A Name of Some Significance

I keep two paragraphs out of an 8-year-old Daily Californian story blown up, highlighted and tacked above my desk in my newsroom:

The story was about the Stanford Daily printing the address of then-student Chelsea Clinton.

“What’s wrong with printing where she lives?” asked a UC Berkeley student. “Isn’t that just freedom of the press? Isn’t that the whatever amendment?”

The quotation fairly freaked out people like me, who have been reporters for some 30 years and do have some reason to believe the “whatever” amendment—it’s the first one by the way and, some of us would argue, the single most important foundation for everything good about the United States—deserves just a little more from our elite university students preparing for righteous battle out here in the real world.

That’s where Jim Branson—a name you probably never heard of and a face you’ve probably never seen—becomes important to your life. And the absence of Jim Branson becomes worrisome to all of us.

Jim Branson was a student at UC Berkeley in early 1964 when he got a reporting job at the Daily Californian. How was he to know, as he put it later, “all hell would break out”?

The “hell,” of course, was the Free Speech Movement, a signature event in the history of this nation that reaffirmed with blood and tears and money that the “whatever” amendment is for all Americans, not just those—as one old newspaper curmudgeon once put it—wealthy enough to own a printing press.

As the never-ending battle for free speech continued, Branson became the Daily Californian’s City Editor, then Managing Editor and finally, Editor in Chief. When the paper finally broke free of the university and became truly independent in the late 1960s, Branson was there, helping direct the paper’s history of excellence in its most turbulent, challenging time.

Branson finally left the Daily Californian for something no self-respecting, self-important, self-centered college newspaper kid would ever do: He went to television news, and worse yet, to a job in TV where he would not be on camera. Where’s the glory in that?

For a top-shelf journalist such as Jim Branson, the glory is in the work: In fact, Branson has spent most of the last 30 years being the primary quality control officer at KTVU Channel 2 News—the station that historically has been the dominant news outlet of the Bay Area, going into some two million homes a week.

When the formidable news anchor Dennis Richmond tells the Bay Area what’s going on, he knows the rock-solid authority of Jim Branson has his back.

“Twenty-seven years working with him and I still can't describe how important he is to what we do,” the famously exacting newsman Richmond said of Branson.

As the station’s Managing Editor for almost three decades, Branson has set a standard all the stations—which have a combined audience far wider and deeper than newspapers, radio or, now, online news—could only reach for but often not be able to grasp.

Those standards have always started with that simplest but most difficult of all: accuracy. But Branson also made sure that news you received directly from KTVU Channel 2—which of course filters down through many other news outlets—was also fair, complete and compassionate.

Outside of a few national networks in their glory days, there have been few other local news stations anywhere in the nation with the quality control Branson has brought to TV news.

“I've never come across anyone like him,” said the 10 O’clock News’s indispensable Executive Producer Mike Kelly. “He sees the small picture and the big picture. He knows the exact word to use and sees the full relevance of a story for our time.”

Jim Branson is leaving KTVU—and the Bay Area’s increasingly at-risk news business—next Wednesday for good. He’s done his time in this rodeo. He will continue to live in Berkeley, passionately follow the Bears, listen intently to stride piano and probably complain about lousy politicians.

And whenever any of us are reading, hearing or watching what’s happening to our world through a local newspaper, the radio, an online news Web site or TV news we can thank Jim Branson for quietly, unostentatiously and meticulously making sure the “whatever” amendment remains the foundation of our American hopes.

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