March 28, 2005
Bonnie M. Anderson Calls for a Free and Responsible Press
This is Part 2 of a 2-part BuzzFlash Interview with Bonnie M. Anderson.
A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW | Part 1 | Part 2
... a real fault of American journalism ... is that there’s very little follow up. You do overkill on a story, and then let it drop, and never go back to it, never continue an investigation. Whatever happened after the anthrax scare, for instance? After all, this nation was terrified.
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Bonnie M. Anderson won 7 Emmy Awards and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize during her career as a print and broadcast journalist. Now the author of Newsflash: Journalism, Infotainment, and the Bottom-Line Business of Broadcast News shares an insider's view of decision-making inside America's network news divisions. She laments sloppy journalism and the networks' regrettable decision to showcase high-cost celebrity news readers and "infotainment" stories instead of hard news. She talks with BuzzFlash in this, Part 2 of our interview, about responsible journalism and the professional corruption that follows from always watching the bottom line.
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BuzzFlash: At the risk of sounding as ignorant
of journalism as the CNN executive who asked you, “What's a journalist?”
we also have to wonder, what is news? A lot of news seems to go all the
way back to the stories in the Bible. It is basically that Cain killed
Abel, and so you see a lot of murder stories. Or Sodom and Gomorrah were
destroyed, that's where you get reports about devastation like the tsunami.
These things were reported in the Bible as divine events. But the Bible,
in many ways, is filled with news stories -- actions of individuals against
individuals, or very natural upheavals. Certainly, the tsunami story was
an incredible example of that.
Bonnie M. Anderson: Sure.
BuzzFlash: Since you worked as a reporter and as an executive
in the television news business, maybe you can tell us what the criteria
are for calling something news? At CNN, for instance, what is or should
be the standard for what gets reported to the public at large?
Bonnie M. Anderson: At a network like CNN that has a
global audience, basically any major event happening in any country could
be considered news, whether it’s a change of government or a natural disaster
or a war. And why? I think "Why is this news," is probably the
question that gets asked in most good editorial meetings. How many people
would it impact or does it impact? What impact would telling the story
have, as well? Are you educating folks on a political system? Are you
educating people about a hurricane that’s headed over their way so they
can protect themselves? Are you educating people with some investigative
reporting? Are you telling people things they need to know so they can
become wiser and better citizens, and take actions, if they choose, on
any side of an issue?
At a local TV station, the small, two-car wreck could be news. The story of a lion on the loose from the zoo would certainly be news in a small town. But is it truly news on the national and international stage? No, but there’s the human interest factor that might get it a lot of play on national and international newscasts.
Should it? I could certainly see it as a ten-second bump
on a network that says, before we go to commercial, have a look at what
the folks in this small town experienced today. Bingo. But what happens
is that you’ll have networks doing almost the O.J. kind of car-chase coverage
of this. They may spend a great deal of time on something like this. Then
what is not being covered might be a coup in another country, or an earthquake
that may have killed a couple hundred people. That’s certainly far more
newsworthy than the lion that escaped from the zoo.
BuzzFlash: The natural disaster kind of story-telling
has its roots, as I said, going back to the Bible, where you had natural
disasters that became part of the unfolding of the divine story in the
Old and New Testaments.
Bonnie M. Anderson: You know, the journalist in me has
never made that connection, and I’m looking at it more as a journalist.
But, of course, natural disasters are always interest because they impact
a whole lot of people, and there’s a tremendous amount of death and destruction
associated with them.
BuzzFlash: Now let’s turn to the topic of "Infotainment,"
which is one focus of your book. As a news editor at CNN, what would you
do with the Michael Jackson story or the O.J. story? O.J. and Michael
Jackson both have dominated the news, receiving almost 24-hour coverage,
and recently we had the Michael Jackson pajama report. What is the distinction
between entertainment and news at that point? And celebritydom?
Bonnie M. Anderson: How it was covered really brings us to the entire infotainment angle on all of this. Did the Michael Jackson pajama story deserve a minute-ten on NBC? Yes, probably it did, because of how absolutely out of the ordinary it was. You don’t have too many people, much less celebrities, showing up in court in pajamas. Is it worth hours and hours and hours of coverage? No.
The same thing with O.J., which was coverer ed gavel to
gavel. I was a correspondent at the time, and my fellow correspondents
at CNN and I were commiserating on a daily basis. We were going out and
covering real news every single day, carrying on with our jobs, but our
stories were never seeing the light of air. That was a financial determination,
and that’s all that counts to the corporations. For them, it was a great
decision because CNN’s ratings went up – I believe the number is 800%.
A lot of people tuned in. They wanted to see it. But from a journalistic
point of view, it was a disaster, and it was an atrocity.
BuzzFlash: Everyone from the so-called elite press kind
of looks down upon the tabloids -- the National Enquirers of
the world, the Globes, the Stars and so forth. But during
the O.J. trial, you really couldn’t distinguish much between the cover
of the National Enquirer and general news coverage of the trial,
except that some of the stations brought in legal experts and took a kind
of microscopic approach that was numbing.
Bonnie M. Anderson: It was numbing. But you brought up
a great point. As for the National Enquirer and other tabloids,
I think it’s great that they’re around, and I don’t believe in censorship
at all. But that’s where these stories deserve to be. Let them cover the
Michael Jackson story for the full half hour on "Entertainment Tonight."
That’s fine. That’s the purpose of those programs and of those magazines.
The purpose of newscasts should be to truly inform the viewers
or the readers of the most important breaking news stories of the day.
Michael Jackson in pajamas doesn’t deserve forty inches in the newspaper,
or forty minutes on air – not when there are all kinds of events happening
around the world, not when more and more soldiers are being killed every
single day in Iraq, not when there are questions yet to be answered about
Osama bin Laden or what’s happening in Afghanistan. Many more important
issues are being put on the back burner, just to provide viewers and readers
one more tiny detail about Michael Jackson’s pajamas. That’s just irresponsible
journalism.
BuzzFlash: We interviewed David Cay Johnston, a New York
Times reporter, some time back. He had written a book called Perfectly
Legal, which became a bestseller. It was on the growing income gap
between the wealthy and the poor and the middle class in America. The
wealthy have just been getting dramatically wealthier. If you look at
a graph of it, the trend is straight up. And the gap between the very
wealthy and the wealthy and the middle class and the poor just has increased
steadily over forty years. What could news do with a story like that,
a trend story that may manifest itself sometimes in a specific piece of
legislation, like the bankruptcy bill which just passed the Senate. Where
is there room in the news, if at all, to approach a contextual story like
that?
Bonnie M. Anderson: There should be a place in all newscasts
for something like that. Unfortunately, some decision-makers would feel
that it’s not a "sexy" story. And they might say, we don't have
too many people who are going to truly care about this, at least not people
that they are hoping make up their viewership or their readership. That,
to my mind, should not eliminate any news story. You should tell people
what they need to know, and not just what they want to know.
Secondly, though, it points out a real fault of American journalism, which is that there’s very little follow up. You do overkill on a story, and then let it drop, and never go back to it, never continue an investigation. Whatever happened after the anthrax scare, for instance? After all, this nation was terrified. Even at CNN, all the mail was delivered to an outside building and sorted, and assistants had to go there to pick it up and bring it into the building. Any mail that was coming from unidentified sources was destroyed, which made recruiting rather interesting, by the way. You get a lot of tapes that are unsolicited. But whatever happened after that? You can't even go back to the whole hunt for Osama bin Laden. That was the number-one story for quite some time, and now it really has been overtaken by other stories.
This is a great fault of American journalism, and it’s lousy
journalism. There should be room in newscasts for the story you just mentioned
on wealth and lack of wealth in this country, and poverty in the world.
So many issues like this drive policy decisions and drive political fallout.
These are things that people need to know about, so they can put the stories
in context.
BuzzFlash: Has technology in some way shortened our ...
Bonnie M. Anderson: ... attention spans?
BuzzFlash: Yes. Is the technology such that you don’t
want to have a longer story that gets into the context or the history
of, say, the anthrax scare? Viewers might switch the channel, and then
you’re going to lose the figures that you need to get a higher advertising
dollar.
Bonnie M. Anderson: That is certainly a concern. But
by the same token, if every news organization was responsible and revisited
issues like this on a regular basis, then that’s also what the public
would be used to. At this point, the thinking among the producers and
the high-level executives is you have to wow and zow the viewers. Production
needs to be snappy. Stories have to be short. There’s got to have sound
effects and windows that open, and get snazzy production values. They
believe that the public is hooked on this kind of thing. In a sense, they
could be right. How do you unhook them, I think, is the biggest question.
A perfect example of technology pulling the wool over people’s eyes is the coverage of the invasion and the beginning of the war in Iraq, where every station had hours and hours of very stunning live pictures of the tanks going across the desert, and dusty correspondents speaking into microphones as they’re in the midst of a battle.
The live pictures were very impressive. But what did they
say? Nothing. Because of the censorship rules and the agreements the news
organizations had to sign, the public didn’t find out where this was happening,
what was actually happening, whether anybody had been killed, whether
towns had been taken – not on the live part, only afterwards. But they
couldn’t say who they were engaging, whether there had been fatalities
or injuries on either side. Basically, all the viewers were getting was
very dramatic videos with bang-bang in the background and lots of dust
and dirt. People were eating it up without realizing that they were feeding
their eyes, but not their brains.
BuzzFlash: Let’s consider one specific example of that
nightly news edit – the hypothetical nightly news editing conference.
Let's speculate about the attack on a town called Fallujah. Basically
both the Iraqi interim government and the U.S. military told reporters
to clear out of town, that if they stayed in the town, their own lives
were at risk, and that was their decision.
BuzzFlash assumed this was the U.S. military’s way of saying we don’t want covered what we’re about to do to Fallujah. And indeed, one of the first things they did was bomb a hospital, saying that the hospital harbored "insurgents." Curiously enough, the Italian reporter Giuliana Sgrena, who was shot at during her controversial kidnap release, had written about that attack on the hospital.
But in a situation like that, let’s say there’s a nightly
newscast. The Pentagon has said to pull your reporters out because we
can’t guarantee their safety, and the Iraqi government says the same thing.
The news editor either accepts the U.S. government version of whatever
is happening, since they have no reporters in there, and they made their
decision to pull their reporters, or of questioning why the U.S. is asking
all the reporters to leave and trying to find some alternative account
of what’s going on inside Fallujah through the Internet or any possible
means. It seemed to us from what we saw that most news editors chose just
to go with the U.S. government account of Fallujah. And the town was decimated,
but the American government said while it was going on that that was not
the case. They were using "precision bombing."
Bonnie M. Anderson: This is war, American style now.
This is not how wars had been covered – how Vietnam was covered, or any
other war. What’s going on in the mind of the news executive? I think
they’re out of their minds, frankly.
I was a war correspondent for several years. First of all, I don’t want to be protected by the U.S. forces or by the Iraqi forces. I don’t want anybody to feel responsible for my well-being. That problem was created when they embeded journalists with troops because then the troops felt that they had to protect you, and you felt protected. But then you also are bound by their decisions. They say you’ve got to leave, you’ve got to leave. That’s one of the big problems I had with the whole embed program.
Independent journalists traveling on their own do put themselves at risk. A lot of my colleagues have lost their lives. But it is the only way to really be able to independently confirm and document what is happening in these areas. Even journalists who are truly dedicated to the First Amendment and to informing the public, these folks will have to make up their own minds at some point whether or not it’s time to get out, whether it’s too dangerous.
I’ve been in a number of situations where you talk with
your camera crew, your producer, and you say, you know what? This is a
little too dangerous for us. The risk factor is too high. But at that
point, the news organization should be reporting to the public that we
don’t have anybody in there. It was what we chose. We decided it was too
dangerous. And if government – any government – said get out, or you must
leave, then you report that as well. You report that the Pentagon ordered
your people out of this area.
BuzzFlash: We printed an editorial in which we asked,
is it news, or is it appropriate, when the Pentagon hands out a press
release, and a newspaper or broadcast reporter says we checked the news
release, we can’t just accept the news release, so we checked with two
Pentagon sources?. Well, the two Pentagon sources, of course, are going
to confirm their own news release. Is that journalism?
Bonnie M. Anderson: No. The journalist should also have
gone to every extreme to try to confirm that with non-Pentagon sources,
and to try to confirm it by getting information from the other side of
the issue, whether it’s the Iraqis or the rebels or whoever. If the only
way to confirm it is this one source, the Pentagon, then you need to clearly
say that. This is where you say, the Pentagon today released this. We
were unable to authenticate it. We tried. This is what they said. You
have to be careful about how much you’re putting out there. You must be
certain to inform the public that this is information we could not corroborate,
we could not second source. So take it with that grain of salt.
A good example from the other side was during the first Gulf War when CNN had the only U.S. reporters in Baghdad. They were being fed information directly by the Iraqis. I have stood up for Peter Arnett and his fellow reporters many many times, because they were really clear in saying, we were taken to this place. We were told it was a milk factory. We don’t know. And please understand that we are here under guard, that everything we say is being reviewed, and every piece of video we send out, they go through first.
Is there value in this? Sure, because you’re still getting
part of the story. There is no way that these reporters could do anything
but what they were doing. You certainly couldn’t get the American point
of view at the time from Baghdad. You have to let the network's other
correspondents try to fill in those blanks. But they were being honest
with the public and with the viewers by saying, this is what they want
you to know, and we can’t corroborate it.
BuzzFlash: I have a technical question going back to
the 1930s and '40s. Radio was a very important source of news during World
War II. A person pretty much relied on newspapers, and listened for breaking
news and commentators on the radio. Then along comes television in the
fifties, and television news came of age in the sixties. It’s a visual
medium. You’re not hearing someone like Edward R. Murrow reporting the
V-2 bombing of London and imagining what this is like as he’s telling
you those sounds in the background are V-2 rockets hitting London. Now
you’re seeing something. Sometimes for tv we may be told it’s a good story,
but there’s no visual component. It’s hard for us to air because we needs
things that are visually exciting to keep viewers' attention through the
commercial break. What about that side of television? It’s not a blank
screen.
Bonnie M. Anderson: I still believe that a reporter or
a news organization can be creative. Images can fill in a lot of blanks,
but people aren’t going to turn off if you’re telling a compelling story
with just interviews. You can have diagrams, you can have just the reporter
on camera. If you’ve written it in a compelling way, it can be as compelling
as Edward R. Murrow describing something. Let's say you’re talking about
a child who calls 911 and and saves the family from danger. You listen
to the 911 phone call, and you don’t see what’s happening, but the story’s
being told in a very compelling way.
Most television journalists are far too lazy, or they may
not have the capacity to write in such a way that they can draw pictures
with words and inform people by keeping their attention. You can make
a story compelling with words. We know that; it’s been proven by radio.
Why aren’t these same skills transferred to television, especially when
there is a lack of video for a certain issue? A lot of people have done
a pretty poor job when it comes to stories about the economy, for instance.
BuzzFlash: I have a completely off-the-wall question
about local news.
Bonnie M. Anderson: ... which is generally off the wall
...
BuzzFlash: I find that local news sometimes will take
on local government much more than national news will take on the national
government. But for the most part, local news on weekends is the knife
and gun club. During the week, it tends to be -- a house burned down,
a car accident, a scandal at City Hall – that sort of thing. Many years
ago, I attended a session with a producer from a local TV station and
the issue came up that someone thought local news in Chicago was racist
on weekends because they focus so much on crime in the inner city. The
response of this producer was astonishingly frank. This producer said,
“You have to understand that we’re under budget constraints, and the reality
is we listen to a police band. And when there’s a murder or shooting in
the inner city, it’s much closer to us to cover, so we go there because
the expenses are a lot less.” It knocked my socks off to hear the producer
say that. But this producer was quite earnest about it.
Bonnie M. Anderson: I would agree with the producer.
The other thing is, it comes down to what’s news. If it’s on a Monday
through Friday, you have thirty or forty stories to choose from because
businesses are open, and you have a wider variety of stories just naturally
occurring. On weekends, most businesses are closed, so you’re not going
to have a whole lot of white-collar scandals happening. What you’re left
with are things primarily crime-related, or accidents. There’s many an
assignment editor praying for a big snow storm on a Saturday, or just
something to cover. They have a hard time filling air on the weekends.
So you are stuck with stories about sports.
The other thing is, you don’t have your crack teams on on
the weekends. Weekends are when you’re training people. You wouldn’t put
a Dan Rather or Tom Brokaw or any of your front-line anchors or correspondents
on for Saturday and Sunday. You figure more people are doing something
away from TV sets, going out to dinner or to parties or whatnot, and not
watching the news.
BuzzFlash: I recently read a biography of Edward R. Murrow,
who started as a radio reporter and continued in TV news with the CBS
television network and William S. Paley as his boss. Edward R. Murrow
was the only person of sufficient stature to have an impact on Joe McCarthy
and to expose him. At the time, there was pressure on CBS not to air his
report, but Paley stood behind Murrow, having asked him, have you got
your facts straight? Murrow did, and Paley said, well, go with it. That
was the beginning of the unraveling of Joe McCarthy. Would the head of
a network be that brazen today?
Bonnie M. Anderson: Unfortunately, the quality of the news that
they’re giving the go-ahead to is not there. You know about the"
60 Minutes" story reported by Dan Rather on the President’s military
service. Also, the president of CNN approved the Tailwind stories that
proved to be wrong. It comes down, once again, to sloppy journalism, and
stories being rushed to air without all of the triple-checking that is
just part of what we learned as we came up in journalism, or what we learned
at one point. I think, more and more, journalists are questioning whether
enough work, and proper work, was done to back up the stories on these
so-called scoops.
BuzzFlash: Tom Fenton, one of your colleagues at CBS
and a reporter who has those old-style journalistic ethics, has written
a book called Bad News.
Bonnie M. Anderson: Yes.
BuzzFlash: He is very critical of broadcasting news.
Not quite as critical as you are, but critical nonetheless.
Bonnie M. Anderson: It’s selling well. The networks are
actually promoting it.
BuzzFlash: He still seems to have a lot of faith in ABC,
CBS and NBC. In fact, he interviews Dan Rather and Peter Jennings in the
book. But one of the suggestions he has is that an hour-long newscast
on the three major broadcast networks would go a long way toward resolving
the problem. I was a little surprised reading that because, of course,
CNN is a 24-hour station. Why would an hour broadcast on CBS, NBC or ABC
resolve any of the current problems in broadcast journalism?
Bonnie M. Anderson: Would it help? Not unless there are
major reforms within the news divisions. Let’s also remember that the
morning shows for these networks are all within the news divisions. "The
Today Show" is supposed to be a newscast." Good Morning America"
and "CBS Morning News" – these are all within these organizations’
news divisions. Are they taking advantage of that time to give you more
news? No, they interview the latest person kicked off of "Survivor."
So expanding the time they’re given – "The Today Show" went
from two to three hours. Are we getting more news? No, not a single bit
more news.
What's needed is a radical overhaul in thinking about what to do with the time they already have. Let’s go back to the Janet Jackson incident at the 2004 SuperBowl halftime. Every network had enough time to cover that story in detail. Was it worth a minute and a half or two minutes of your 17- to 22-minute news hole in a half-hour broadcast? Of course not.
It’s about prioritizing what is news, and in any given time
frame, whether you have a half hour, an hour, three hours, or 24, it comes
down to how much of this are you going to truly dedicate to news? Sure,
on a 24-hour network, you could dedicate hour slots to debate programs,
to opinion programming. But within the actual newscast, whether a half
hour or an hour, it is really rededicating the news-gathering division
and the programming division to filling that time with the news that people
need to know about.
BuzzFlash: We saw during the election the emergence of
a group called the Swift Boat Veterans, who attacked John Kerry’s record
in Vietnam. They also had a book that was published by Regnery Publishing,
which is a very right-wing publisher and is often used as a vehicle for
getting stories out there. But my question is this: By what standard did
that become such a colossal news story?
Bonnie M. Anderson: That’s a good question. Again, I
think there was very little responsible journalism done. I can’t justify
it, or say what the standard was. Obviously everyone was trying to find
information about the main candidates. But was this information shared
responsibly? Were the motivations exposed? I don’t think so. But, I certainly
can’t defend how the story was covered – not by any stretch of the imagination.
BuzzFlash: America is a nation that has kind of prided
itself and been built on certain cultural stories and myths. One could
argue as a hypothesis that, what we’re seeing now in news, is more of
a groupthink around such story lines. For instance, leading up to the
war in Iraq, the administration had a certain story line, and it was verboten
to challenge this story line, except for a few minor exceptions. In general,
the administration story line was pretty consistently followed by both
broadcast news and newspapers.
We were beginning to see this kind of stereotype, or story line, about people in the 2000 election. The Republican Party was very effective in stereotyping Al Gore as a liar, which doesn’t seem, by any stretch of the imagination, to be accurate. But that got out there. The Republicans managed to insinuate it, and that became sort of a stereotype and a story line. Then in 2004, it was the issue of John Kerry being somehow weak, French – he liked the French and could speak French. He was portrayed as dishonest about his Vietnam record and so forth. And the media starts to accept certain story lines either implicitly or explicitly, and they don’t wake up every day challenging such assumptions, but begin every story with an assumption. Isn't that sort of counter-intuitive to how journalism is supposed to work? Do you agree with that at all?
Bonnie M. Anderson: I totally agree with that. As I write in my book, Newsflash, the media have become lapdogs instead of the attack dogs and watchdogs. Part of this is, that the corporations and the top-level news executives have seen the success of Fox and the apparent mood of this country. They want to go after conservative viewers. One way to do that is to support this administration, right or wrong. They’re also feeling, especially at time of war, that questioning an administration leaves you open to attacks of not being patriotic, which couldn’t be further from the truth. It is patriotic for journalists to question what’s going on. There’s nothing more patriotic than to truly do the job of journalists the way it should be done. But you also have a very, very powerful right wing and Republican propaganda arm that is feeding information and manipulating these reporters.
And the reporters are to blame.The propaganda machine is
a very, very able one, but if reporters can be manipulated, shame on them!
In many cases, I believe strongly that there was a conscious effort to
avoid being tarred by the "unpatriotic" label. I think people
and news organizations were very afraid that the right wing would say,
X network is anti-American, for example, and their viewership would crumble.
Again, it is very poor journalism that does not serve the public well.
BuzzFlash: You are obviously very committed to the craft
and trade and profession of journalism. The fundamental question here
is how important is a free, unencumbered press -- unencumbered by either
corporate concerns about the bottom line or government de facto influence
over the press? How important is a free press to the decisions that need
to be made on public policy in a democracy?
Bonnie M. Anderson: It is absolutely essential. This is the call
to arms that I am trying to spread from coast to coast. It’s absolutely
essential, and Americans don’t realize how important this is, because
we have never gone the way of Cuba or, any of these other dictatorships,
left or right. When you take a look at the countries that have suffered
the most over history, these are countries that have governments, either
left or right, that totally shut down any semblance of a free press.
We need this, and it is not just a free and unencumbered press, but a responsible press, too. We don’t have that, either. It is essential for a democracy, if people are going to be able to live free. It’s essential for our economic well-being, as well. It touches every aspect of our lives. Right now, we are sitting back and watching our freedom erode on all fronts. Among these freedoms are freedom of speech and freedom of the press. These freedoms are as important as any other element of a democracy. This is the rallying cry.
I don’t care if people are left wing or right wing, whether
they support this president and administration or not, but we should all
be, as Americans, absolutely concerned about a free and responsible press,
and be demanding it of these news organizations. We must be willing to
make some sacrifices, frankly, and especially among the journalists. You
speak up, you’re going to get in trouble. But is it worth it? It certainly
is.
BuzzFlash: Bonnie, thanks so much.
Bonnie M. Anderson: You're welcome.
A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW
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Resources
News Flash: Journalism, Infotainment and the Bottom-Line
Business of Broadcast News by Bonnie Anderson
http://www.buzzflash.com/premiums/05/03/pre05026.html
Bonnie M. Anderson profile
http://www.medill.northwestern.edu/alumni...
David Cay Johnston, Author of "Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich -- and Cheat Everybody Else," the Book on How the Middle Class is Getting Ripped as the Rich Pad Their Pockets -- A BuzzFlash Interview http://www.buzzflash.com/interviews/04/03/int04016.html