Mornings With Barney by Dick Wolfsie

just kind of grew,” said Lee. “Barney the dog turned out, over time, to be a very interesting personality. A real dickens around the studio, but viewers just fell in love with him.”
    I thought it was important for the morning news team to know that the big tunas were onboard. How could I engineer some public display of the GM’s acceptance of a dog on the news?
    How could I lobby for their open support? Ah, the lobby!
    The lobby of WISH-TV was nothing fancy—a kind of’50s retro look with a TV monitor and a coffee table stacked with magazines so guests and clients could bide time while waiting to be summoned by the producers downstairs or the sales reps upstairs. Guests often peered at the framed photos that hung on the south wall. Each color picture was a bigger-than-life-size portrait of our news anchors, representing all of our several daily newscasts, about a dozen or so photos in all.
    Now that Barney had his own photos, I wondered whether, just hypothetically, the big shots would consider placing Barney’s likeness on that wall. That would mean that someone else’s mug would have to be removed to make room.
    And so an idea was born. I’d report live from the lobby one morning and take down our star news anchor Dave Barras’s photo, then replace it with Barney’s. I used one of the photos that Ed Bowers had taken months earlier and had it blown up to the appropriate size.
    This is what I call a 6-Up idea. Almost perfect, but something was missing. To make it work, I had to legitimize the switch. I needed the transfer made live on TV—by the execs.
    This was a charade, of course, but one that would be good for a few laughs and serve my purpose, as well. It also meant getting Paul Karpowicz and Lee Giles up at 4 in the morning to be part of the first segment at 5 AM I wasn’t really going to ask them to do this ... was I?
    What the hell. First I asked Giles, who just shook his head and rolled his eyes, but he finally agreed to do it. Then I told him I wanted Karpowicz to do it with him.
    â€œAre you crazy? He’s not going to do that.”
    â€œAre you sure, Lee? I didn’t think you were going to do it, either.”
    I met with Paul the next day, laid out the plan, and waited for his reaction. “That’s damn funny,” he said. “Sure. Why not?”
    And so it was. We did four segments live, the first in the GM’s office at 5:20 AM where I pretended to have a hidden camera listening in on this big executive decision to move Dave Barras’s photo off the lobby wall and substitute Barney’s. On the set, Dave Barras could be heard laughing as the drama ensued. He thought the whole idea was very funny. It was just realistic enough that I thought I caught Dave squirming a bit in his seat.
    In the final segment, Barras’s photo came off the wall and the beagle’s went up. Karpowicz adjusted the frame and turned to the camera. “Nothing personal, Dave. The news is changing. We have to adapt to our viewers’ needs.”
    How prophetic. I would experience that transition myself, but it would be fifteen years later.

Beagles and Burgers
    I’d like to take credit along with Barney for our rise from the bottom of the AM ratings pile to the top, all the way to the number-one morning show in the mid-nineties. I can’t, of course. Television shows live and die by the ratings, but research is expensive and there were no hard numbers that would pinpoint exactly what had happened. The rise did occur during my tenure. And, yeah, it also happened to coincide with Barney’s rising popularity. Anyone who had a nose for the local news scene would have suspected that our growing success had at least something to do with the beagle. My success certainly did.
    Barney gave me a different kind of TV presence from all the other reporters. A guy on another station doing a similar show pegged himself “Treeboy,” often doing