He Got Point Across, but His Job Was Shot

In the 1976 movie “Network,” newscaster Howard Beale, played by Peter Finch, tells the nation, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.”

In real life, a Fresno sportscaster, Mike Bryant, did sort of the same thing last week.

In the movie, Beale became a ratings success. In real life, Bryant got fired.

According to Bryant, he was doing a commentary when he told viewers in the central San Joaquin Valley: “I normally don’t do stories on hunting of defenseless animals, but there is one kind of animal we can all help control.”

Bryant then showed a picture of a man who allegedly used a knife to rob an undetermined amount of cash from two video stores owned by Bryant. The picture was from film taken by a surveillance camera.

When Bryant appeared back on camera, he was holding a semiautomatic rifle. “With help from you, me and the police, we can proclaim open season on crime,” he said.

Bryant said he then cocked the weapon and said, “Thank you very much.” As he started to walk away, he turned and aimed at the camera.

“I didn’t realize we were still on the air when I did that,” Bryant said. “Our director is slow on a good night, but on this night I guess he was particularly slow because he was stunned by what I had done.”

So was Bill Rice, Bryant’s boss at station KMPH (Channel 26), which serves the Fresno-Visalia area. Rice was watching at home.

“I was shocked,” said Rice, the station’s news director. “At first, I didn’t know what to think. It was like someone you know doing something so outrageous you just can’t believe it.

“I called him almost immediately and said, ‘We need to talk.’ He played coy and said, ‘Oh, about what?’ I told him he had clearly exceeded the bounds of good taste and judgment, and I wanted to see him in my office at 11 o’clock the next morning.

“He said he was booked and that he’d be in at 2:30, when his shift started. I thought maybe he had something important to do. But when he said he had a golf date, that’s when I started to get a little peeved. So I told him either come in at 11 a.m. or not at all.

“He didn’t show. He called the next day and said, ‘You want the chance to tell me I’m fired.’ I said there was a letter in the mail explaining he’d been fired for his misconduct on the air as well as his insubordination the following day.

“But even without the insubordination, I think the result would have been the same. After what he did, I don’t think we would have been able to keep him.

“Imagine being a stranger in town and seeing that. I know what I’d think. I’d think, ‘That’s some kind of lunatic on the air, and his bosses better do something about it.’ ”

Bryant said he has received a number of letters and calls of support since he was fired July 10. “I talked to a receptionist at the station last Friday, and she said of about 65 calls, only two were in favor of my being fired.”

Said Rice: “The reaction to all this would make a good study in the kind of people who write and call a television station. At first, we got calls of complaints about what Mike did. Then after we fired him, we got complaints about that.

“Some people wrote that Mike is the best sportscaster in Fresno, which he is, and we shouldn’t have fired him. Others didn’t understand that Mike wasn’t being serious and they praised him for taking a vigilante sort of stand against crime.”

Why did Bryant do it?

“I was serious to a degree,” he said. “The idea was spurred by a personal thing, by my video stores being robbed by the same man six days apart.”

Since Bryant’s surveillance camera had photographed the robber, the picture was used on KMPH’s newscasts, and a suspect was arrested on Monday. But Bryant never got permission from his boss to use the picture with a commentary during the sports segment.

Said Rice: “The worst thing about what Mike did wasn’t aiming the gun at the camera. The worst thing was using a picture of a man, a black man, as his symbol for a commentary about controlling ‘some kind of animal.’

“The man in the picture wasn’t masked, he wasn’t holding a gun or showing any kind of aggression. For all the picture shows, he could have been standing in line at a movie.

“Mike is a very talented sportscaster. I’ve been a big supporter of his. . . . Mike’s problem is he’s too inside with his humor. He’s the kind of guy who would tell a joke in a room of 100 people, and if 25 people laughed, they’d be the ones with a sense of humor. The other 75, in his mind, would all be bozos.”

Although Bryant said that if he had to do it over again, he would give it more thought before going on the air with his commentary, he also called his firing “a knee-jerk reaction.”

In a way, Bryant is a victim of his profession. Off-the-wall sportscasters are the ones making it these days.

Bryant’s problem was that he went a rifle too far.

Notes NBC is offering a Dodger/Angel doubleheader Saturday, televising the Dodger game in St. Louis at 10:15 a.m. and the Angel game against Toronto in Anaheim at 1 p.m. Vin Scully and Joe Garagiola will be the announcers on the Dodger game, and Ted Robinson and Joe Morgan will work the Angel game, which will be shown only on the West Coast. . . . Bo Jackson will be among Marv Albert’s guests on NBC’s pregame show Saturday at 10 a.m. . . . Good news, bad news department: The final round of the British Open Sunday will be televised live on the West Coast. The coverage, though, will begin at 7:30 a.m. . . . It was reported in this space last week that the Raiders and radio station KMPC had talked about a possible future deal. But Al LoCasale, executive assistant for the Raiders, said it isn’t so. “We’ve just signed a new three-year deal with KRLA through (sports packager) Bob Speck,” LoCasale said. “That takes us through the 1988 season. We did talk to some other stations before signing, but KMPC wasn’t one of them. We didn’t consider KMPC because that’s always been the Rams’ station.”