SURVIVING BULLY CULTURE

Regal recalls weathering insults, tantrums, and conspiracies in the cutthroat TV news business in this stinging memoir and self-help work.

The author recaps four fraught decades working as a media producer, starting with his 1980s stint on The Morton Downey Jr. Show, where he endured the host’s belittling nicknames (“Weasel”) and rages, which also targeted on-air guests. (“Mort walked right over to the seated anti-smoking guest, puffing on his always-lit cigarette, turned his back to him, bent over from the waist, and screamed, ‘If you don’t like my butt, you can kiss my ass!’”) Regal developed successful legal news shows for Court TV while getting nothing but venomous threats (“one more script like this, I cancel the show”) from CEO Steve Brill. He even received nasty put-downs (“You can’t even work the fucking cue cards”) from the avowedly empathetic psychiatrist hosting The Dr. Keith Ablow Show. But the worst bullying was the quiet isolation Regal experienced at The Wall Street Journal, where bosses ignored him and canceled meetings as they gradually shoved him out, an ordeal that made him almost suicidal from anxiety. The author combines this chronicle of mistreatment with commentary from anti-bullying experts and advice on coping. (Don’t bother with human resources—“Do you really think the HR department will support you over the boss when the boss signs the checks?”—but keep up positive self-talk and support anti-bullying legislation). Regal vividly depicts the psychic turmoil that bullying engenders in gripping, evocative prose; about a meeting where no one talked to him, he writes, “I scribbled feverishly on my pad, just trying to occupy my mind….How did it come to this?…What have I done?…Why do these people hate me?” The book is also a brilliant portrait of the bizarre world of TV talk shows, where the seemingly spontaneous melodrama is meticulously scripted after careful recruitment and vetting. Anyone who’s had a bad job will find Regal’s saga fascinating.

An appalling—and often hilarious—account of terrible behavior in an infernally high-pressure industry.