The Professor and the Iceberg
Larry Lorenz is about to receive high honors from the local media – but he’s still not totally satisfied with how we’re covering our town.
By Allen Johnson Jr.
What’s going on with organized crime in this town?"
Larry Lorenz suddenly poses the question to his interviewer over lunch. It’s an unexpected question for several reasons.
First of all, everyone else in this Uptown restaurant is currently looking for the waitress. Second, Lorenz, who moved to New Orleans from the Midwest in 1981 to chair the communications faculty of Loyola University, might be the city’s only professor pondering the whereabouts of the mob. Third, the occasion of the luncheon interview is supposed to be about him – not the "muffaletta Mafia" that local feds claim to have broken up with a video poker corruption case several years ago.
Lorenz, perhaps like a dwindling number of journalists in today’s "telebrity" culture, prefers the primacy of news issues to TV personalities – including his own.
In addition to teaching journalism to college kids, Lorenz is perhaps best known as the TV moderator since 1984 of Informed Sources, a local news reporters’ roundtable that airs on public television station WYES-TV/Channel 12. And after nearly four decades of teaching and practicing the craft, Lorenz – along with WWL-TV icon Angela Hill – on Saturday (May 26) will receive a Lifetime Achievement award from the Press Club of New Orleans.
"The honor describes a long tenure of service in journalism to someone who has made a contribution," says Press Club President Matt Scallan. Previous recipients include such local media sages as newsmen Phil Johnson and Bill Elder, and sportswriters Bob Roesler and Peter Finney Sr.
Truth to tell, this lunch could be a self-love feast for Lorenz. He could easily do what many veteran journalists do when it’s their turn in the limelight: gas away the time with self-important recollections of their proximity to great people and events.
After all, he’s got the credentials. In 1962, fresh out of the Army and armed with a bachelor’s degree in English from Marquette University, he joined the Chicago offices of United Press International’s National Broadcast Service. In his first two years in the news business, Lorenz wrote about some of the biggest stories of the 20th Century, which were quickly packaged in broadcast reports and read aloud by 3,000 UPI—client radio and television stations nationwide.
He was on the desk at UPI the day President Kennedy was fatally shot. "I was the No. 1 desk editor," he recalls, solemnly. "We sent out the first bulletins from the time he was shot in the motorcade.
"You know the rush you get with a big story," he says, gravely. "Well, that one was so overwhelming. It was terrible, the tragedy of it all, but I wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere else."
Lorenz also wrote broadcast reports on the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and the Civil Rights Movement sweeping the South. Daunted by the world he was writing about, he stuck his head back into college for graduate school, earning a Ph.D in journalism from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, while taking courses in political science and history. After he earned his doctorate, he covered the riotous Democratic National Convention in Chicago as a stringer for UPI, a time when some reporters were returning to the newsroom beaten bloody by police.
From 1968 to 1980, Lorenz taught journalism at Marquette University. As he has done throughout his career, he continued to work part-time and summers as a radio stringer and newsreader. In the late 1970s, he produced and moderated Milwaukee Behind the Headlines, a public affairs program similar to Informed Sources – but examining the media coverage rather than the stories themselves.
"It was my first work for television," he recalls. And with the show he found his raison d’être as a media critic.
Unlike most journalists, Larry Lorenz’s job is not to ask the tough questions of public officials. His job, his niche, is asking the reporters why the hard questions are going either unanswered or – even worse – unasked.
"I think the poverty in this city is just awful," says Lorenz, 64, who moved his wife and five children to New Orleans 20 years ago. "Why do we have such a hell of a drug problem in this town? Why? Why?"
Why, he continues, is the condition of life for so many people in the city so desperate that they are driven to crime and drugs? "The easy answer is to get a police chief, get more cops," he says. The media, he says, should take a "really hard look" at the legions of people living at or below the poverty level.
"One of the first things I heard from my colleagues at Loyola when I came here was that New Orleans is a great news town," he says. "And the longer I’ve been here, the more I have come to see that is so. But I wonder sometimes if we don’t just scratch the surface of the news iceberg. Television news has so little time, limited staff and the TV news departments are so pushed to profit by station ownership, they cover a lot of ‘fluff’ at the expense of hard news."
By fluff, he says, he means features like "fish-and-game reports."
The Times-Picayune, meanwhile, has "greatly" improved in the 20 years since Lorenz arrived. The daily newspaper does a "superb job of giving the news in an intelligent, readable way," he says.
Among the high marks the professor gives the T-P are for its coverage of the beleaguered Orleans Parish School Board over the last five years, the chronic problems of Harrah’s Casino in New Orleans, and the ongoing debate over stadiums for the New Orleans Saints football team. And when the T-P marshals its resources as it did for a recent investigative series on local disadvantaged businesses or the Pulitzer Prize-winning series on the oceanic fisheries of the world, he says, the paper serves its readers well.
"But it’s not enough," Lorenz says, frowning. "We get page after page of obituaries in every paper. I have to ask the old question – ‘What else could go in that space?’" He then answers his own question: "I’d like to see more coverage of the courts. I hear lawyers tell all kinds of stories about the courts in this town."
And, he says, "I’d like to see The Times-Picayune prod the city administration on why is there no business in this city? Why are other communities prosperous and New Orleans is not?" And where is the "media scorecard" for Mayor Marc Morial since he started his push to change the city charter this fall so he can run for a third term as mayor, Lorenz adds. "What is his report card on the issues? What has he done? My sense is that he has accomplished a great deal, but there are people who say that the mayor is more show than substance. When he says, ‘We’ve got to keep the drive alive, somebody in the media’s got to say, ‘What drive?’"
These types of questions have prompted Lorenz to co-author a journalism textbook. He’s also now working on a history of a Chicago Tribune sports column – the longest running sports column in America. And he continues to moderate Informed Sources.
New Orleans is indeed a great news town, Lorenz concludes, but there are a lot of great stories still out there below the news iceberg.
Like organized crime, for starters .
