WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - The WRFH Interview: Lee Harris

Episode Date: September 19, 2025

Lee Harris, a Radio Hall-of-Famer, recently visited Hillsdale's campus. Harris recently served as Director of Integrated Operations for NewsNation & WGN Radio. For 30 years, he was morning news anchor at 1010 WINS radio in New York. He also operates Harris Media, where he has developed tools to help broadcasters. He joined Camryn Juelg on WRFH.

This is Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I'm Cameron Juleg, and with me today is Lee Harris. Now, Lee Harris recently served as the director of Integrated Operations for News Nation and WGN Radio. For years, he was the morning news anchor at 1010 Wins Radio in New York City, and he also operates Harris Media, which he's developed tools to help new broadcasters to radio. So how are you today? It's great to be here on the campus of Hillsdale. Dale, which I'm very familiar with from a distance, and I've taught a couple of virtual classes here over the years, but it's great to finally be on campus, which I have to admit is much bigger

and grander than I had envisioned for some reason. They've been doing a lot of construction lately. I bet you've been seeing that, but we've gotten a lot of news recognition lately just due to the whole culture and everything, and Hill still being one of the few colleges that's gone against that. Well, I'd say aside from some Bible, colleges, you may be the only one. Yeah, absolutely, especially when it comes to free speech. And I know with radio, that's one of the forms that you used to extend that. How long have you been doing radio exactly overall? Well, I started, believe it or not, when I was 13 years old. 13, wow. So let's just say that Richard Nixon was still president. What sort of radio broadcasting did you do at 13? Like,

how did you really get into it? What were they letting a 13-year-old do? Well, there was a local radio station on Long Island where I grew up and they played rock and roll and at night they had a feature called School Scope and they let kids from the local communities come in and say what happened at their school that week. So, you know, Wednesday, we had a fire drill. Thursday, Mrs. Pinkney fell and broke her arm and they'd let you come on for 90 seconds and, you know, say that kind of nonsense. And the idea is you tell all your friends and they would tune into the station and the ratings

would go higher. So as a promotion, it was pretty clever and, you know, got to go down to the radio station and sit in a real studio with an RCA 77, you know, egg-shaped microphone. And, you know, it would seem like the big time to me. Absolutely. And like, so you started off doing that. What got you into seriously considering it maybe as a career? Did you ever think of it as a career, like when you were that young or is there something that changed that? I did because back in the 1970s, everybody was pretty lazy. And I heard guys on the radio working three hours a day. And it didn't seem like they were working very hard. They were, you know, talking over the introductions of records. And I said,

you know, that seems like a pretty good job. I later found out there was a bit more to it than that. Luckily, I was able to get taken in by a local college radio station for the following reason. Back then, you needed a license from the FCC to do a lot of the work at a radio station. Mostly, you needed it to operate the transmitter. And in a small station, if you were on the air, you were also the transmitter operator. And this local local. station, a lot of the kids couldn't pass the license test. So they reluctantly let me and my friend Phil come in and help them out. And I actually wound up teaching the test to college kids, tutoring them when I was in high school. What sort of things does the test include they need to know?

Oh, how many times an hour you had to do the legal ID, you know, station call letters followed by city of license. How often you needed to take the meter readings on the transmitter, things like that. Just basic, simple rules. It's one of the reasons I like the business is that the rules were understandable to a 14-year-old. Absolutely. I know with, you know, Halesda Radio, that's the first thing that, you know, Mr. Bertram did. He just passed out the FCC guidelines, make sure that we all knew him before going on hand. It's definitely not as strict now. There's no test to go on air with this specifically, but that's super interesting. So you started off doing that. you did the test. Was there any sort of education, like maybe college-wise that you needed to

like really get on air? Was it just through connections that you were able to? I already got commercial station work when I was in my senior year of high school. I worked for two commercial stations on the island. Very small stations, obviously, but they operated more or less like the big station. So by the time I got to college, unfortunately, I had more experience than most of the people who were teaching the classes. And I basically studied other things. things to get a more rounded knowledge of the world. What sort of other things did you study? Was it like not?

Medical, medical Greek and Latin. Oh, really? Meteorology. City planning. Did you go to a liberal art school? I went to the University of Wisconsin. Oh, okay.

So certainly a liberal school. They had some art there. That's interesting. So, okay. And when did you start working in New York City and how did that happen? Well, I had a bit of time in the wilderness. this before I went back to New York. So when I got out of college, I went to work in Chicago and an FM station that had a pretty serious news department for an FM station. It was not

common back then and learned a lot, which was easy because I found out, even though I thought I knew everything, I knew nothing. And that's kind of where I learned how to write, how to do street reporting, made a lot of mistakes on their dime. But by the time I got out of there, I think I knew kind of what I was doing. And I went down to Phoenix as a news director of a news talk station there and was my first management job. From there, I went to St. Louis to work for CBS. They had a big radio station there, still there, KMOX, and ran the news department there. Back to Chicago to work for the Tribune Company at WGN. They had a bunch of statewide radio networks for Illinois and Indiana and Iowa and worked on those. Bought a radio station in Wisconsin.

ran that for five years. That was quite a lesson in how not to do things and went back to New York to get out of the radio business selling collateralized mortgage obligations with my brother, financial derivative of product. That lasted about three weeks. And then I was in New York and was getting general manager offers from Wichita and Dubuque, places like that. But I decided, you know, maybe I'll hang around New York, see what happens. And phoned it up an audition tape because I hadn't been on the air in about 10 years at that point and dropped a couple off around town. One of them at 10-10 wins. And about three days later, I was on the air there doing mornings, freelance.

And I figured, all right, you know, this will be what I'll do until a good general manager's job comes by. And then 30 years later, I was still waiting. That's awesome. And I know you said you moved around a lot and you did mention your brother. Did you have a, you know, like maybe a wife or a family during that time that was moving around with you? Or were you just going solo at this point? Yeah. Now, my wife I married after I got to New York, so she's never had to do the gypsy thing.

And, you know, admire very much the wives who did go along for the ride with their husbands. A lot of radio marriages were not long lasting in part because of that. But my wife has had the advantage of having me in the same place the whole time. No, that's awesome. So you were in New York City, you did the Wins Radio. What sort of, what was the one, was there any story that you talked about in particular that maybe impacted you in some sort of way that's really memorable? Well, the big one was 9-11. You don't want to top that.

I hope we never have to. And to some degree, an all-news radio station is marking time until something bad happens. a severe storm, a blackout, or the one we didn't see coming, not at this scale, a terrorist attack. And understand that when the World Trade Center went down, most of the television stations had their transmitters on the World Trade Center. So did quite a few of the FM stations in town. So AM radio at that time was much more of a lifeline than it would be today, although they're trying to get that AM Radio Act passed to make sure.

that all cars have AM radio and they do point back to 9-11 as an example of when cell networks went down over-the-air television and FM went down. But the AM stations, which tend to have transmitter sites scattered, not in a, they're not on buildings. They're out in swamps. I remained on the air. And that might be an emergency lifeline. How soon after, you know, Nileva took place were you on air? Like how quickly did that transpire? We were on the air, of course, when it actually happened. The first thing we heard was on the police scanner in the newsroom where we listened to the police frequencies that a small plane had hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center. And, well, that was a big story right in and up itself, even if we were talking about a Piper or a Comanche, that's a big deal. We didn't quite understand how such a plane could just fly into it on such a clear sunny day.

so we figured there was something deliberate about that. We did not know at first this was an airliner-sized plane. And so I got on the air at 9 o'clock. We had been on the air up until that point, but we switched shifts, and I got on. And at 901, the second plane hit. And the thing I did at 901, that perhaps I think was my best act that day, was when the second plane hit, I immediately declared that we were under terrorist attack. Of course, nobody in a position of authority had said that at that point.

But to me, there was no other logical explanation. And I sort of figured in the back of my head that if I said this in the heat of battle, and it just turned out that, you know, the planes weren't working right that day, that nobody would remember. But to me, I'm sure that there was no other explanation. There was one other guy in New York on TV who did the same thing. But we were alone. and everybody else was kind of doing it the way journalists are taught to do it is,

well, we don't know until somebody official tells us. Sometimes you have to use your own eyes and your own brain, even if you're a journalist. How do you think maybe events would have transpired if you didn't say that? Like if you didn't have the... It would have been much the same. Eventually, somebody in a position of authority would have come out and said it. But I felt it was important to let the audience know the nature of what was happening because, for one thing, we didn't know that those were the only two planes that were headed for New York.

There could have been, for all we knew, 100. And people should need it to know what they were dealing with. Absolutely. I also wanted to ask you, was there anything that you did after the, you know, the actual event took place? Was there any other broadcasting things you did related to that afterwards? Yeah, so it's 2001. You have to remember it's not the early days of the Internet, but it's pretty early. And so at that time, the website for the radio station, TentenWins.com, which my wife built in its original form, was still kind of a makeshift operation.

And so I spent the rest of the day personally updating the website. Nobody else had the time or inclination to do that. How were you able to get information for that? What sort of sources do you guys use? Well, at the time, we had the wire services, but mostly a lot of what we were getting, we were seeing. on television because they had cameras down at the World Trade Center. There were a lot of news conferences and interviews and information coming from various points, and it was a matter of writing that up and putting that up. A lot of the information we broadcast on 9-11 turned

out not to be true in the end, thankfully. You know, we reported that there was a plane headed directly for the White House coming up the Potomac. That would have been Flight 93, apparently, had it made it that far. But we were reporting it as it was about to happen because that's the information we were given. This is Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I'm Cameron Jolick and I am talking with Lee Harris. I also wanted to ask you a little bit more about what was the program that you made for journalists to help out with them? Well, made several over the years because sitting in the studio doing the news, you become aware of the problems that you have because you're the guy having the

problems. One of the problems we were having is that our reporters in the field were doing all of their stories via telephone. And for whatever reason, the more cellular phones that were out there, the worse the quality got to the point where a lot of these reports from the field were becoming unintelligible. And there were ways of getting higher quality audio, but they were kind of cumbersome. So at about the time, the iPhone came on the market, we figured out a way to make an app. for the iPhone that would allow a reporter to press one button and get on the air in broadcast quality. And I think this was pretty transformative. It made the station a lot more intelligible, for one thing, especially from the field.

And it also made the reporters sound like they were actually there. Some of the other solutions to the remote broadcasting problem had noise cancellation, and it made it sound like the reporter was sitting next to you in the studio. And that was nice. They were intelligible, but you didn't get a sense. that they were on the scene of the story. And ours was designed to mix in the ambient sound. So you knew the reporter was not in the room.

He was out there. Do you think that helped out with emergency broadcasting at all? Like quickly relaying information back? Yes. And interestingly, it wins. And I think a lot of the all-news stations work this way. There's kind of a pipeline to get from the source of a story onto the air. And it can take a while for that story to work its way through the snake state.

digestive system. And I think the thing that sped up that process more even than the application QGO Live is when the reporter started using Twitter. And we had a dashboard in the studio that showed us the Twitter feed for our station that the reporters were putting stories into. And very often they were putting the stories up on Twitter before they were getting on the air. And so I started reading what the tweets said and disintermediating the editor who was going to take another 20 minutes to figure it out and get it to me through the various processes that the newsroom had. And here we could skip the whole thing. I'm trusting the reporter that the information that they put on Twitter was accurate.

And if it's not accurate, that's on them. And you can deal with them. What they put on Twitter, I should be able to take to air. And I did. So with that, you would, you know, would you know, would you follow us specific reporters and see if they do post on Twitter. And do you also just use like general consensus as well? Like if you look on there. No, I would not use user generated content in that way. That that has to be checked. But our reporters work for us. And if they're putting it up there,

this is the same content that they would be eventually getting around to putting on our air. So it's trustworthy. And if it proves not trustworthy, well, then it's the reporter who needs to be dealt with, not me. I see. What other ways have you also helped the field of journalism? One of the things that I did, and this is kind of specific to radio, it wouldn't necessarily apply to print or maybe even television, is when I did get back on the air, I had been off the air for about 10 years, and I sort of developed a different approach to doing the news, which is I had been a civilian for a long time. and I realized that a lot of the things that the people in the newsroom doing it every day for a living got caught up in were not things that interested the general public. They're very into the procedural aspects of things and the official names of things and trying to make everything sound important.

Went to the general public a lot of the time. These things are not important. So I looked at the news from the viewpoint of a civilian, what would be important and how would I want to be told about it. So the first thing I did is eliminate all journalese from my writing and speech. For example, there were no motorists in my news stories. You had drivers. This is an argument I've had with women over the years, but I think I'm still right, that no actual person who is not a newscaster has ever called a child a toddler.

You know, this is a word you hear on the news that you don't hear in general conversation. So anything you wouldn't say in a conversation, I wouldn't say on the news. Also, very often when people did watch or listen to the news, they made fun of it because there were obviously things you could poke fun at in the news. The people who were being reported about, the actual nature of the story, et cetera. So where there was a joke to be made, I made the joke and let the audience know that we knew it was funny too. and I'll give you an example. It's not the best, but it's the one that comes to mind is that there was a woman living in a high rise

on the Upper West Side, and she had a falcon circling her building and looking at her chihuahua rather menacingly. And she called the city. She wanted them to get rid of the falcon, do something about it. And I tagged out the story with, the woman is hoping that the bird goes back to mind

and its own falcon business. And so 5% of the audience got the joke and, you know, the others paid no attention. But for the 5% it made their day and they got a laugh and laughs release endorphins. Endorphins are addictive. You come back tomorrow. So there's an act. That's why, you know, morning zoo radio shows are successful because people get addicted to the laughs. Well, just because you're doing the news doesn't mean that you can't work in a joke here or there when appropriate.

Do you think that's why podcasting has become so popular in the United States? Podcasting is not done like newscasting. Podcasting is very casual. It sounds like normal people talking. And yes, I think that is one of the reasons why it is so popular. It doesn't seek to have a divide between me, the newscaster on Mount Olympus and you, the lowly listener. You're treating the listener as a peer. And this is what I try to do as well. Do you think that newscasting still has a future considering that? I think it has to adapt and adopt. I often suggested to talk radio programmers that it would be better to have the talk show hosts do the news and provide a little context because what they would typically do is they would break at the top of the hour and have a news reader do five minutes of news. And very often it sounded like the news reader didn't know what they were talking about because the talk show host sounded so much more informed than the news.

than the news reader, who wasn't able to work in the nuance and the significance of the story. They weren't able to contextualize it. And so I think you'd be better off to some degree having the talk show host, read the story, say what he thinks about the story, and read the next story, which is kind of what they do on the shows. So the news is almost superfluous in that regard. Speaking of that, did you have any disagreements with your own stations that you may have worked with? editorially, yes, but at the end of the day, you know, it's their candy store and I defer. If I feel that strongly about it, then I can stop working there.

But for the most part, they trusted me and I trusted them. This is Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I'm Cameron Jolick, and I'm talking with Lee Harris. Besides that, do you have any sort of encouraging words for people that maybe want to get into radio or want to getting to broadcasting? And do you have any sort of advice you may give them? Yes. So there was a time when the job was more skill-based. You had to learn to talk like a radio announcer and read everything properly.

You might have to learn how to work the equipment and how to edit video or audio. And you would have to learn to write in a certain format. The most important part of the job now is one that was not considered important when I was getting into the business. And that was the ability to think. Like, does this story make sense as present? Very often it doesn't. And then what's wrong with the story? Let's dig into this.

You know, famously, the joke was that you could call newsrooms around New York and tell them that there was a horse outside Central Park drawing a livery cab that can recite the Declaration of Independence. And everybody would send a crew down there, you know, without thinking that that's not possible. It's obviously some kind of a joke. You might want to go down and find out what the joke is. but, you know, very often newsrooms would buy these things hookline and sinker because there was a lack of critical thinking. So I think the future is bright for those who are able to think critically, who can express themselves clearly,

and the technical skills or having a beautiful voice or whatever, that's nice if you do. But if you sound like Ben Shapiro and you have Ben Shapiro's thoughts, you'll do just fine. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Our guest has been Lee Harris, and I'm Cameron Jolick on Radio Freehosedale, 101.7 FM.