Don Shelby works in a fishbowl, and not just because he’s on television. His cubicle in the WCCO-TV newsroom is right in front of a big window facing Nicollet Mall in downtown Minneapolis. Until he steps down from his anchor job and into retirement, an event scheduled to take place on November 22, passersby can still stop and gawk at him most afternoons, if they are so inclined.
On this particular July afternoon, they can see him composing copy for tonight’s “Good to Know” segment, the part of WCCO’s 10 p.m. newscast where, since 2006, he has stepped away from the anchor desk—figuratively, since “Good to Know” is taped earlier in the evening—to deliver a 45-second opinion piece, his own take on some event in the news.
He is the only TV news anchor in the Twin Cities who enjoys such a soapbox. But then he also is the most decorated—awards include three national Emmys and a Peabody—and the longest serving. He has anchored Channel 4’s 10 o’clock news since 1985, when he took over from Dave Moore.
Tonight on “Good to Know,” Shelby wants to talk about a letter that WCCO received from a friend of some murder victims. A day or two earlier, a man in St. Paul allegedly shot and killed three family members and wounded a fourth in a sketchily explained fit of desperation and rage. The friend’s letter essentially says that the people killed were, indeed, people, and deserved more than a just-the-facts news account of their sudden, violent passing.
The letter struck a chord in Shelby. He is trying to compose a 45-second statement that explains why.
The writer is absolutely correct, he says. “We told the facts of the story. We did the proper reporting on that. But we didn’t say anything about who these people were, or what they meant to the community, their family, their friends.” You can’t do that for everyone who dies, of course. Still, Shelby says, he is haunted by the people who die without a proper sendoff from the TV news.
He is absolutely serious. The complaint that TV newspeople will shove a microphone in a grieving mother’s face before her children’s bodies have cooled and ask, “How do you feel?”—that’s crap, he says. He’s been in the business for 45 years, since college in Cincinnati, and he’s never heard a TV reporter utter that phrase.
Besides, “we seldom have to seek out these individuals,” he adds. “They come to us. They gravitate toward the camera, toward the microphone.”
