The ABC of TV

Alma Kadragic, former ABC producer; associate professor, College of Communication and Media Sciences, Zayed University, Abu Dhabi

I was born in Budapest, where I lived for six months. Then my parents dragged me along as they tried to get out of the Soviet bloc and into the free world through various parts of then Czechoslovakia.

When I was 3, we finally arrived in Geneva where we remained five years waiting for a US visa. Although we had offers to go (elsewhere), my father had the American dream and insisted on going there. From the age of 8, I was raised in New York City.

Undoubtedly, there were hardships along the way, especially before we got to the US, but I was with my parents, and that was all I needed.

Later I heard about financial problems and major crises, like when my father was jailed by the Czech authorities who gathered up Yugoslavs and were planning to repatriate them.

My father had the luck of having been neither a communist nor a Nazi sympathiser.

He hated both sides and with the communists taking power at the end of the Second World War, he would have probably remained - as my parents always said - shorter by a head (dead) ... if he had been repatriated.

In a ploy out of Edgar Allan Poe's detective stories, my mother hid a document that they were not supposed to have, essentially an international visa, in her bag and asked the Czech police to search the hotel room.

They found nothing, my father was released, and we were out of there on the first possible train to the West. Shortly after we arrived in the US, my mother started working as a counsellor and my father secured a job as a banker.

I learned English very quickly. I did well in my studies from the beginning and had no problem assimilating.
I majored in English literature, because that was the easiest. I was a good student, used to being one of the smartest in grade school. What I loved most and what was the easiest for me was reading novels.

By majoring in English, I could do that, write papers, get As ... while saving my energies for working on The Campus, the school newspaper at the City College of
New York, where I got my BA and MA in English.

Because I was a baby, 17 years old, when I graduated, living at home and without specific ambitions, I continued into the PhD programme in English, receiving an assistantship and beginning to teach students only a couple of years younger than me.

I eased into full-time college teaching, but didn't like it very much, although I liked the money. I would have stayed there except that I got fired in a typical New York City budget cut that affected only junior faculty without tenure.

That's when I decided ... to try to get into TV news. Although it wasn't pleasant, I often say that getting fired from that job was one of the best things that happened to me. It changed the course of my career and my life.

It took me a year, some contacts ...
... and, of course, luck, to land a job at ABC News, one of the three major American networks at the time.

It was 1974, and after having spent several months working for free - a true freelancer - at a small station outside the city, I had picked up enough terminology and just enough of a sense of how TV news worked to survive at ABC the first few weeks.

By then I knew enough to enable me to develop and grow in the industry.

My first job at ABC was as a writer, meaning working with film and tape editors to write words and then edit short news pieces. It took three years to be promoted.

For the promotion, I agreed to work an overnight shift, starting at midnight and preparing stories for Good Morning America, which went on at 7 am and lasted two hours with the possibility of doing updates ... until noon.

Two years later, I was sent to Washington DC as a field producer. It was an election year and I was lucky enough to cover several primaries as well as trips overseas by the president.

A year later, I returned to New York and was promoted to full producer. And 18 months later, I was sent to London to work as coordinating producer for all morning programmes.

A year later, I left that job for the position of bureau chief in Warsaw ...
... that proved to be the most interesting and last assignment of my career in TV news. That time from 1983 to 1989 I covered the collapse of communism and my bureau handled coverage in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Romania and Yugoslavia.

I also worked several times in Moscow when things (were) slow in Poland and learned quickly that while being in Warsaw was quite different than being in London, the difference between life in Moscow and Warsaw was even greater.

Each country differed in its degree of personal freedom and amount of pressure you sensed from the government.

The fall of communism had a great effect on me, not only as a news producer but as a person. My parents went to great lengths to escape communist rule and I grew up hearing about (their) scorn for communism.

They had no respect for it because they saw - both had doctorates in economics - that while its theory may have had admirable aspects, its practice in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia was entirely different.

When I got to Poland in the early 1980s and saw communism on the ground, I saw it was a system guaranteed to kill human initiative, to drive away the best and the brightest. If it ever had redeeming features, they were gone by the time I saw it close up.

You could say I had an orientation from my background and reading as an adult. But I would have easily changed that approach had I seen something else. What I saw was pathetic.

Poland, for example, was a country full of disillusioned people. In each country I heard the saying, "We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us."

I was tremendously inspired by Lech Walesa (a trade union activist who later became the President of Poland), who was always more admired by foreigners than most of his countrymen.

"We saw his leadership and his role as an icon of opposition. They saw a worker whose grammar was often incorrect. It was typical for the European intellectual to have this sort of attitude towards people perceived as being from uneducated lower classes.

It was a perfect meeting of man and moment that led to the Polish revolution - which led to the downfall of communism throughout the Soviet sphere of influence and eventually in Moscow itself.

At the beginning of 1990, when the revolutions in the Soviet bloc were over, I left ABC ...
... having the desire to be an entrepreneur and run my own business. My company, Alcat Communications International, was registered in the US and its subsidiary in Poland. Most of our work was in public relations.

The first client was American Express, the second Levi Strauss and the third Citibank. During the 13 years that I owned the company in Poland, those were the kinds of clients we had: nothing but Fortune 500 or even Fortune 100 companies.

In 2003, I sold Alcat in Poland, it still exists as a name only in the US, because I was tired of spending most of my time in Eastern Europe. I had bought a house in Winter Park, Florida ... and installed my parents there in 1997.

My parents were not well and I needed to be with them and take care of them. A few years after returning to Florida, my parents passed away ... and after that I moved on ...

Through an old friend from ABC days ...
... I heard about Zayed University, applied online and was invited to a videoconference in the spring of 2005. They offered me the job and so I arrived in August, eager for adventure.

I came to the Gulf ... because it was an opportunity to encounter a culture I wasn't familiar with and because my old friend who was teaching here had spoken very favourably about people and conditions here. I have started some freelance writing here, which I hope to continue.

Also, I am working on a research project involving interviewing journalists here. I look forward to that, because journalists are among the most interesting people to talk to in any country.