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Wouldn't it be nice?


The late Perry Como, NBC5's Deborah Ferguson, NBC's Brian Williams

By ED BARK
There's been a debate among unclebarky.com commenters about the niceness of former NBC5 early morning meteorologist Rebecca Miller, whose activities were updated earlier this week.

A few seem to think she's an off-camera shrew, which goes against the grain of what most people have been saying about her. I've always found Miller to be very nice, but have only met her once in person. So what do I really know?

First impressions count for a lot, though. They stay with you. As a kid I sat through many of the late Perry Como's prime-time variety hours, mainly because my parents and live-in grandma loved both them and him.

It was torture at first, but his Christmas specials particularly stuck with me. I kept watching them as a younger adult, and finally got a chance to interview Como in person while he taped his last holiday special in San Antonio in 1986.

It's damned disillusioning when people you revere turn out to be jackals. But Como was anything but. He couldn't have been nicer. Not just to his interviewer, but to everybody.

Paul Molitor and Ernie Banks, two of my all-time favorite baseball players, also turned out to be really nice guys off the field as well. I interviewed Molitor as an adult and got Banks' autograph several times as a kid. Came away with good feelings each time.

There also are many authentically nice people working in D-FW television news. NBC5's Deborah Ferguson stands out, though. Again, I've only met her once in person. That was while doing a story on what it's like to get up at ungodly hours to anchor the increasingly important early morning newscasts.

I arrived at NBC5 at about 4:30 a.m. Ferguson was busily putting on her own makeup, and didn't mind a bit that a photographer started snapping pictures when she was plucking her eyebrows or something. She was instantly friendly and forthcoming, as was co-anchor Brendan Higgins.

They had every reason to be guarded, being that I was from a newspaper whose parent company also owned arch rival WFAA8. But there was none of that at all. And Ferguson in particular seemed almost too genuine to be true.

At the network level, NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams is funny, knowledgeable, approachable and completely without pretense. At least that's the way he's always seemed to me, whether talking to him one-on-one or amid a group of TV critics.

A few years ago, on one of the semi-annual Television Critics Association "press tours" in Los Angeles, Williams made it a point to ask several beat veterans about his late brother, Dave Williams, who recently passed away. Dave had been a TV critic for several years, and is a past president of the TCA. But none of us knew he was Brian's older brother. Or that the future standardbearer of NBC News tagged along with him once on a 1980s press tour.

Brian now was looking for little remembrances that others had of his brother. It was a very thoughtful gesture on his part. You don't forget things like that.

This is by no means an all-inclusive list of TV's nice people. There are many jerks as well, but I'm not going to name any of them here. They already get enough ink and attention while the quality human beings often are overlooked.

That's where you and your comments come in. Based on firsthand experiences, who are the really decent local or national TV people? Those who work in the business have a wealth of firsthand knowledge about this. Those who don't can rely on their first -- and often lasting -- impressions.

Accentuate the positive. Eliminate the negative. Let's hear from you.