Former longtime WIBC reporter Eric Berman passed away

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Former WIBC newsman extraordinariy Eric Berman passed away.

Speaker 2 (00:06):
This morning.

Speaker 1 (00:07):
And for those of you who know longtime WIBC listeners, look,
I think he was here for more than twenty years,
from the nineties all the way into I mean he
was here through parts of COVID and many of you
will remember Eric Berman as the longtime voice of the
State House back when WIBC used to have a permanent

(00:30):
entrenched like many other news outlets positioned in the state House.
He would do daily reports from the State House. He
would get the interviews with the politicians. And he was
a phenomenally interesting guy despite in addition to his reporting
that everybody knew him from best known probably as he
won on Jeopardy.

Speaker 2 (00:51):
He was Jeopardy Champ. He was on it. He won
an episode of Jeopardy.

Speaker 1 (00:56):
And Eric was a very interesting guy obviously if you
went on Jeopardy, guy whose IQ was off the charts.
And you know, when you deal with people who are
so ridiculously intelligent like an Eric Berman, and then you
have a guy like me, So what's up right? Like,
what do you even talk to a guy like that?
But I was talking to him about his appearance on Jeopardy,

(01:18):
and he said the biggest challenge of Jeopardy was not
the questions, but it was mastering the buzzer.

Speaker 2 (01:25):
Yeah, buzzing in to answer the question.

Speaker 1 (01:27):
Because there was really an art to doing the buzzer.
And what he said was he said a lot of times,
the people who will be very the most effective on
Jeopardy are not necessarily the smartest people. It obviously helps,
or even the most well rounded also helps, but the
people who can master the buzzer because it is a
sprint to get into that buzzer properly. So anyway, I
wanted to pass that along that he and he did

(01:49):
pass away this morning. I worked with Eric for I
say with I mean, he was over at the State
House most the time, but I'd see him in the
building and obviously we would air his reports and for
numerous years and just a really great sort of a
sort of he was a throwback a bygone era it
doesn't exist anymore in which media outlets had people Casey

(02:09):
totally entrenched in the state House every single day.

Speaker 2 (02:12):
Yeah, a state House press corps.

Speaker 1 (02:14):
Yeah, And it's interesting I was having I mentioned that
I had lunch yesterday with a very prominent Democrat, not
an office holder, but somebody who's very entrenched in politics
for many, many years in the Democrat Party. And we
were talking about just this, about how he was saying that.
You think about even twenty five years ago or thirty

(02:37):
years ago, there were forty plus people with media credentials
there inside the state House, like you know, legitimate. I
worked for this newspaper. And they were from all over
the state. You had Louisville at Fort Wayne, you had
the region. They had people that they would send down here,
especially during session, and they were just entrenched. They lived here, right,
And you had all of these people trying to search

(02:58):
out all of these things, not just in terms there's
a policy, but hey, what's the Shenanigan's going on behind
the scenes, And through budget cuts and consolidations and more
budget cuts and more consolidations, there's only a handful of
people even there anymore.

Speaker 2 (03:11):
And that's why these politicians do what they do. They
most can get away with it. Yeah, and for the
most part, they all live here in Indianapolis full time.

Speaker 1 (03:16):
Yeah, I mean, and you think about I get this
all the time. I'm sure you get this all the time.
I know, are other friends in the media get this
all the time. Why aren't you covering blank? You should
look into.

Speaker 2 (03:27):
Da da da da da.

Speaker 1 (03:29):
And it's like, okay, but when do you expect me
to do whatever thing you want me to do in
addition to all the other things I do? And it
just really is hard. It's no, it's no fault of
the media into well, I mean in the sense they've
they've cutted their budgets, they've slashed their budgets, they don't
have this anymore. But in terms of the people that

(03:50):
are in the state House, there's only so many hours
in the day. You have to cover the nuts and
bolts of the stuff going on because that's actually affecting
people's lives. So then when you get all these sort
of like extracurricular things that are happening.

Speaker 2 (04:02):
Can't do it all. You just can't. And that's why these
politicians pull the stuff they do.

Speaker 1 (04:06):
It takes a very high bar, see someone maybe getting
indicted or being oh, I don't know, under a grand
jury investigation to actually draw the attention of the public
because you have to have some sort of paper trail
of something to get to be looking into these things.

Speaker 2 (04:21):
Yeah, but by all accounts. Eric Berman was a truly
kind person and had a thirst for knowledge.

Speaker 1 (04:28):
Oh he was great. He was great, and he truly
was a throwback to a bygone era. Guys like him
just don't really exist anymore. And one of the things
about Eric Berman, who was it was fascinating to talk
to him because he never really gave his opinion on anything.

Speaker 2 (04:46):
A true journalist.

Speaker 1 (04:47):
Yeah, I mean on these stories, on these stories he
would cover, you'd sit there and shoot the breeze with him,
and you know, he'd have opinions on things. But my
point is in his news reports, in the things he
covered fact based, he was just here's what happened. And
this is what the WBC newsroom still does so well
to this day. Now we don't have somebody in entrench
in the State House like we once did, but the

(05:08):
news department, they're totally separate from us. We talk about
this all the time that those guys are not us,
and we are not them, and they're certainly not accountable
to or for us. Right, they do a very good job,
the WIBC newsroom, as it has for generations, of just
simply giving you the facts and then letting you decide
what to do with that right, Letting you decide