Toyota Quality : Broadcast Veteran Marks 19 Years on L.A. Airwaves While Serving as a Role Model for Minority Journalists

Tritia Toyota had been working as a reporter at KNX-AM radio for a year when an executive from KNBC-TV Channel 4 first called her in 1972. After a few seconds, she hung up on him.

“The guy only wanted to know three things: Was my last name really Toyota, was I Japanese-American and what did I look like?” recalls Toyota, the KCBS Channel 2 journalist who has served as an anchor in Los Angeles for the last 15 years. “I thought it was a crank call.”

Her phone rang again.

“It was right on the heels of the civil rights movement, and television stations were very much aware that they did not have people of color on their staffs,” she explains. “So there was a big push to hire women and minorities. At the time I started at Channel 4, there was one black reporter out of about a dozen and a half and they had a woman doing consumer reporting, but she left on maternity leave. So without any real professional experience in television, they hired me to replace her.”

Going on 19 years later, Toyota has graduated from “token hire” to a member of the elite club of enduring local news personalities in a town where anchors seem to blow on and off the air with the Santa Ana winds. After three years of gaining her TV news legs as a reporter at Channel 4, she anchored the news there for 10 years, becoming the first Asian-American anchor in the market--preceding Connie Chung--before moving to KCBS in 1985.

“After a while, you are just this old face and you just outlive everyone else,” says Toyota, now in her early 40s. “The fact that I have been here so long works to my advantage. I think viewers feel comfortable with what I’m talking about.”

For nearly all of her tenure at Channel 2, the station has been mired in last place among L.A.’s three network-owned stations. And as KCBS has brought in other news talent in an effort to hike up the ratings, Toyota has seen her air time dwindle. She now works two half-hour shifts--at noon and at 6 p.m. With her latest partner, Michael Tuck, her 6 p.m. newscast could manage no better than a distant third among the network-owned stations’ newscasts during the November ratings sweeps. Even worse, that newscast finished last in the time period among the seven local VHF stations, losing even to decade-old reruns of “Three’s Company” on KTTV Channel 11, according to Arbitron.

Nevertheless, Toyota has survived at KCBS while other anchors such as John Schubeck, Terry Murphy, Warren Olney, Ross Becker, Valerie Coleman, Dan Miller and Paula Zahn have been forced or have chosen to go elsewhere. To illustrate just how fickle the business can be, Toyota says that she has been paired with nine different male anchors in her five years at the station.

“Her greatest strength is that she’s very intelligent and she really understands news,” says Robert Hyland, KCBS’ general manager. “And she’s very disciplined in her work habits. She’s the kind of person who, if given the chance, would do all three daily broadcasts. She’d work seven days a week.”

But it was rough going at first. Toyota was young, inexperienced, a woman and a minority. She says that often when she went out to interview sources for a story, they wouldn’t talk to her. They’d talk to her cameraman, but not to her. Some of her own cameramen, she says, wouldn’t speak to her.

“In the beginning, I did have to fight against the perception that I was there just because I was Asian American,” Toyota says. “But that didn’t bother me, because I knew I had to prove myself. After about a year, they wanted to fire me because I wasn’t doing very well with the nuances of television production and my scripts weren’t very good. Being a minority would not have saved me if I didn’t get the help and support I needed.”

Toyota credits Irwin Safchik, a news producer and then news director at KNBC during the 1970s, with saving her career through tough editing and teaching. For his part, Safchik says Toyota succeeded because she worked harder than just about anyone else and “because she was a willing and fast learner.” He dismisses any suggestion that Toyota’s ethnic background might have helped her survive myriad newsroom housecleanings over the years.

There was, Safchik acknowledges, a “zealous pursuit” to hire minorities during the late ‘70s, when federal regulators were more active in applying affirmative-action requirements than they are today. “But when the decision was made to pair Tritia with John Schubeck, and then with Jess Marlow,” he says, “I honestly don’t recall that her being a minority even entered into it. The decision was made that the newscasts would work better if they (had two anchors), and she was the best-equipped person we had to step into that. No one ignored the fact that she was Asian and a woman. But that did not trigger that decision.”

Today, Toyota says the situation for minorities in TV news has improved, and Hyland believes that Toyota’s success and visibility has served as an inspiration for other minority broadcasters, showing them that they do have “credibility in this community and within this business.”

Still, only one other Asian American--KABC Channel 7’s Joanne Ishimine--is anchoring here (and that on weekends) and, while there are a few black anchors on weekend newscasts, only one black--KCAL’s Pat Harvey--anchors a weeknight newscast.

Toyota says that part of the problem is that management positions have been mostly closed to minorities. A recent study conducted by the Asian-American Journalists Assn.--which was founded by Toyota and five other local journalists nearly 10 years ago and has now grown into an organization with chapters in 11 regions across the country--showed that many Asian-American journalists are leaving the business because they are not being promoted. And many Asian-American men avoid broadcast news altogether, Toyota says, because they feel discriminated against by white male managers “who tend to want to hire women more than men, partly because we fill two slots.”

A brochure published by the association, which claims that Asian-Americans are the fastest-growing ethnic minority in the United States, states: “While some Asian-American journalists have achieved visibility on camera, they are vastly under-represented in the media. Few are in positions of editorial or managerial decision-making.”

“The first step was people like me getting their foot in the door,” says Toyota, who acknowledges that even today she still receives hateful, racist mail. “The next step is to crack that glass ceiling into management. I think that will begin to happen in the next 10 years.”

As for her own future, Toyota hopes that station managers will let her and her fellow female anchor colleagues remain on the air as they age. “It will be interesting to see how they handle that,” says Toyota. Her “welcome-back” note to veteran KABC anchor Christine Lund after a four-year absence said: “Nothing has changed since you’ve been away, except everyone is getting younger.”

Someday, says Toyota, who has a master’s degree from UCLA and eventually would like to teach at a university, one of those younger faces will knock her off the air.

“I get letters from kids who are 7 or 8 years old that say they want to be TV reporters when they grow up,” Toyota says. “That’s part of the responsibility of the job: to not goof it up for those kids. And one of these days one of those people will come along and take my job. And that will be great. I would love it if my replacement walked in and said, ‘I’ve watched you since I was 10 years old. And I really liked what you did.’ ”