Threats of lawsuits from the mayor of Detroit. Complaints about calling the governor of Michigan a coward. Suddenly, I was ungrounded. But now there were expense report caveats: no beer, no direct flights, no snacks or bottled water.

Sitting in my rear office now, feeling that I was some kind of thief, I thought about how far the media business had fallen. I thought about Johnny Apple, the talented newspaperman I had known at the New York Times, who was not known for pinching the company’s pennies. A veritable Pavarotti of the expense report, Apple breakfasted on poached eggs and caviar during his time on the ’68 campaign trail, as he had connived for himself an unlimited travel budget. A famous story runs that Apple, while posted in Moscow, bought himself a fur coat and put it on the Times’s account. His editors balked, sending back the paperwork and instructing Apple to retabulate his expense report, which, to their consternation, he did, with a note attached: Find the mink.

I thought about the stories told to me by the longtime local TV anchors who, after the eleven o’clock newscast, would order a bottle of scotch and an exotic dancer or two to blow off the day’s stress. A limousine would arrive at the station to take them home.

What happened? Working in the news business today, to quote an old colleague, is like showing up to a cocktail party at one o’clock in the morning and finding all the booze gone. The bottom-line pressures brought by stockholders and the internet have stripped the business of what glamour and vigor it ever had. At least on our level. Even as national correspondents for Fox’s local TV group, we were little better than traveling brush salesmen. We were as often put up in crack-infested motels as in three-star hotels. Why the company did business with such places I can’t say. Hookers worked the corner. Ghouls roamed the causeways. Rooms were crawling with bedbugs. Once in San Francisco’s Mission District, figuring it was too much trouble and too expensive to ask corporate for a change of location, I sucked it up and simply wrapped my head in a towel. That may have saved my scalp, but not my scrotum.

I never did journalism for the perks. I do it for the adventure and curiosity and the freedom from the nine-to-five prison cell. I’m no Johnny Apple, and the old newspaperman’s face would probably have puckered with disdain when he saw the most lavish expense report I’d ever submitted: nine pints of beer and a plate of calamari. It took three months for the green eyeshades to decide that I was going to pay for it. Forget that I told them three months ago that I would pay for it.

So, ungrounded now, off we flew on a two-stop flight to Oregon to cover the armed takeover of a bird sanctuary. The Bundy family was at it again with their guns. Risking a whiteout blizzard to make our connecting flight, we nearly skidded off the side of a mountain, blowing out a tire on the rental car.

I would later be told about more caveats: The company didn’t pay for blown tires or funerals, either.