More to the point, the idea that he was regularly grilling the "powerful" from behind his desk and teleprompter is laughable. I suppose 30 years ago when he started he may have been holding powerful people's feet to the fire.
These days, the man who became known as "DFL Don" is more likely to be holding powerful people like Minneapols Mayor RT Rybak not accountable, but sweetly in his arms while laughing and performing at a fundraiser for a liberal news web site.
Just so. I stopped watching WCCO after Shelby's self-importance became too much to bear, especially his commentaries, where he comes off as Ted Baxter with a slightly better vocabulary.
It shouldn't surprise anyone that self-importance is a trait of anyone who thinks they ought to appear on television. Some people eventually get beyond that. When I was in college there was a hotshot news anchor who came on the air at a Green Bay television station. The guy's name is Tom Zalaski and he started at WBAY television not long after Shelby began at WCCO. At first it was obvious that Zalaski was thinking Green Bay was just a stepping stone and that he was bound for glory, or at least a larger market. In his initial broadcasts the condescension in his voice was almost palpable as he discussed the latest drunken domestic dispute in Bonduel or kicked it over to Carmen Winkler in the "Lakeshore Bureau" for a dispatch on a barn fire outside of Two Rivers.
But a funny thing happened; we'll let Zalaski tell the story:
I came to Green Bay at age 25, telling myself I would stay here for one year and then it was off to the 'Big Time'. Now, 25 years later I realize how blessed I am to have stayed. There is nothing more important one can provide for his family than quality of life. In that respect, Green Bay is the Big Time.
Zalaski raised a family in Green Bay and lost his wife to cancer in the 1990s. He did move from WBAY to WFRV, but that was the only change he made. Although I don't know the particulars of Zalaski's career, he most likely had opportunities to go someplace else. He was at least as professional a news reader as anyone currently working in the Twin Cities. It would have been easy enough to imagine Zalaski landing a job at one of WCCO's competitors; after all, Zalaski's former colleague Joe Schmit got out of Green Bay and ended up here. But Tom Zalaski realized something important, something that I rarely see in other television personalities -- it really isn't about you.
The last time I was back in the Valley, I caught Zalaski on a newscast. While he was the same guy I'd seen all those years ago, he wasn't the brash, almost-smartass broadcaster he'd been in the 1980s. He seemed content to tell people what was going on without adornment or puffery. He didn't feel any need to opine or tell us What It All Means. He trusted that his audience would be able to figure things out without any prompting. Somewhere along the way Tom Zalaski learned to trust the intelligence of his audience and stopped sneering at barn fire reporting. I wish more people in the news gathering business felt the same way.
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