10 Plus 1: Producer Michael Solmsen And The 28-Hour Drive From Jordan To Baghdad

(CBS)

What do you do at CBS News?

To the untrained eye, I pace around like a mental patient while waiting for other people to do things I've asked (or begged) them to do.

To the trained eye, I am coordinating and overseeing a highly sophisticated, complex, yet easy to understand news story.

It turns out the untrained eye sees more accurately on this one.

Just so you guys at Public Eye know, this is the question everyone hates. Here's the best answer I can come up with. There is no answer. News should be flexible. Pressing issues change all the time, and getting fixated on any one can make a news division slow in reacting. New problems and issues pop up all the time, reacting to them intelligently is when we're at our best.

At the beginning of the invasion of Iraq I was in Kuwait. Dan Rather came through trying to get to Baghdad. We were in a fairly desperate state to get there...and I was fairly inexperienced and in wildly over my head. We tried all kinds of routes, including chartering a 200-seat 747 to fly ten of us to Jordan. It was from there we set out for a 28-hour drive to Baghdad. Now Saddam statues were already falling, so we felt a bit late in getting there. We started to drive at 2 in the morning. I was in an SUV with a camera crew and Dan. He was riding shotgun (he likes to sit up front) I was in the seat behind him. Three hours later I was fast asleep, I only woke up because our SUV was riding over huge boulders off the main road at 80 mph. Dan was bouncing around like a bobble head, and I was banging against the roof of the car. After about 100 yards we came to a stop, it was during that bumpy ride when I was wondering whether or not they let you keep working at CBS after you kill the anchor.

Needless to say, we all survived and made it into Baghdad. The SUV didn't. Made for a pretty big expense report.

Morally? Never. Having loose principles helps.

Once Jim Axelrod and I were assigned a story about a monk and an overweight lady who stopped a man from shooting a police officer. It was all caught on camera (naturally). Jim and I thought doing the story made us look a little silly. It might have had something to do with the fact that the overweight lady foiled the crime by sitting on the armed man.

We went to our bosses and complained (we're Jewish, so I guess we whined while gesturing with our hands). But to no avail. It made it's way onto TV. Jim's reputation was never the same. He's stuck on the White House lawn covering the President.

I would love to own a minor league baseball team. Either that or a restaurant. But I don't know if I could stay in business with a place that only serves fried chicken, chocolate cake and bourbon.

I can't say that I do. I usually wait for my friends to send me links from Drudge, YouTube, and NewsBlues with "important" things. You know, like rap videos by Smirnoff about "high tea in the parlor making the ladies holla." Guess you'll have to look it up.

"Little Miss Sunshine." I actually saw it with my friend and co-worker Chris Dinan. Turns out Katie Couric was also there. She hadn't started anchoring yet, but was working for CBS. After the movie ended we looked at each other and tried to figure out if we should say hi. We decided we didn't want Katie to assume that Chris and I were on a date, so irrational homophobia took over and we ducked out after it ended. I guess now is where I'll say, "Not that there's anything wrong with that."

My first memory of what I associated with TV news was watching Gilda Radner do Roseanna Roseanna Danna talking about "Soviet Jewelry" and Dan Akroyd calling Jane Curtain an ignorant slut. My first memory of real news was President Reagan being shot.

This is a selfish answer. But I'd love it if they would just let me do whatever stories I pitched.

Martha Stewart. Met her last year when she was selling homes in North Carolina. Pretty interesting watching a person who is a brand onto herself.

Same person. She yelled at someone that day, it was in front of a whole bunch of people for dragging mud in the house. It's bad to embarrass someone in public. She seems to embrace instilling fear in others (do I get points for naming someone who could have me killed?).

I haven't been there in over two years, and my general rule is, if asked I'd probably go (I'm hoping my bosses don't read this and see this as a reason to ask me), but I'm not so much for volunteering. The first time I went, at the outset of the war, I practically begged to go. But now I can't see asking for the assignment.