As some of you know, a reason that I am not posting much these days is that I have been consumed with work for NPR who are working with the stations of the public radio system in the US to find their way to the future.
As I have got to know people at NPR, in the other producing organizations and stations better, I am getting a sense of what is at stake. I went to see Good Night and Good Luck the other night. It is all about the conflict between the commercial world and our need as a society to know what is really going on.
Since then I have been speaking to Bill Buzenberg, ex head of NPR News and now head of MPR News. We talked about this and he sent me this short piece
“Good Night, and Good Luck,” the movie, provides a nice backdrop to the CBS book I published in 1999, along with my former wife Susan. The book is “Salant, CBS, and the Battle for the Soul of Broadcast Journalism: The Memoirs of Richard S. Salant.” (Westview Press) Mike Wallace was kind enough to write an excellent foreword.
The book tells the story of CBS News in its celebrated Golden Age when Walter Cronkite anchored the CBS Evening News, when documentaries were a regular weekly feature with CBS Reports, and when 60 Minutes was created. We drew on some 3,000 pages of memoirs written by the late Dick Salant, who was president of CBS News for 16 years in the 1960s and 1970s. I learned a tremendous amount about the news business from Dick Salant.
As a broadcast journalist who has created programs (Talk of the Nation, American RadioWorks, Speaking of Faith), and who has run news organizations (National Public Radio, Minnesota Public Radio /American Public Media), I learned that the scale of the enterprises may be different (CBS vs. public radio), but the battles are all cut from the same journalistic integrity cloth.
The conflicts are always about growing—not cutting—newsroom budgets to do excellent work; about maintaining an editorial firewall and standing up to internal interference in the editorial process; and about insisting on actual balance and fairness inside the newsroom, while defending the same against a constant drumbeat of biased outside critics (who are sometimes correct). What I also learned was that setting and applying high standards and pursuing fact-based, public service journalism is a high pressure, high wire act for any decent news manager. There are no shortcuts, no autopilots, no easy outcomes. Heads can roll, yet the fight is worth it.
As Dick Salant often said, the First Amendment is not just a license to make money; it comes with enormous responsibility to serve the public. He liked to say that the press is a great moral enterprise, and credibility is its most important asset. To Salant, it was never as much about the audience numbers as it was the value created for the citizens of democracy. He favored serious, hard news, with analysis, context and history.
He wanted great writing and intelligent talking heads. He hated entertainment as news, focus-group fluff, giving people what they want (as opposed to the information they need) and anything that had the tinge of show business. As for balance and fairness (it was said that these words were stamped on his forehead), “Normal news judgments must prevail. We must neither lean over backward nor forward, but simply stand up straight.” Even Salant recognized he was “Mr. Yesterday,” with respect to the trend toward softer broadcast news.
Yet, he would be pleased by the popularity of “Good Night and Good Luck.” It is a reminder that what Ed Murrow did still matters. And that broadcast journalism at its best stands up straight, preserves democracy, and the audience ultimately appreciates the battle for the soul of our profession."
There is a lot to play for - a lot to fight for
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