The Golden Rule

The ever-alert San Francisco television news desk where I worked in the 1970s sent me of a morning to a San Mateo highschool campus to cover a nude-in. The event had been announced with a press release, so why not.

California at that time had not quite settled on a dress code and not being at all dressed was, while not exactly legal, it wasn’t actually “wrong” either. At least in the right places. “Political” demonstrations were protected, and construed very broadly. A Bay Area high school might or might not be a right place to express …. something, freedom, dissent, something. Also, nudity per se. 

So we all, representatives of much of the Bay Area press, responded, including me.

By this time in my life in San Francisco I was sensitive to the process of ‘announcement as action’.  It was clearly no longer necessarily required to do; sometimes one only had to say. The political environment was VERY busy and rich. A plan could easily be enough to make a point. 

So I arrived at the high school not really expecting nakedness. And somehow I got that message out, because killing a minute at a men's room urinal, a teen aged kid stepped in next and told me he was one of the organizers, and that the event was …. well, we, the press, were the event. Funny. We could so easily be had. Wanna see the firehouse dog run? Just ring the bell.

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On a freezing day in January 1982 a poorly de-iced Air Florida 727 fell out of the air on takeoff from Washington, clipped a bridge and crashed into the Potomac River. Most of the people on the plane and some on the bridge were killed. (Incidentally, his rescue efforts made a folk hero out of Lennie Skutnik, who I never met but of whom I have written elsewhere.)

The additionally awful thing about Air Florida flight 90 is that while the disaster was obvious and public in Washington, official-types in Tampa where it very briefly headed, were clueless. Nobody in the company or the government told anybody in Tampa that Flight 90 was in the river, not the air. So in the two and a half hours that first responders and news crews were busy doing catastrophe in DC, happy people were arriving at Tampa airport to pick up their relatives and friends.  These two worlds intersected when Tampa reporters began to arrive at the airport to interview the grieving who themselves did not yet know of their loss. 

I went to Tampa shortly thereafter to look at the behavior of the news people and the ugly failures of the system that made for the mess.  You know, reporters did exactly what we are trained to do, which, stripped of context, looked outrageously cruel – “how do you feel,” to people who did not yet know they were supposed to be devastated. 

My favorite though, was a young man in a bar near the airport who saw news of the crash on TV and realized that we, the news machine we, would need mourners, so he went to the airport and volunteered to be one, inventing a ‘friend’ on the downed plane to grieve. He was interviewed and quoted widely. Hard to fault him, really, for trying to be helpful, for recognizing a generic role and attempting to fill it.

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Guy set himself on fire in Anniston Alabama one night, for a TV news camera, in a drunken protest against unemployment. He lived to regret it, as did the two young TV newsmen who were his only witnesses, and his excuse.  

This was in May of 1983, and I went to Anniston to write about it for a show I was doing with Hodding Carter in New York. Here’s the sequence – drunk, unemployed guy calls the TV station four times on a Friday night offering an interview and self-immolation; finally the station sends  an intern and the sports camera guy over, more or less to get rid of a pest; guy in fact sets himself on fire and the TV guys and late arriving cops extinguish the flames. 

I met the two TV guys who were being generally condemned by most of the country. I was more sympathetic and wrote later for Hodding that they were astounded when the guy did actually spark the fire, that before that they were simply video-taping a press statement – albeit a drunken one. They gave me the tape which had caused so much regret, and I still have it. 

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The language I wrote for Hodding after the Anniston thing, and that I have thought of so often since, was this: that the message we news people have put out is that if you do something weird enough, we will put you on TV or in the paper for it.  Click bait before we had the term, the unspoken Golden Rule of news media. Everybody kind of knows it, including the burned guy, the Tampa bar fly, and the high school kid in San Mateo.

And Donald Trump. He knows too.

Tom DeVries

Mariposa, July 2026

uploaded 9/23/26