The Record from Hackensack, New Jersey • 358

39 MIKE TAIBBI IS A NEWS HOUND By Robert Mann ike Taibbi, a 10-time Emmy winner, is a newsman who has no trouble assessing his strengths and weaknesses. "I know there are some aspects of the way I perform that are OK," says Taibbi, seated one recent workday in a cubicle on the outskirts of the Channel 2 newsroom. "I can be intense. I am intense, and if I feel deeply about a conclusion that's been reached on a story, I think I can get that over." On the other hand, Taibbi says he's never been comfortable in front of a camera. "I'm not a natural performer.

I don't like it," he says. "In virtually every one of my pieces, the weakest part is where I'm on television, whether it's the stand-up or on the set" Off camera, Taibbi shuns the spotlight, avoiding celebrity events with as much determination as he pursues his leads. Ironically, though, Taibbi found himself smack in the middle of one of his news stories this summer, when his dogged investigation the Tawana Brawley mystery brought him head to head with the Rev. Al Sharpton. But for the most part, Taibbi has attract ed attention for getting the stories other reporters miss.

A recent case in point was his expose of the exploits of Metro North cops wh in 1983 paraded naked, before a video camera in Grand Central station. Taibbi attributes his success to "enter prise reporting" a term he prefers to investi gative journalism rather than any competi tive jousting. "I don't think about anybody else," says Taibbi. "I never say, oh, who am I up againsi today? I think a lot of that stuff is overblown And if you worry too much about that, you're gonna miss something in pursuit of the He adds, "My only motivation when I gc out is to make sure that I'm hearing well, ques tioning well, that my instincts are in gooc form. If they are, and all that stuff is working, just know from experience that what I come up with is going to be pretty good." It all boils down to a heightened awareness, says Taibbi.

"I think reporters do what everybody does They see things happen, they hear what people say, they pick up something in the wind, they tell somebody else about it But if you're a reporter, you're a craftsman, by virtue of the fact that you do it better. You ask better questions. You ask more questions. You demand better answers, so that when you finally do tell somebody about it, what you're saying is more reliable." Taibbi, 39, has been honing his reporting skills for the past 20 years. Born in Hawaii his mother was a native Hawaiian, his father an American service man and raised in New York, he worked a graveyard shift at the New Brunswick Home News while he was a student at Rutgers.

"When I graduated, I was going to work for Newsday, but a friend of mine said, "You ought to consider TV." He did. And so, when in 1971 a producer for William F. Buckley called and asked him to be a guest panelist on "Firing Line," Taibbi says, he studied hard and did welL The 21-year-old Taibbi did so well interviewing Bishop Fulton Sheen and attorney William Kunstler that WCVB-TV in 3ostoc offered him a job as an investigative correspondent a job he held for the next six years. After a short stint as an ABC network correspondent in London in 1977, Talbb' moved to WNEV-TV in Boston, where he headed the station's investigative team, co-anchored the 6 o'clock and 11 o'clock news, anr, created and was host of a weekly newt maga- See TAIBBI page 62 36 Th Record, Wk of October 2,.