TV journalists weren’t quite the easy riders that Eaton made them out to be. In the world of straight, “objective” journalism, the more freedom you gave a reporter, the more he censored himself. “Freedom” scared a reporter out of his mind, because it wasn’t really freedom at all. “Freedom” simply meant that nobody had clearly marked all the pitfalls and booby traps, so the reporter became cautious as a blind men on a battlefield. A network correspondent worried about the FCC breathing down his neck, he prayed that he wouldn’t cross some little quirk of the network-news president, and he thought of all the money he was pissing away   …   To say that TV reporting was an “individual thing” was to say that if a reporter fumbled a story, the shit-hammer came down squarely on his head. There were no middlemen to blame.