NB: This treatment has been registered with the Writers' Guild of America.

Written by Carolyn Kay, caro-at-makethemaccountable-dot-com

Newsroom
A Television Series

The Chicago Sentinel is one of the last of the old-fashioned newspapers. Its staff and management have spent many years speaking truth to power, locally in Chicago, in Illinois, and most recently, nationally. The Sentinel was mostly a local paper, known as a workingman’s newspaper, until Lou Grant [clearance needed] moved from the Los Angeles Tribune [clearance needed] in the mid-1980s to develop a national profile for the paper.

Lou succeeded admirably. He built a stable of editors, reporters, and columnists who were dedicated, old-line journalists, people who believed it was their job to discover newsworthy events and to report on them truthfully. Lou and owner/publisher Edward Merton made an unbeatable team, and created a widely admired newspaper that won many awards.

Suddenly, Ed Merton dies. According to provisions in his will, his fun-loving, not very bright, son Mike inherits the newspaper, but only if Mike agrees to sell it immediately. Ed was smart enough to know that his son is no newspaper publisher, and that the sale proceeds must be put into a trust fund, or Mike will be destitute within a few years. Ed has also seen the corruption of journalistic integrity during recent years, so he put another condition in his will. Whoever buys the newspaper must agree to a provision that the paper must be sold back to the trust if at any time in the next ten years the trustees (who must all be long-time newspaper people) vote to force the repurchase because they believe the paper has become too commercial.

The sale is handled by investment bankers, at the behest of the executors of Ed Merton’s estate. Bidders are not exactly knocking down the door because of the ten-year provision. The bidding process narrows down to two potential buyers, Katherine “Kat” Harrison Weisman and, unbeknownst to either of them, her father, media mogul Gregory William (G.W.) Harrison. Kat and G.W. have been estranged since Kat married Abraham Weisman twenty years previously. At that time, the intolerant G.W. made no bones about his distaste over his only child marrying a Jew.

Kat is a business graduate of a prestigious Chicago private institution of higher learning, Great Lakes University. As a student, she fell in love with her economics professor, Abe Weisman. She married him over her father’s objections after she graduated, and for eighteen years was a stay-at-home mom. Abe and Kat’s only child, their son Jacob, has just started attending Great Lakes, where his father still teaches, and Kat has decided it is time to spread her wings.

Kat reads in the Sentinel that its owner has died and that the paper is up for sale. She immediately decides she will somehow buy and run the paper. Kat wants to make her mark in the business world to show her father that she can do well, and she especially wants to succeed in his bailiwick, the media. She gets Abe to help her put together a group of investors to bid for the paper.

G.W. becomes interested in the paper because he wants to round out his media holdings. He owns a number of radio and television stations in the Midwest, and some regional newspapers, but now wants to own and run a big-city newspaper. A hard-driving businessman who believes religiously in the bottom line, G.W. finds out from his hirelings researching the Sentinel purchase that he is bidding against his own daughter. The discovery sets him back on his heels. Only lately has G.W. begun to acknowledge his mortality, and he realizes that if he is ever going to reconcile with his daughter, or get to know his grandson, this is the time.

First, G.W. tests Kat. He has his lawyers offer her a deal separate from her investors, without telling her that her father is the other bidder. Kat refuses to sell out her partners. G.W. appreciates her pluck and her loyalty, but he nevertheless makes sure that her group is outbid, and that he gets the newspaper. He wants control—of the paper, and of their relationship.

Kat is devastated when she realizes the other bidder has gone beyond any amount she can raise. She thinks all is lost. Seemingly out of the blue, she receives an offer from the winning bidder, through a surrogate, to become the Business Manager of the Sentinel, with the prospect of becoming Publisher someday. Curious about who the bidder is and why he should make her such an offer, she accepts. Kat finds out on her first day at work that her new boss is her father.

Friction between the old and new regimes begins as soon as the sale is finalized. G.W. takes over the Publisher’s office, and begins to lay down the law that the newspaper is now a moneymaking proposition. The purpose of the writing in the paper is to entertain, not to inform, he tells the staff. He wants more fluff, more celebrity gossip, more scandal.

Lou Grant wants to quit the Sentinel after its sale, but he cannot bring himself to leave in the hands of a man who cares only about profits the newspaper he has been building for almost 20 years. And he has the leverage that he not only knows all the trustees who can force a re-sale, he is one of the trustees. He decides to stay, and hopes that he can somehow convince G.W. or Kat, or both, that the real purpose of a newspaper is to inform the public.

The pilot episode tells the story of G.W.’s and Kate’s struggles to buy the Sentinel, and the immediate aftermath of the sale.

Recurring Characters:

Lou Grant is the Executive Editor of the Chicago Sentinel. He is a big bear of a man, gruff but kind. Lou is an old newshound who does not understand what has happened to the business he loves—getting news to the public. Lou was the news director of a television station in Minneapolis and then an editor of a newspaper in Los Angeles. Ed Merton hired him to come to the Chicago Sentinel to improve the paper, and Lou succeeded.

Lou and his wife of many years were not able to have children. Since her death, Lou has only the newspaper to love. There is an occasional relationship with a woman, but mostly Lou’s time and energy are taken up with his work and discussing philosophy with his friend and confidant, Father Pat, at the Billy Goat Tavern on Lower Wacker Drive.

G.W. Harrison recently purchased the Sentinel. All his adult life, G.W. has been a very predatory businessman and very conservative in his politics. In running his media holdings, he has always insisted that advertisers be pleased above all else. It is this ethic that he wants to teach his daughter, to qualify her to run his media empire when she inherits it. He does not understand Lou’s insistence on good journalism. G.W.’s first wife committed suicide, leaving him with a young daughter. He had always been more committed to his business than to his personal relationships, but became even more so after his wife’s death. He completely neglected his frightened, lonely daughter. There followed a procession of wives, each younger and more beautiful, but less intelligent, than the last.

While totally ruthless in his business dealings, G.W. is quite sincere about wanting to get to know his family, he just does not know how to go about it. He only knows how to control relationships. It is how he runs his business and how he runs his personal life.

Kat Harrison is G.W.’s formerly estranged daughter. Once she realizes that her father bought the Sentinel out from under her and then hired her, she understands that he wants to reconcile with her and get to know his grandson. After many years of therapy, she has almost gotten over the great anger she felt toward her father for abandoning her to boarding schools after her mother died. She decides to see if she can build some kind of relationship with him.

Kat is a survivor of ovarian cancer. The cancer was discovered while she was pregnant for Jacob. She had a hysterectomy immediately after he was born, so Jacob is and always will be her only child. Kat’s cancer experience played a major part in her decision to remain at home for so many years, raising Jacob. And it is one of the most important reasons why she now wants to run a newspaper. Just as she wanted to make a big difference in her son’s life, she now wants to make a difference in the world.

Kat feels caught between the old and new regimes at the Sentinel, since she can understand both viewpoints. She likes and admires Lou Grant, even wishes sometimes that her father were more like him, so she ends up being the peacemaker, the go-between, for G.W. and Lou.

Abe Weisman is Kat Harrison’s husband, an economics professor at Great Lakes University. He is an academic, and an economist who does not subscribe to the principle that greed is always good. He won some acclaim in the 1980s when his early predictions on the failures of Reaganomics began to prove true. He is friends with one of former president Bill Clinton’s economic advisors and has testified before Congress on certain issues. Abe has had a field day with the Bush agenda, but he had only written for academic journals.

After G.W.’s purchase of the Sentinel, Abe begins to write a column on economics for the paper. He frequently butts heads with G.W. because of the liberal content of the columns. They both try to keep their confrontations civil, and for the most part they succeed. Slowly, Abe and G.W. begin to get to know one another, and start to form a grudging respect for each other.

Jacob Weisman is Kat and Abe’s son, a freshman at Great Lakes. Intelligent and handsome, he lives at home while attending college. Jacob changes his major regularly as he is “finding himself.” In Jewish tradition, Jacob was reared in Kat’s Protestant faith. But Jacob is curious, and begins to explore Judaism. His first appearance on the program has him speaking elementary Hebrew while studying for his bar mitzvah. G.W. does not know what to make of his grandson, but tries in his gruff manner to get to know him. Jacob amuses his father, and his mother adores him, but both experience pangs of angst as he becomes an independent adult.

Callie Johnston is one of Lou’s stalwarts, a political columnist of the liberal persuasion who fought her way from the mail room to the editorial suite. G.W. does not dare suggest firing her, since she is a Pulitzer Prize winner. And an African American. Callie made her name and won her Pulitzer for her reporting on the Chicago Seven trial many years ago. Since then she has written about politics, and despite all the craziness and all the corruption and the many years she has been covering the subject, still loves the political process—and the politicians, too.

Callie was the featured columnist for the Sentry before Harrison took over. Once Harry Wilkins comes on board, she is more or less pushed aside, and almost frozen out of the local radio and TV discussion shows. Callie mostly feels that she has made her mark, and the one great ambition remaining in her life is to get her two daughters through college and established in their chosen fields. Brilliant girls, twins named Betty and Barbara, they are almost finished. The closer they are to being independent, the more free Callie feels to tell management what she thinks, instead of what she knows they want to hear.

Harry Wilkins is a conservative columnist G.W. has long admired and whom he lures away from his previous employer by offering a weekly commentary-style television show, in addition to publishing and syndicating his column. Harry is very egotistical, and thinks the world should certainly be ready for him to be on television. Harry is in his 50s and, though married, with two adult children, considers himself quite a ladies’ man. He pushes his unwelcome attentions on every good-looking woman he sees.

Harry, in addition to having his own television show, is a frequent guest on the cable news channel food fight shows. He eats his opponents’ lunch on these shows by bullying them, rather than arguing the issues. Harry never went to college. He is very proud of his self-educated status and his anti-intellectual stance. He sees himself as everyman, even though he makes millions of dollars a year.

Marty Quilty is the newspaper’s website editor. A young man, in his twenties, Marty admires Harry Wilkins. He works with Harry to publish as much gossip as possible on the paper’s website. In their attempts to beat the competition with scoops, Marty and Harry get egg on their faces rather frequently. A comic character at times, at other times Marty invokes pity. He’s almost a pretty young man, and he wears a bowtie to distinguish himself from the crowd.

Marty may be a homosexual. One is never certain, and he himself probably does not know his sexual orientation. Both Marty and Harry claim to be staunch advocates of family values, and the kinds of families they mean do not include any same-sex couples.

Hang Tran, is an intern, a beautiful young woman whose mother is Vietnamese, and whose father was an American soldier she has never met. Her mother managed to get to the United States not long after Hang was born, and has eked out a living as a translator. She and Hang both must work long hours to pay for Hang’s schooling at Great Lakes. Hang is a journalism major, and is very fond of Jacob Weisman. They have an ongoing flirtation, but it never gets terribly serious.

Assigned to do research for both Callie and Harry, Hang feels whipsawed between polar opposites. She often seeks the advice of her favorite professor to help regain perspective on what journalism is or should be.

Father Pat is Fr. Patrick J. O’Donnell, S.J. He writes a weekly column on ethics and morality for the Sentinel, and he teaches at one of the local Catholic universities. Father Pat is very liberal. He believes that Jesus was an advocate for the poor and downtrodden, and that his job, if he wants to follow in Jesus’ footsteps, is to do the same. He believes that the current wave of selfishness and bigotry in America is completely un-Christian, and he fights it with all his energy.

An activist since the 1960s, Father Pat was one of the sources for the articles that won Callie her Pulitzer. He and Callie have remained friends all these years. Father Pat also writes romance novels under the name of Molly Green. His books are wildly successful, and he donates all of his profits to charities and to radical causes.

Mike Merton is the happy-go-lucky son of the former owner of the Sentinel, Ed Merton. He shows up from time to time to provide comic relief, always with a tall, lovely model on his arm. Mike spends more money every month than his trust allows him, and he tries to borrow from everyone. They learn not to lend him money, because he never pays it back. Money is not important to him, so he cannot imagine it could be important to others.

But Mike is loveable. He is a fun-loving clown, and one of those charmed individuals who go through life getting into scrape after scrape but managing to avoid disaster, formerly with help from his father, and now with help from his friends at the Sentinel. Everyone stays exasperated with Mike and his reckless ways, but they like him anyway, and help him when they can. G.W. and Harry compete for the attentions of Mike’s girlfriends.

Granny Bee writes only a weekly column since she retired. And she still does one-minute radio commentaries. Granny is a southerner who somehow got transplanted to Chicago and became a social commentator. She’s a cross between sweet little Aunt Bea of Mayberry and Sam “I’m just an old country lawyer” Irvin. Granny made her name by showing that you don’t have to be terribly well educated to be wise. Many years previously, she and G.W. had an affair, so Granny does not hesitate to tell G.W. when she thinks he is wrong.

Possible Feature: Granny could do one of her one-minute commentaries at the end of each show, and Harry Wilkins could counter her argument. They could take turns being point and counterpoint.

Ideas for Episode Story Lines:

Lou finds out that one of his reporters has been making up information that he reports as fact.

G.W. refuses to let Kat run ads sponsored by a progressive Internet activist organization, but allows the running of ads sponsored by the government that are basically political ads for the administration.

An advertiser takes great exception to a story, and threatens to pull all ads for his company and to get the Chamber of Commerce involved to convince other businesses to pull ads.

G.W. makes a secret deal with a sports stadium owner to do a Sunday feature section favorable to the stadium in exchange for additional advertising revenue.

Harry’s latest book does not sell well, so right-wing organizations buy it and give it away to make sure it goes on the best-seller lists. Right-wing websites have contests to push the book higher in the lists than a book written by a liberal.

Another company in the conglomerate is involved in a scandal, but the paper is not allowed to report on it.

Union members strike to get better pay and benefits, and G.W. strongarms them.

A local right-wing talk show bloviator is caught in a child pornography ring. He is a friend of Harry’s, and Harry does everything he can to defend the host, despite knowing that he is guilty.

Lou deals with an email and call-in campaign to get a reporter fired because she participated in discussions on liberal websites.

A presidential advisor leaks a false story to Callie in an attempt to discredit her and get her fired. She does not fall for it.

The administration in Washington threatens to block access to all departments if the paper prints a story that reflects negatively on the president.

A liberal congresswoman feeds material to Callie, especially activities by right wingers in Congress to freeze out Democrats.

Harry takes his flirtations one step too far with a researcher, and she sues him and the paper for sexual harassment.

Although Lou has primary control of the editorial board, G.W. insists on assigning reporters to political campaigns.

Harry discovers a horrible truth about a major political figure but refuses to publicize it after deciding that the G.W. would want it kept under wraps.

Lou discovers that the nation's dominant cable news network is coordinating its reporting with the candidates it favors, but the story is spiked because G.W. wants to do business with network's owner. G.W.’s goal is to become the nation's premier media mogul, which requires an expansion of his broadcasting holdings, and he knows that he must not alienate the politicians who can make it possible.

In at least one episode, Edward R. Murrow and William L. Shirer come back from the dead to talk with Lou about the difficulties with their early reporting from Europe in ’38 and ’39. CBS thought their reporting was too anti-Nazi. Their appearances could be a regular feature.

© 2004 Carolyn Kay