SALISBURY FORUM
HOTCHKISS SCHOOL
LAKEVILLE, CT—9 JUNE 2006
THE NEWS—WHAT SHOULDN’T CHANGE

Thank you, Senator Roraback, for that very kind and generous introduction. You know, after an introduction like that, the wisest course might be to just say “Thank you and goodnight.” But I will persevere, and I hope you will too. I also want to thank Frank de Chambeau for having me here, as well as my good friend Kitty Benedict.

And of course I’d also like to thank all of you for coming out this evening. There are a number of subjects I’d like to try to cover tonight, but before we get started, I wonder if I could ask you to indulge me on one thing. It’s been a hard and bloody couple of weeks in Iraq and, lest we forget, also in Afghanistan, and it just isn’t in me to stand before you at this beautiful school on this lovely Connecticut evening and not give a thought to the American men and women in uniform who are, at this moment, standing guard in those places. So I’d be gratified if you would all join me in pausing for a moment of silence, so that we can to have them with us in our thoughts, as they go about their difficult and dangerous work.

I mention how tough things have been in Iraq, and it has been a very violent and very eventful couple of weeks there, especially since the Memorial Day weekend—which, incidentally, is when the new Iraqi Prime Minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, began his term as the head of Iraq’s first popularly-elected government since before the rule of Saddam Hussein. Cold-blooded massacres of bus passengers at fake checkpoints, severed heads discovered in boxes, terrorist bombings, police impersonators (it is hoped) abducting dozens of Shi’ites from Baghdad’s streets in broad daylight—these sorts of things have become daily news in Iraq, adding up to a vision of hell to rival Picasso’s Guernica.

In May, it was reported this week, Baghdad’s main morgue took delivery of 1,375 bodies, many of them blindfolded, with tied wrists and showing telltale signs of torture.

There have been times recently when, personally and professionally, the violence in Iraq has hit very close to home, as it did when a team of journalists from CBS News, embedded with a unit of the Army’s Fourth Infantry Division, were attacked by a car packed with explosives, killing a soldier, along with the cameraman Paul and soundman James, and critically wounding correspondent Kimberly Dozier—who is now back in the U.S. and, I am told, in good spirits though facing a long road to recovery.
I want to talk with you tonight about a subject that is very important to me, and that is the news. The news was my first love, and it has kept me fascinated and beguiled for more than fifty years. This is a love story that started—and don’t get the wrong idea here—in bed. When I was a boy growing up in Houston, Texas I was struck with two prolonged bouts with rheumatic fever.

It kept me laid up in bed for long months at a time. At an age when all a boy wants to do is play football and baseball and explore the world around him, I was cooped up in my bedroom under a strict, doctor-ordered regimen of bed-rest. Over that time, my main companion became the radio, with its near-mystical power to transport the listener to strange places with strange names. To other worlds far beyond the cramped confines of my bedroom, and the town, people, and places I knew.

There on the radio, among the many serials and the adventure tales and the like, was one program that called out to me above and beyond the others, from my listening post there on the bed. A program that at once contained more clarity and mystery and unpredictability than all the rest. It was called This Is London, and it was carried on the voice of a man named Edward R. Murrow.

Murrow’s name became a legend because of those broadcasts from the London Blitz, and deservedly so—all of this long before the chapter of his life detailed in the recent movie “Good Night and Good Luck.” As Murrow was bringing the plight of brave Londoners to the hearts and minds of those in North America, as he was outlining the beginnings of the epic struggle in which the whole world would soon find itself joined, somewhere, in a bedroom in East Texas, a small boy with oversized ears—yes, even then—was drinking it all in.

I knew, back then, that those broadcasts from faraway were news, that the events that they contained were fact, not fiction. I was young but I was old enough to know that, old enough to have heard my father, my mother, and my uncle’s talk around the dinner table about the rumblings of war. And I was old enough to understand that the United States might find itself involved in that war, though not yet old enough or wise enough to grasp what war meant, what it really meant.

But the way that Edward Murrow related the story that was his to tell rendered it more compelling than any story sprung from the mind of Edgar Rice Burroughs or Jules Verne. Murrow, in addition to his considerable gifts of erudition and compassion, was a master of the telling phrase, of the perfectly apt, yet understated, description.

Speaking the eerie noise made by solitary footsteps during an air raid, he said they sounded “like ghosts shod with steel shoes.”
Or this, after two audible bursts of artillery fire, “There they are. That hard stony sound.”

That hard, stony sound.

Murrow said, and I’m paraphrasing here, that it was not the purpose of radio to take the story to the listener but to bring the listener to the story. And he did so not only by the scenes he would set with words, but also by putting the microphone down at street level so the listener could hear the footsteps for himself, by at times letting the sounds of wartime London—the sirens, the explosions, the reports of artillery—speak for themselves.

Because of the vastness of the story that Murrow played a part in telling, the fact that he and the group of reporters around him—the so-called Murrow Boys, and they were mostly men, at that time—were also, in their reports from wartime Europe, inventing broadcast journalism as we know it today…this fact is relegated to a footnote, as it should be.

But it is a footnote that is nonetheless important to your speaker, as it is a big part of what made me want to be a reporter. It provided the foundations for the craft I’ve pursued—imperfectly but always with passion—for more than half a century and it established, in what was then, lest we forget, the new media of its day—radio—a set of standards that we might well consider today, as the news moves towards an almost bewildering array of ever-newer media: High definition television, satellite radio and television, podcasts, and, of course, the Internet—with all its many permutations of streaming video and audio, ‘blogs, and custom-tailored information.

Murrow and fellow journalists such as Charles Collingwood, William Shirer, and Eric Sevareid understood the demands of their new medium. In today’s way of speaking, they “got it”—got that radio necessitated a new way of writing, a new way of presenting the news. But they also understood that to report the news is, at its core, to tell a story. That the desire to hear and to tell the news is connected in some primal way with that same impulse that drew the ancient Greeks around the fire to hear about the exploits of Agamemnon and Achilles on the wind-swept fields of Troy. They understood what had to change, and they understood what things were important to keep.

Their success in bringing traditional storytelling to a new medium is how I and many other reporters were drawn into this work, at the first—the desire to hear the story, to go to the story, and ultimately, to be one of the persons who told the story.

To report the news seemed like a call to adventure—and continued to seem that way, even through all the city zoning meetings and tedium and drudgery that makes up the waking life of a reporter who is just starting out.
Because the story that journalists get to tell is, all humility aside, the most important story of all: It is the story of the present; the story of what is happening to our world and the people in it, right now.

I’ve been thinking about these things—these memories from long ago and far away, and what they can tell us about the essence of journalism, ever since I spent a few days, last month, at a convention for the American broadcasting industry. I mention that it was American as a point of fact, but the technological innovations that took front and center at this convention easily apply just about anywhere else in the industrialized world.

I came away from that convention with a mix of emotions. One, I’ll admit, was jealousy: A part of me is envious of the tools that the next generation of journalists will have at their disposal for gathering and reporting the news. But I was also left with a certain sense of unease.

It was the unease born of seeing so much technology arrayed and talked about in such a breathless way, without a countervailing sense of just what use to put it to. It made me think, in a way, of the proverbial fishing concern that builds a tremendous new cannery on the shore, complete with the latest, gleaming, state-of-the-art equipment. A cannery so big and complex that some of the fishermen have to come off their boats and put down their nets in order to operate it. And then, one day, the foreman of that cannery wonders why, despite all the new equipment in the factory, they aren’t catching as much fish as they once did, and the fish they are catching aren’t as big as the ones they used to catch.

One of the buzzwords you hear constantly when media people talk with each other is “platforms.” As in, “We can have a news presence on a variety of platforms, including broadcast, cable, and the Internet.” That’s fine in and of itself, and someone with a strong regard for the news—not to mention an anchorman’s ego—is all for more news, in more places, at more times.
But, for the most part, I think what we’re seeing instead is: The same news, and the same people delivering the news…in more places, at more times. And all of these “fishermen” that have been called on to write for their news organizations’ new ‘blogs, to provide “content” (another buzzword) for their news organizations’ new website and podcasts and their 24-hour cable news platforms are, by necessity, no longer out there fishing for stories, not as much as they used to be. No longer pulling in the big ones, though the news ocean—unlike the actual one—is as well-stocked as it has ever been.

Our own age is called the “Information Age.” And “information” is what one hears about endlessly when one listens to the prophets of new media talk about the news—or what they might call “the news and other reality-based content.”

But information, as important as it undeniably is, is not a story. It is but an element of any story—a fact or statistic or even a picture or piece of video footage that needs to be attached to some larger narrative in order for it to have intellectual or emotional meaning.

To become a story that people will find interesting, or compelling, or even relevant, information requires context. It needs historical and geographical context. It needs context in the form of knowledge of how our democratic and international institutions work—how they and the people who run them really work—and it needs context in the form of subtlety and shading. It may even need grounding in something that is deeper than that which can be conveyed by isolated facts and figures alone—and that is the truth, or as near to the truth as we can come to it.

It takes a lot of thought and sound judgment and experience, a lot of work, and—not least—a lot of money to shape raw information into a compelling, relevant, and comprehensible story. It takes less work, less money, and considerably less thought, to merely extract soundbites, to spout factoids and poll numbers, and simply pass along the latest government-issued press release without scrutiny. It takes less work, thought, and money to boil complex, vital issues down to the in-studio shouting matches so favored by many cable news outlets. And more and more, this easier, cheaper way is the way the news—or what passes for news—is being presented.

This is not, mark well, a new development. It’s part of an evolution that in many ways began in the 1980s, when the major U.S. network news divisions began cutting staff, getting rid of foreign bureaus, and started to fill up their broadcasts with more and more “soft” news—more feature pieces, more infotainment and scandal, and more so-called “news you can use”—fluffy stuff like “How to Find the Best Deal on Your Summer Rental.”
If you went back and look at archival footage of news broadcasts from the 1970s and the early 1980s, you’d be hard pressed to believe you were watching the same thing that we call news today. It isn’t just the haircuts that have changed—thank goodness—and the look of the set and the graphics. It’s also, more importantly, the amount of time that those broadcasts would devote to single, important news items. These days, a two-minute piece by a correspondent is considered a long piece, and three minutes is “a thorough, in-depth investigation.” But as the Watergate scandal was unraveling, for example, it was not at all unusual for the CBS Evening News to run pieces by myself and other White House Correspondents that regularly exceeded five minutes in length.

The premium was on telling the story, fully and correctly, in as much detail as was necessary. Did that mean that an evening news broadcast—half-an-hour long, minus commercials—didn’t cover as many different topics as it does today? Sure. But it also meant that those subjects of greatest importance to our viewers were given the treatment they deserved. It is just my opinion and clearly labeled as such, but I’ll take that any day over being reduced, as some have called the evening news broadcasts and with some justice, to just being, quote, “headline services.”

And along the same lines, I remember permanent, fully-staffed foreign bureaus in places such as Jakarata, and Frankfurt, and Cairo. These datelines now belong to another era. It isn’t that news has stopped happening in these places—far from it—but too many major news organizations have stopped covering international news with the intensity and, crucially, the sense of historical and geographical context that they once brought to bear. All during a time when the world, as we have heard so many times, was getting smaller. All at a time when knowledge of and perspective on international developments was becoming more valuable than at any time in human history.

These trends have accelerated in recent years, just as the rate of technological change has accelerated, and just as the stream of information has become a flood.

This is ironic, and it is a shame, because it seems self-evident that if we are to have any hope of making the flood of information comprehensible—if we are to find a way to drink from this fire hose—and if we, as a society, plan to reap the benefits of all this new technology in a meaningful way, then the old news values, those that require context and judgment and research and old-fashioned journalistic spade work, are still the best way to make these things happen.

Years after his reporting on World War II, at a time when he was working in another “new” medium—television—Edward Murrow gave a speech, at another convention, this one made up solely of news broadcasters. In this speech, (which, for those of you who may have seen “Good Night and Good Luck,” is the one that comes at the end of the movie. For those of you who haven’t I hope I won’t spoil the ending) Murrow outlined what he saw as the perils of television’s growing tendency to provide entertainment over education. He said, of television, “This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely lights and wires in a box.”

The same could be said today, of all the new media: they can teach, they can illuminate; or they can become merely lights and wires in a box.

To be fair to our own time, and to avoid the tendency to romanticize the past, Murrow and his peers were operating in a media environment that was undergoing change, yes, but change that was occurring at nowhere near the pace that Murrow’s journalistic descendants must cope with today.

Now, in all this talk of storytelling and media new and old, there’s one thing I haven’t yet touched on. And when we think now, as Murrow had to do in his time, about what to change and what to keep as the news and media go through rapid re-invention, this may be the most important thing of all, the most vital thing to make sure that we keep.

And that is: To remember that the news is meant to be, first and foremost, a public service. To deliver the news is to tell a story, yes, but it is not just any story, and it is not a story that exists solely to entertain, or to sell detergent, or to gain ratings and demographics. This is not to say that the news can’t do any or indeed all of these things, in an incidental way. But to sever the news from its core mission to serve the public interest would be to render it no longer news, not in any way that really matters.

And for those of us who live in a democratic society, that would be a tremendous danger to us all. Because the quality of the decisions our elected representatives make, and the reaction with which their policies are greeted, are directly related to the quality of the news that is available to voting citizens. The vast array of challenges facing our countries and our world—from our environment to the state of the Middle East, from the minutiae of local concerns to the tumult of national politics—all have this one thing in common: Our responses to these challenges depends on the understandings we glean from the news, whether we get it from newspapers, from television or radio or the Internet.

One definition of news, for which I can’t take credit but to which I heartily subscribe is: The news is that which the public needs to know…which someone, somewhere does not want them to know…and all the rest is just advertising.

This definition is so important to me because it tells us what we should expect from news. We should expect it to be enterprising and entrepreneurial; we should expect it to ask tough questions, and to not take the answers of the powerful at face value. We should expect it, and the reporters who gather it, to do some digging for the truth. We should expect news, yes, to serve a public interest—and we should expect it not to confuse the public’s interest with the narrow interests of any particular elected official or corporate CEO.

Moreover, we should not expect it to hew to any set party or corporate line. We might even expect it, from time to time, to upset the established order of things, if that’s the direction where the facts and the reality point.
This definition of news also tells us, indirectly, something about storytelling, something that I think may be instructive to all those broadcasting executives who, in trying to remake the news, are really trying to figure out how to get viewers—especially younger viewers—to watch the news.
Because it reminds us that the most compelling, the most interesting stories, are best told straight, no chaser. Too many times when I watch a news broadcast these days, I’m struck by the heavy reliance on euphemism and tact—as if the correspondents were conducting international diplomacy rather than trying to tell you exactly what happened in Washington, or anywhere else. As an example, try to think of the last time you heard anything said by a powerful official, no matter how patently absurd the statement might have been, referred to as a “lie.” Likewise, in interviews and press conferences, the most important question of all—the follow-up question—seems to have fallen strangely out of fashion.
I don’t know where this urge to be so polite, this mandate not to offend came from, but I wish it would go away. Now I don’t want you to walk out of here tonight saying that “Rather said journalists need to be more rude,” but the work of the press is too important—not for us, but for our audience—for us to take so much care not to step on toes. To paraphrase President Truman, if you’re a reporter and you want a friend…get a dog!

When we try to smooth all the edges out of an important story in order to make it palatable to all, we inevitably rob it of its drama, and more importantly, its truth. And I think viewers can sense this, especially the younger viewers that the owners of media corporations so desire. And so they tune out. The public opinion surveys tell us that they increasingly prefer to get their news from comedy programs—which, though they will never win awards for accuracy or depth, do often manage with humor and satire to get to the underlying truths in news stories that real news sources so assiduously avoid.

What I’m trying to get across is my belief that soft-peddling the news is not only bad for democracy—it’s also bad for the business of news, for those who are concerned with such things. And it’s bad for our attempts to craft something meaningful out of the mountains of information that reach our eyes and our ears every day.

Never before in history has humanity had to deal with change coming as fast and furious as it does now. A hundred-and-fifty years ago, the fastest thing on earth was a horse at full gallop. Then it was a locomotive…then, in the short span of a century, an automobile, an airplane, a rocket ship. In my own time, which does not quite go back to the Pony Express or the telegraph, I have seen newspapers give way to radio and to television, and finally the Internet. All these media have their strengths and their weaknesses where the delivery of the news is concerned, and all of their part to play in that role. The same can be said of the innovations that are just open us, and those yet to come.

The news media, new and old, has a tremendous potential to increase our understanding of the world and its people, and to dispel harmful stereotypes…it has the potential to increase the reach of democracy and keep it vital, at home and abroad…and it has the increasing power to link us in common cause to face some of the truly monumental challenges of the new century.

But all the new and amazing ways we have of communicating with one another, of sharing information, will only succeed in living up to their potential if we remember, in using them, what they are there for. They are there to tell the story of our world, without fear or favoritism, and in the public interest. And if we see evidence that those who own the machinery of communication have forgotten these things, it is up to us—as news reporters and news consumers, and as citizens—to remind them, often and without apology.

Because otherwise, in the words of the man whose story of London burning first reached me in faraway Texas, it’s merely lights and wires in a box.

Thank you.