Transcription of Pat Callaghan for the show Faces of Maine Broadcasting #275
Dr. Lisa Belisle: My next guest is well known, really, to the Maine community. This is Pat Callaghan who started working at WCSH 6 News Center in December 1979. He is the co-anchor of the 5 pm, 6 pm and 11 pm shows and has been co-anchoring the 6 pm newscast with Cindy Williams for 27 years. Wow! You’ve been around for a long time.
Pat Callaghan: Wow, indeed. Yeah.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Yeah.
Pat Callaghan: Time flies when you’re having fun.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: It does seem like you’ve had some fun. I can’t imagine spending as much time as you have doing what you’re doing if you didn’t enjoy it in some way.
Pat Callaghan: Oh, no, one of the great things about it is sometimes it’s not like working for a living. Lot of times it is. There’s always a routine that you get into, things that have to be done at a certain time, but it’s usually something different every day so, while you follow the same pattern or routine, there’s something else going on that… and you think you’ve seen it all, and you never have.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Now, you grew up not in Maine. You grew up in Framingham, outside Boston. Tell me a little bit about that early path. Did you know from the moment you jumped out of the womb that this is what you wanted to do?
Pat Callaghan: I didn’t know, but it’s not surprising that I would have been interested. My dad worked for a radio and television station first in western Massachusetts, then in Washington and then in Boston. That’s when I came along, and so it was always something that seemed like an interesting way to make a living to me. The other part of it was that we had three or four daily newspapers in the house, so when you’re a kid, you start out reading the newspaper and you read the comics. Then you read the sports pages. Then eventually you start reading the rest of the paper as well.
In those days in particular, when you had morning and evening editions of papers and a lot of competing papers in the city like Boston, plus the local Framingham paper, you got a lot of different opinions and takes on things. It teaches you to be a little open minded about ideas and figure out who’s right and who isn’t. I was always interested in the news, and we would watch the newscast. My dad was anchoring sports for a while at the time when the Red Sox were having their impossible dream, almost 50 years ago now, in 1967, and that was very exciting for a kid who was about 11 years old. That’s just the right time. Watching him do that was pretty interesting.
Occasionally, we’d go in to the station with him. At the time, they were located in Kenmore Square in Boston, just two blocks away from Fenway Park. If we’d go to a ballgame, we might have to stop by the station for something and seeing all the technology stuff and also they had kids’ shows in those days. “Major Mudd” was one of them, and they had this science fiction thing called “Fantasmic Features.” The host was a guy named Feep. When you saw the big Feep head on a stand, it was like, “Ooh, I know that.”
Anyway, so it always seemed kind of glamorous and interesting. In college, I went to the University of New Hampshire and worked for the radio station there, mostly as a disc jockey, and I loved that because you can play what you want when it’s college radio and really express yourself. I also started doing news. I didn’t really study broadcasting as such or communications. I studied English and history, so I’ve always thought that that is a good background for anybody in this line of work because you know a little bit about a lot of things, and it teaches you how to ask questions and how to seek out information and research things.
The TV part of it or the radio part, the broadcasting, that’s easier to learn than the rest of it. You have to be able to write quickly on deadline and have it come out making sense without laboring over it sometimes. It’s a good background for that. Just to conclude that story, which went on forever, when I graduated, I had several part time jobs. One was writing for the nightly newscast they used to do in New Hampshire Public Television which was almost like going to grad school, which I considered doing, but now I’m with people who are out reporting the news in a place where there’s a lot of interesting stuff going on because of politics, which I’ve always loved.
I got to follow the governor’s race that year and it was really interesting to see how it’s done and just the whole mechanics of it all. Occasionally, they’d let me get on the air to fill in or something, and that was it. I was able to put together a tape with some demonstration stuff and when I was looking for a full time job, I wound up in Bangor, WLBZ. I had applied here in Portland and they said, “Well, you’re not quite ready for this yet, but we’ve got another station, and we think you could use some seasoning up there.” They were absolutely right, so that’s where it began.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: From what I understand, Bill Green helped you out for a little bit of the time when you were in Bangor.
Pat Callaghan: He did. Bill was working at LBZ then. He’s a Bangor native, so he really knew his way around. He’s very friendly, very open. He didn’t really know me at all and the first day I was there, he said, “Hey, if you need to use my apartment to make phone calls looking for a place to live …” No, so Bill is the oldest friend I have in Maine and it’s a pleasure that we’re still working together after all this time. You have this sort of shared heritage, if you will, that we’ve seen a lot of things come and go over the years, and we’ll make jokes about something that some of the younger people have no idea what we’re talking about. Just a couple of old fools, but, you know, it’s been very nice.
The other great thing, Don Carrigan worked at WLBZ at the time, too. I remember when I first walked in I saw this reporter, he had a full beard at the time, which I thought was unusual for a television station. I think the reason he had it was he was appearing in a play, he was probably doing “Fiddler on the Roof” or something, because Don does a lot of community theater and still does. You quickly learn, this is a guy who knows his way around, and you can learn a lot from him, and I have. I still feel like I’m learning from him now.
In those days, I was hired to produce and anchor the 11 o’clock newscast as well as report. I covered City Hall, all the City Council meetings and so forth. You had to learn how to do a lot of things. We were shooting 16 mm film back then and there were no computers or word processors. Everything was done on typewriters, and you had to type your scripts with carbon paper, so you had multiple copies.
To put the newscast together, you have to assemble a big film reel with each clip of film that you’re going to use and make sure they’re in the right order. If you have to drop something for time reasons, you can’t just throw the tape aside or anything. You’ve got to now spool through that piece of film. It seems outrageous. You wonder how you got it done, but you do. All of it was part of a great learning experience because you’re involved in every aspect of producing and reporting.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Do you think that there’s something that’s missing now, that people don’t have to go through this whole process, or does it not really …
Pat Callaghan: No, there’s a different kind of multitasking they have to do now. There’s a lot more reporters in our shop and others, too, who have to work on their own, what they call multimedia journalists, or multi-skilled journalists. They always come up with some thing you can initialize, but really what it means is that they shoot and write and edit all of their own stuff. In some cases, that can be good. I’ve always thought it’s better to have two people to work on the story together because you have someone to bounce ideas off of. Especially when you’re starting out, you know, it’s nice to have somebody who sort of knows their way around.
In Bangor, for example, it was really helpful… The head photographer there is a guy named Paul Salisbury, a good friend of mine who just passed away a few months ago, but he was from Southwest Harbor area, so he really spoke the language, and I didn’t. I would have looked silly or sounded like someone who didn’t know what in the world he was talking about to go down there and talk to people if you’ve got to do a story on some fishing thing. To have somebody who really knows it and knows how to break the ice and get people feeling comfortable was incredibly valuable.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Having done this for as many years as you have, I’m guessing that you have a fair sense of what’s going on in the state and you have a fair number of contacts.
Pat Callaghan: Yeah, I mean I certainly, in the political world, I’ve covered a lot of these people for a long time. I’ve covered five governors and six US Senators over the years which doesn’t seem like a lot, but the people in Maine, in the Senate in particular, tend to stick around awhile. I know many of the legislators. I don’t get to the state House as much as I used to, which I always really enjoyed. I liked the vibe up there. I know a lot of those people, and I like to think that maybe the more valuable thing is not just the contacts, but that people know who you are, and they have a sense that they can trust you to treat them fairly and get the story right. If you screw something up, you’ll tell them and apologize and move on.
You know, that’s what I like to think, that because we have people like myself and Don and Bill, and a lot of our younger reporters, too, but we have a certain level of trust that people know what to expect from us. Now, not everybody loves the media, but I think they know they’re going to get a fair shake from us.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: It sounds like the relationship that you have with people, it’s something that is strengthened over time and can actually lead to a more valuable outcome.
Pat Callaghan: Yeah, I think that works well for what we’re trying to do for people in Maine. When you think about it, having a television station is a public trust. You’re granted the right to use the public airwaves to make money, but you owe something back, and the way that’s been paid back, traditionally, is through public service programming and news.
The fact that we do so many newscasts, and we even have the magazine show, 207, which is unique in the state, and a lot of places don’t have anything like that, so we have an outlet for Mainers to express themselves, whether it’s in a news sense or whether it’s in an artistic, a musical or theatrical sense, there’s a place for all of that. That’s really… It’s our pleasure to be able to provide that public service, to give something to the people of Maine.
I know you mentioned you’d talked with Keith Carson. Well, weather is a huge part of that. Whenever you do research and ask people what’s important to them, severe weather coverage is number one because it’s Maine, and they want to know what’s going on. That’s why we spend so much time finding the right people and making sure they have the tools they need. It’s all part of what we owe the public.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: I remember WCSH before there was Storm Center. I actually remember when it started and now you are….
Pat Callaghan: You can’t be that old.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: I am that old, actually, yes, but I remember how it became, like, a thing, and I remember at the time… I was relatively young and I was like, “Really, we have to make this a thing?” but over time it’s kind of like got this excitement behind it, like, “It’s Storm Center. We’re taking this really seriously.”
Pat Callaghan: Yeah, those of us who were working there thought it was a bit much, too, and it occasionally still can seem like overkill from our point of view, but when I was growing up, and maybe you remember part of this, too, cancellations were done on the radio. If it was snowing, you’d get up and you’d turn the radio on to hear if your school was cancelled, and that seemed like a radio thing, not a TV thing, but our bosses at the time recognized that, “no, we could do this, too.” Thankfully, we reached the point where we didn’t have to read this stuff, that it can all be done with on-screen graphics. We kind of paved the way for TV stations to do that. Everybody does it now and has for some time, but I really think we were the first ones to break it out and make it a separate thing.
When you hear that music, everybody knows, “All right, time to pay attention.” It’s actually kind of funny because when the stations were owned by the Thompson family for many years, since their founding back in the 1920s as radio stations. When they were sold to Gannett, which is now TEGNA, when corporate ownership took over, they have a little different idea. They want music packages in every market to sound the same: “These are the things you can use,” but they did give us the exception that we can still use the Storm Center music because we convinced them, “This is important. This is how we identify this particular part of the newscast.”
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Which is so true because I’m actually like replaying it in my mind even now as you’re talking.
Pat Callaghan: Yeah, it’s an ear-worm now, and I’ve cursed you with it.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Yeah, thank you so much for that. You could sing it. Would you like to sing it for me?
Pat Callaghan: I wouldn’t but, you know, we had one of our meteorologists, Cliff Michaelson years ago, was a pretty good fiddle player, and he would play that sometimes on the air on his violin. Caroline Cornish, I’m sure, could learn it, too, because she plays violin, too. There’s nothing like hearing the Storm Center theme on violin, but I can’t do that.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Okay. Well, maybe we’ll sneak around like next time the storm comes up….
Pat Callaghan: Yeah, yeah.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: We’ll see if we can catch you unawares or something, let’s see if we can get you to do it in a weak moment. I’m interested in the news these days because I also came from a time… I used to deliver both the paper, you know, when there was The Portland Press Herald and it was The Evening Express….
Pat Callaghan: Right.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: And the Sunday Telegram, and this was really how we got our news. There was radio and there was the paper and there was television. Now, the news is everywhere all the time which is great, and it’s been sort of democratized, but I also wonder if there’s a lack of curation. There’s a lack of, it seems like… It seems like maybe we don’t have the same amount of reflection on what’s going on.
Pat Callaghan: Yeah, I think some of that comes from the idea that people can now just, if they choose, listen to something that reflects the point of view they already hold, something that reinforces what they believe in, and it started with cable channels that skewed one political leaning or another. It continues with social media through Facebook or Twitter, or what have you. Your newsfeed on Facebook sort of is tailored toward the things you’re interested in, and there’s nothing wrong with that except, really what you’d need to do is have a broader palette to find information.
You know, say if you’re someone who’s liberal who only watches MSNBC, you kind of owe it to yourself to spend a couple hours a week watching Fox News just to hear what they’re talking about. Get some sense of where are they coming from; why do I disagree with that? Defend your… you know, internally, if you will, but you can convince yourself, “All right, maybe I was wrong,” or “No, I’m more convinced than ever that I was right.” It’s true, if you’re only getting it through social media, we try to have a… we have a presence there, of course. It’s never quite the same as when it’s put together in a newspaper or in a newscast.
Many would disagree because they think the, as you call it, the democratization of it is a good thing in that we don’t have to just rely on the so-called mainstream media, but mainstream media, at least the way we do it, is something that we feel you can trust to be fair and reliable, that it’s researched, that you don’t just say something and have it unchecked. Everything is vetted that gets on the air. There’s value in that.
The other problem with social media, and it has hurt a lot of media companies, newspapers in particular, is people have developed an idea that news should be free. Free is nice, but professional journalists who know how to do this craft need to be paid or they can’t do it. If you don’t subscribe to a newspaper, you’re kind of letting down the community in my eyes. You need to support journalism, even if it’s a paper you don’t always agree with in their editorial slant. People say, “Well, television is free,” so it’s, “Well, it isn’t really. We have commercials.” That’s how we pay the bills. The deal is, you sit and watch that half hour and you see the sponsor messages, and everybody gets something out of it. If you’re only getting it from social media, I think you’re kind of selling yourself short.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Why do you think we’ve come to this place where we believe that well researched, well written, well… I don’t want to say performed. It’s not performed, but well spoken….
Pat Callaghan: Presented.
Dr. Lisa B.: Presented, yes, information is somehow not worthy of getting support?
Pat Callaghan: I think it might be generational. You know, as younger people have gotten accustomed to using social media for so many things, they don’t really see the distinction. That can be a dangerous thing, if you just believe anything that gets tweeted out without some kind of background check or some kind of verification, you may wind up with some ideas that aren’t quite right.
That’s that whole debate that’s going on right now after the presidential election of what’s fake news and what isn’t. This idea that facts don’t matter is sort of frightening because facts are facts. If you quote somebody saying something, you’re not somehow attacking them. You’re just saying, “Well, this is what this person has said before. Now they’re saying this. Those things don’t match up. It’s worth pointing that out.” That’d take smarter people than I to figure out how you solve that.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: I also wonder about the lack of pause where something is happening, but when something’s happening, you can’t necessarily make a good judgment. You can’t necessarily get the background on it; you can’t know what the long term implications…. If you put the news out there as it’s happening and that becomes the report of it….
Pat Callaghan: Without perspective.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Without perspective. Exactly.
Pat Callaghan: Well, it is and that’s been changing for a long time. It used to be, you know, back in the 60s, for example, you had one newscast in the evening. You had the 6 and then the 11 o’clock. Reporters working on the 6 o’clock news had all day to gather their information, call sources, check out what they had, and put the story together in a thoughtful way. Then you would start adding more newscasts. The deadlines start coming earlier. They come at 5:30, and then they come at 5 o’clock.
Now deadlines are constant. You’re supposed to be posting to the web or social media right away. When you’re covering a story, they want you putting out photos or maybe little videos as it’s happening, and again, the immediacy is good. It gets people interested in the story but, as you point out, if it’s done without much consideration of the bigger picture or what it all really means, I’m not sure any of us gain from that.
However, that’s technology, and it’s brought us to this point today and we have to learn to make the best of it and be careful not to rush just to try to be first, to try to be right first. When the TV producer, Grant Tinker, died last week, in his obituary they talked about one of his mottos when he started running NBC and their entertainment division was, “First, be best. Then be number one.” Or, “Then be first.” That can apply to us as well. You’ve got to remind yourself, and I have to remind myself, too, I’ve failed at this as well, there are times when you rush to get something out first and it’s not quite right or not what you believed it was, or just flat out wrong.
When it does, then you apologize and you try to fix it, and you move on. That’s at least one thing that the so-called mainstream media does that perhaps others, the fake news, will not do, is that if we get it wrong, we’ll admit we got it wrong, and we’ll try to make it right as fast as we can. Sometimes others will not do that.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: You are one of the few reporters in the country on air live from the Kennedy Space Center when the space shuttle Challenger was destroyed. Now, I remember this. I was in Geometry class in high school, and it was a big deal back then. I wasn’t there, I just heard about it from my teacher who was devastated. I suspect we all know where we were at that time.
Pat Callaghan: Yeah.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: You were there, though.
Pat Callaghan: I was. It’s interesting how that came about, too, because in Framingham where I grew up, I knew the Corrigan family. They went to the same church we did, and so our families… I didn’t know them well, but I knew them enough and my dad was friends with Christa McAuliffe’s dad; her maiden name was Corrigan. I kind of had that little bit of an advantage when I told the news director at the time when she was chosen, Christa McAuliffe, the teacher from Concord, New Hampshire, chosen to be the first teacher in space. I said, “Gee, I really think we should cover this live. It’s local enough, New Hampshire is right there.” I might have oversold the connection that I had to the family, but not by much. I said, “Ah, yeah, really, this is going to be a great story,” and he bought into it and said, “Yeah, we should go cover that.”
The launch was delayed several times for various technical reasons. It was also very cold there. In fact, some of the Florida reporters blamed those of us coming from New England for bringing the cold with us. We really weren’t prepared for that, we hadn’t brought winter gear or anything. You’d go to a Sears down there and try to buy some winter gloves. They don’t have them. While we were covering the launch… Excuse me. There was a press grandstand, and there was a VIP grandstand.
The photographer I was with was down by the VIP section shooting video. There was in the “Teacher in Space” Program, if you’ll recall, there were two teachers chosen from every state to be the finalists, and one of the teachers from Maine was making the trip to watch the launch, a guy named Gordon Corbett from Yarmouth.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Who was also my teacher.
Pat Callaghan: Oh, well, there you go, so then you know exactly what I’m talking about. Gordon was there, and as part of the story, we wanted to see his reaction to the flight, everyone of course expecting it’s going to be jubilance, it’s going to be great. This was the big payoff at last. When the launch happened, and when the explosion happened, for those of us who’d never seen one of these things in person, it looked wrong but you figure, “Well, maybe that’s what it looks like in person. I don’t know.” Then, when it got so quiet, you weren’t hearing the chatter on the radio anymore, it’s suddenly, “Okay, there’s really a problem here.”
What your hope was, that we’d seen all the briefings about ways they could have a return to launch site abort, you know, if something was going wrong they could separate the orbiter and land. You’re hoping, “Well, gee, we hope that’s what it is,” but I was sitting near another reporter, a guy from Florida Today newspaper who actually lives in Maine again. His name is Chet Lunner, and he said, I could see, I was sitting right next to him, and he said, “This is bad. This is…” Because we were on the air live, I was actually on the phone. We were showing the pictures from the NASA Select satellite, but I was on the telephone, and we had Patsy Wiggins in the studio sort of anchoring the coverage.
You had to be careful not to say what you didn’t know. You needed to say something, but you can’t say, “Oh, crap, they’re going to be dead,” because you didn’t know that, but in the back of your mind you figure, “It doesn’t seem… Everything we’ve heard about what this really means is there is no real escape from this.” You start calling on your background knowledge. This is where homework comes in. I knew a lot about the space program, of course having grown up while it was the big moon shot race and everything, and I remembered Apollo 13. This is before the movie was made or anything, but I remembered all of that, was able to talk a little about, “Well, there have been accidents before, and they’ve been able to improvise and survive it.”
You end up filling time. We were on the air off and on… NBC hadn’t cut in yet because they weren’t covering it live. The space shuttle program had gotten so routine the networks weren’t covering it. I think CNN was because that was their job, and the station in Manchester was because it was a New Hampshire story. I think channel 13 might have been as well because they had a reporter there. Anyway, we had to fill all this time, and it was hard because I never saw the video of the explosion at the time, until that night. I saw what happened before my eyes, but it wasn’t until that night when I finally saw the videotape, I said, “My God, it’s so obvious what just happened,” because the picture’s so close, but at that moment let’s say you rely on the homework you’ve done and the background that you have, and you can speak extemporaneously about it.
You have to keep your emotions in check because nobody wants to hear you falling apart. It was shocking and sad and so unexpected. You don’t really think about that till you’re done with the job for the day. That carries through into anything you cover, really. There are times when the news is so tragically sad. You know, little kids with cancer, or whatever it is, and you can’t get so wrapped up in it that you’re falling apart. Really, people are looking for someone to tell us about it and kind of keep a cool head, so that’s what I try to do.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Do you ever thing of yourself as being an important part of people’s daily lives? Do you ever think of yourself as, “Oh, I’m sitting down to dinner with people and, you know, I’m one of the last things they see before they go to sleep, or….”
Pat Callaghan: That sort of thing occurs to you when you meet them, and they’ll tell you, like we just recently did the annual Coats for Kids drive. We all go out to the various locations, the supermarkets where we collect the coats and the toys. That’s a chance to meet a lot of people. I mean, they know you’re going to be there so they come by and you chat with them, and so, “Oh, we watch you all the time. We’ve been seeing you for so many years.” That’s when you think about it.
If you spent every day walking around thinking about that, it would be pretty ridiculous. You’d get a big head for no reason. When I introduce myself to people, they sometimes will say, “Oh, we know who you are.” Well, I assume nothing, take nothing for granted because not everybody does, and you kind of have to look at it that way. If you, as I say, if you walked around all the time thinking how important you are, that’s not a good way to live your life.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Well, I appreciate your taking the time to switch back to your radio presence, to your radio persona in coming in and having a conversation with me today. I’ve been speaking with Pat Callaghan who started working at WCSH 6 News Center in December of 1979. Certainly your station has been a part of my growing up in the state of Maine, so I thank you for all the work that you do, and I appreciate your being here.
Pat Callaghan: I thank you and everybody else for caring and keeping us employed.