Terror of the Tube

To hear him tell it, Gary Deeb's job is to sit in front of a television set for up to six hours a day and be insulted. "Counterfeit, stylized brutality that passes for entertainment," he says of the current TV season, adding that the networks' offerings seem to be "devoid of innovation, creativity or diversification," freighted with "drivel," "sanitized doggerel" and "phony, rotten garbage."

Such snarls have won Deeb, TV and radio critic for the Chicago Tribune, a reputation as the wolf-man of the air waves -the sourest, crudest ravager of the medium since Spiro Agnew put away his thesaurus. Deeb's daily diatribes, now syndicated to 60 papers, do not merely dissect new shows but also provide inside accounts of broadcast-industry greed, timidity and assorted other failings. Deeb has described lavish network press junkets in embarrassing detail, disclosed power struggles at local stations, and even exposed the suppression of an abortion documentary at WON, the Trib 's own TV outlet.

When he is not watching the 23-inch Zenith console in his bachelor apartment near the Tribune Tower, Deeb prowls the corridors of local broadcast stations seeking out disgruntled producers, reporters and even advertising salesmen. "Reviewing programs is the least important part of the job," he says. "I love to expose fraudulent, shoddy practices."

Deeb began learning about broadcast practices at age 16, when he became an unpaid announcer at a Buffalo public TV station. He went to the Trib in 1973 after three years as a critic for the Buffalo News. Now 30, Deeb is one of the few radio and television reviewers on U.S. newspapers (out of an estimated 80 or so) who do anything more enterprising than rewrite network press releases. Characteristically, Deeb has not neglected to blast his colleagues either. He has called them "fuzzy-headed boobs whose minds were sealed shut at birth." Not too surprisingly, Deeb has few friends in the industry. Howard Cosell calls him "a punk." Says NBC Vice President M.S. Rukeyser Jr.: "He's not a nice man. At his most egregious, he makes you want to scream!"

Bad Cartoon. Television is one form of entertainment in which critics rarely affect the box office, so it is hard to assess exactly how effective Deeb has been. But his denunciation of bias in a pre-election special led WGN-TV to grant equal time to Mayor Richard Daley's opponents. Deeb's criticisms helped prod the public TV network to air a documentary about the funeral business that the industry had tried to halt. He helped pressure a local station into dropping a cartoon series that he considered too violent.

Deeb is not all vitriol. He has praised NBC's Police Story and Medical Story (the latter was canceled by the network last week) as refreshing examples of intelligent realism, and he almost always praises a solid documentary. Despite his fulminations, he thinks TV, with all its money and hours, does in fact get some good material shown. Says he: "There is more good per week in television than in any other medium -theater, films, records."

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