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After a brief start
at WMPS radio, Brewer became the voice of Memphis television news on
WMC. “He was Mr. Television News in the 1960s and early 1970s,”
said former colleague and best friend of 44 years Terry Lee. “You have
to understand, his hero was Edward R. Murrow. He believed in serious
journalism.” That led him to make a decision in 1968 to break
from a lifetime raised in a segregated South to speak out for the
mostly black striking sanitation workers, he told niece Kim Cherry.
She wrote about local media coverage of the strike in a paper called
“They Burned a Cross in my Yard” for a class at the University of
Missouri in Columbia.
“Journalists are
just like other people,” Brewer told her. “We could never be truly
objective. But we could be fair. Because of the way we were raised, we
had to think a little more about being fair then. Intellectually, if
not emotionally, we knew that segregation was wrong. But we were
struggling to emerge from what we’d been taught.” Later, Brewer
struggled with a journalism industry that was headed where he didn’t
want to go, said Lee, a retired senior vice president and manager of
corporate communications for First Tennessee Bank. “He didn’t
like that news was becoming more entertaining,” Lee said. “He didn’t
like all that yuckity-yuck happy talk.”
Brewer resigned as
WMC news director in 1973 after he found changes at the station to be
“professionally untenable.” “Whether you agreed with him or not,
his commentaries were thoughtful and incisive,” said Jeff Sanford,
another longtime friend. After he left WMC, Brewer worked for
four years as manager of the Downtown Council, which later became the
Center City Commission.
In 1978, he joined
The Commercial Appeal as an editorial writer. Otis Sanford,
editorial page editor for the newspaper, said Brewer taught him to be
prepared to get editors interested in a topic. He said Brewer’s
time at the newspaper made him a better commentator when he returned
to television news in 1995 at WREG-TV Channel 3.
“He had a long
history of excellence in journalism in editorial and commentary that
we knew our viewers would embrace,” said WREG general manager Ron
Walter. “He had a depth of knowledge of Memphis that would generate
dialogue and discussion.” When the newspaper and television
station teamed to produce political debates, Otis Sanford and Brewer
were partners. “We didn’t throw softballs,” Otis Sanford said.
“We were looking for inconsistencies to get a candidate to explain
something he said one time and how he explained it differently now.”
The pair made their
own news in July when former Memphis mayor Willie Herenton refused to
participate in the WREG debate when he ran against incumbent U.S. Rep.
Steve Cohen. Herenton called the pair biased and unprofessional.
Memphis Mayor A C
Wharton had a different opinion. “Norm’s peerless knowledge of
the city made him a truly irreplaceable Memphis institution,” Wharton
said in a statement. “He held an unshakable belief in the power of the
press to protect the public good and always held himself to the very
highest standards of his craft.”
He is survived by
his companion, Dr. Lovely Free, and two sons. Funeral arrangements
were incomplete. |
