Cocaine, Suicides, abusive sex, abortions, lesbianism, amphetamines, disposable marriages. Such was not the life of some self-destructive rock star, but rather the portrayal of Jessica Savitch. Unfortunately the Savitch family did not cooperate with Blair, so much of the gosspi remains unattributed, undocumented, and unexamined. Blair, who wrote a column for Mademoiselle, is more successful in tracing the rise and fall of Savitch's career and the distorted values of the television news world. Blair argues that Savitch was trained and prized only for her on-camera charisma. When she landed a job at NBC in 1977, she was assigned to the Senate, a beat for which she had neither the background nor the disposition to cover adequately. She was eventually consigned to the "NBC News Digest" which usually required her to read only a minute of someone else's copy from a teleprompter.He career came to a sudden end during a rainstorm when her date drove off the road into a canal. Not three weeks earlier she had rambled incoherently through a 43 second spot on the news.
