The Bitter Tears of Jessica Savitch

By Emily Carney

“I very much wanted to be accepted by my peers, to be considered a serious journalist.”
—Jessica Savitch

Photo from People archive

Due to dire economic circumstances across the US in the last few years, and particularly in early 2009, there has been a decline in the television news audience nationally and locally. Many TV stations and networks have downsized considerably; it certainly helps one who desires to carve out a niche in broadcast news to have an extremely impressive CV in reporting and anchoring. The ultimate cautionary tale in how not to conduct a network news career continues to be the final, sad slide of Jessica Savitch.

For those who do not remember the halcyon years of television news from the early 1980s, Jessica Savitch was a reporter and anchor at the American network NBC. Jessica’s story really begins in her often-troubled childhood. At an early age, she endured the catastrophic loss of her father, an event which undoubtedly would turn anyone’s life upside down. She became a local radio personality in her teenage years, which gave her a taste of the fame she would later encounter as a network broadcast journalist. At Ithaca College in New York, she managed to complete her college education while modeling and working at a local radio station. She was determined even then to be a network anchorwoman, even though in the late 1960s there were few notable women in broadcasting.

However, she already displayed the anxious, manic tendencies which would plague her future television career; by the end of college, she was under the care of a campus psychologist and would sometimes fly into nervous rages. In an excellent biography of Jessica written by Alanna Nash (Golden Girl), Savitch confidant Louise Schwing recounted, “She couldn’t sit still for ten minutes . . . and she would chatter on in that awful, nervous way. By then she was very thin because she wouldn’t eat a proper meal. And she would bite her nails until they would honest-to-God bleed. I’d have to slap her hand and say, ‘Jess, don’t do that!’ It was terrible.”

After graduating from Ithaca College, Jessica worked for a short time at CBS, and soon landed a reporting job at KHOU in Houston, Texas. She quickly gained renown as a gritty reporter, once risking serious injury while covering a tanker fire. She soon became the first female anchorwoman in the southern United States. A local radio station even had a song about her; she proved to be an enormously popular TV personality. She also met a reporter named Ron Kershaw, who worked at Houston TV station KTRK. Kershaw would alternately be her ultimate mentor and tormentor; they were both passionate about TV news and rock music. However, Jessica was frequently subjected to violent beatings by a jealous Ron, who later admitted some of his anger was at Jessica’s meteoric rise at KHOU and her eventual departure to greater fame at Philadelphia’s KYW station. At KYW, Jessica often had to take time off from anchoring because of the visible physical injuries sustained from her altercations with Ron.

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