Media Watch

BUD FOSTER AWAITS INDUCTION TO ARIZONA BROADCASTERS HALL OF FAME

Bud Foster can thank a bank robber for where he is today. In
the 1970s, as a fledgling behind-the-scenes producer at a Phoenix TV
station, Foster, who at the time looked more like Grizzly Adams than a
newsman, was stuck in a Valley Bank branch at 27th and Camelback while
it was being robbed. It was a flamboyant robbery, too, not one of those
quiet pass-the-note jobs.

“He said, ‘Get your hands in the air, don’t rattle keys, I’ve got a
bomb in the box. I’m going to die. You’re all going to die,'” Foster
recalled. “He gets his money from the tellers, leaves in a white pickup
truck, so they locked the doors and I’m inside. I walk outside when
they finally opened the door and there’s the Channel 12 news
crew. They started talking to me about it. They get on their radio
saying Foster was in there. It’s not very often you get to do a first
person story. Somewhere there’s film of this kid with long hair and a
beard talking about what it was like being inside a bank while it was
being robbed. The news director said, ‘That wasn’t bad; you want to do
that again?’ I said sure. I had to clean up a bit, but I’ve been on the
air ever since.”

For 30-plus years he’s been an anchor and reporter, most of that
time in Tucson, the last 15 years at KOLD, an opportunity that
arose after the only time in his career he was let go.

“The old saying is you’re nobody in television news unless you’ve
been fired at least once. I was fired once,” Foster said. “As long as
you’ve been hired one time more than you’ve been fired, you’re OK. You
never take it personally. When I was fired, we were the No. 1 rated
newscast with ratings higher than the other two stations combined, and
I asked why am I being fired, and the man said, ‘Bud, you’ve lost that
gleam in your eye.’ I guess it was the lighting or something. Very
early on I learned you can never take it personally. It’s not a
reflection of your work and how you do your job. It’s a reflection of
someone else’s personal preferences. Once you’re able to deal with that
and come to terms with that, it allows you to stay in the business and
move on and not take it personally.”

What Foster does take personally is performance. The reasons for his
induction at the 20th annual Arizona Broadcasters Association Hall
of Fame luncheon—the other three members of the class are
iconic Phoenix television news anchor Kent Dana and Valley radio
legends W. Steven Martin and Dave Pratt—run deeper
than just longevity. When KOLD moved Foster from the morning anchor
desk into the field as its political correspondent, it made the CBS
affiliate the local TV news destination for information related to
political occurrences in Southern Arizona and throughout the state.

“Every news organization has to have its institution. You need
someone with an institutional memory,” Foster said. “Other newsrooms
don’t have the luxury of having someone who can talk about (the history
of Arizona politics). You have to have that. It gives us a huge
advantage and it helps us a lot. I am a staunch advocate of local news
coverage, and local political news coverage. I don’t know if the other
stations have made that commitment. I am fortunate our management has
made that commitment. There are a number of times where I was the only
reporter sitting in on a zoning meeting. Why would a TV station show up
for a zoning issue on the northwest side? I do that. We do that, and
the other stations don’t have that kind of commitment.

“If you look at the latest ratings book, content is exceedingly
important. You can have a beautiful and great anchor team, but if you
don’t have content, it ain’t gonna work. You can have an average anchor
team, and if you have great content it will work. Content is the most
important thing you can have, and the most important thing you can
sell. That’s one of the reasons I think they’ve seen fit to put me in
the Hall of Fame, because I’ve always been about content.”

Given Tucson’s screwy political climate, Foster isn’t at a loss for
material, and even though his responsibility is reporting the news, he
loves to engage in lively conversation about the issues and problems
facing the area, from what he sees as a flawed city charter to
inconsistencies in downtown redevelopment contracts to the negative
effects of term limits for representatives at the state level.

“It’s more entertaining now than it ever has been. Tucson has this
system that doesn’t work, and it’s obvious,” Foster said. “You have to
have a strong mayor. Lew Murphy thought he was a strong mayor,
even in this weak mayor system. He’d tell (city councilmember) Tom
Volgy to sit down and shut up. (Current mayor Bob)
Walkup won’t do that. He has six people all moving in different
directions and there’s nothing he can do about it. It’s brutally awful
for the people in Tucson. It’s dysfunctional. Right now is the worst
I’ve seen. They need to get their act together because we’re seeing
some really hard times. They need to rewrite the charter, rewrite the
code, rewrite the development agreements, and as long as they don’t do
that it’s entertainment at its finest. But everybody in Tucson gets
hurt by that.”

Foster’s Hall of Fame induction is not his swan song. Far from it.
He recently inked a three-year contract extension with KOLD.

“By the time that’s out I’ll have almost 40 years in this business,”
said Foster, who is just two years removed from quintuple bypass heart
surgery, which in and of itself has given him something of a lighter
outlook on the future. “I’m going to die at my desk, but at least I’ll
have a nice suit on.”

This article appears in Oct 22-28, 2009.