discrimination, management philistines, and the everyday incompetence of many NBC staff members. But she also admits she was "difficult" in temperament and behavior. I am not one to complain about that, except to say I don't know any other reporter who has purposely slammed a metal microphone into the jaw of someone attempting to bar her from a story. True, NBC's Andrea Mitchell once dug her elbow into an offending cameraman's ribs as she jockeyed for position on the White House rose garden colonnade, but that was...