Transcript

1. Source(s) of Interest/Early Experiences

I guess my earliest experience was in high school when I did the morning announcements over the public address system so (laughing) before I was receiving a paycheck, I was blathering into a microphone. Really, I got into by accident. I was a liberal arts major at a liberal arts college. I studied American history as my major with a lot of different languages. I worked at the college radio station, but spinning records as a DJ. I had been the editor of my high school newspaper, so I had always enjoyed writing and journalism and that sort of thing. When I was in college I had a job at the local radio station downtown during which time I did a lot of local reporting. At the point when I got out of school, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. That was respectable then; maybe it still is. And so I applied to a lot of different places, among which were several small radio stations, and I found that every radio station I applied to offered me a job, so there must have been something there. So I took one of them, the one that paid the most by $10 a week, and I ended up in the proverbial little radio station in Vermont. And, that’s how I started. From there, because of my interest in language, I applied to an internship at the Voice of America, and so shortly thereafter, I was down in Washington doing that. There was something about broadcasting that drew me. I suppose it was the combination of being able to apply my ham bone instinct and my intellect with current events, which have always interested me. When I was a kid, working as a janitor in the high school, which was how I made money in the summers, I went around with the news radio station on, on a transistor radio listening to something called the Watergate Hearings.

2. Internship/Work Experience

I was with the Voice of America for about six months. I did not leave because I had a problem with any kind of censorship or government oversight. But I did feel that the slow pace was not consistent with my metabolism. I went to the Associated Press Radio Network, and for, I think about eight weeks, I was based in Washington, cutting tape, doing some reporting. But as fate would have it, their London correspondent left. As fate would have it, I was being paid next to nothing. And as fate would have it, the Wire Service Guild contract prohibited the Associated Press from transferring somebody and having them take a cut in pay. Because that was a very low budgeted position, there were very few people who could actually go take the job. So I was in the right place at the right time for the right price, and I ended up over in London, then, at the age 24 as an overseas correspondent. Fabulous time – I covered Lech Walensa and his --the rise of solidarity through Poland. I covered the disturbances and hunger strikes up in Northern Ireland. My biggest ongoing story when I was in Europe was the American hostages who were held in Iran at the time. We were monitoring that from London, and when they came out, I was down in Wiesbaden down in Germany for the depart—for the arrival of the American hostages after their 444 days of captivity. So that was a wonderful experience. And one night at about 1:00 in the morning the phone rang, and my boss from back in Washington said, “We would really like you to come back and be our White House correspondent.” And so I then came back with the Associated press to become White House correspondent.

Then I was with radio for another several years. I also was national correspondent. I worked for a time at the White House, and then I spun out and was national correspondent, what I referred to as the poor man’s Charles Kurault. With AP, I traveled all over the country and did some great things. At that point in 1984, I joined CNN. And again, I joined CNN, not having done television, not intending to, not knowing where it was going to go, as a General Assignment reporter to learn television. And six weeks later they came to me and said, “Would you be our White House Correspondent?” So I was back at the White House in 1984 with CNN till ‘91 through the Gulf War. CNN asked me to anchor a couple of newscasts coming out of the Gulf War, which I did for several years. Um, and, in 1994, they came to me and they said, “You know, we really would like to combine your – what we think are your -- leadership skills with your broadcast skills, and we would like for you to take the job as Executive Editor in the newsroom and reorganize the newsroom, sharpen the editorial content, that kind of thing.” And, I, after some great thought, took that and a year after that became Bureau Chief.

3. The AP Style Manual and Other Tests

For our writers, we apply our own writing test, which is both stylistic and substantive. We expect people to know widely and deeply an array of current events, world leaders, issues that are before us. We expect them to be able to write well and coherently and that kind of thing. We do not give, you know, somebody else’s test.

4. Past and Current Pressures, Conditions, Realities

Infoedutainment, Accuracy, and Consumer vs. Media Responsibilities

Need for Consumer Responsibilities

The explosion of outlets on broadcast print, certainly Internet, has to some extent allowed us, collectively, to blur the line between information, entertainment, and education into this info-edutainment thing that we can call it now. I tend to not be one of the great pessimists on this. And while there will always be those who will demagogue an issue and who will sensationalize an issue and who will report irresponsibly on an issue, I think, generally speaking, people will know where the responsible in depth reporting lies. That being said, it is noisy, and it is confusing out there. And what people do have to learn, and my big campaign now is that, you know, we can continue to flog ourselves, those of us in the media, to get better and be more responsible and all, but I think attention to some extent has to shift to the news consumers because you can click on The New York Times, CNN, The National Enquirer, or Drudge – they’re equally easy to access. So you, the news consumer, are going to have to decide where you want to spend your time, and you have to assess the information just as you the consumer assess the quality of any other product you consume. Now I think that the single most important thing that any person who wants to be an informed citizen can now do is read. It’s a little counter-intuitive to say that -- because everybody wants to click on the Internet, and everybody wants to watch television. But you gotta read. People have to read. And, again, I tend to be a little bit optimistic on this, perhaps overly so, but I think that in the end people are smart. Being realistic, I think the consumer is going to influence the news business only to a degree. The degree is the degree to which they buy the newspaper, the magazine, or watch television, or listen to the radio. Larger numbers will speak for themselves, always.

More about the Influence of the Internet: The Pressures of a Real-Time or 24/4 News World

(1). Less time for decisions on what to run

Across the industry we have less time for deliberation now, less time for discussion, things move much, much more quickly. Decisions have to be made much, much more quickly, often in real time -- that’s dangerous. It’s dangerous because it robs us of what now looks like a luxury to contemplate something. And if you make a mistake, you make it in real time. If you do something well, you do it in real time. But it can be a dangerous business at times. Ok, you know somebody is standing up on the bridge with three hostages, and they’re wrapped in -- and they’re wrapped in explosives, and there’s a local helicopter hovering overhead, and you have a picture back from an affiliate. Do you take the picture? They may have a whole city stopped. It is the news; the picture’s available. If you don’t take it, some -- your competitor will take it. But if you do take it, and that guy pushes the button, and he blows himself and those three innocent people up, you have submitted your audience to something that, if you had an opportunity to screen any story or any tape, you would never have them watch bodies falling apart.

(2). Internet and Broadband Influence in a Real-Time News World; the Future of Newspapers

We’re in a 24/7 world. And it’s very interesting because everybody says, “Oh well, CNN brought us the 24 hour news cycle.” That’s not true. I mean the wire services existed for years and years and years, and they were on basically a 24-hour news cycle because, if they put something out, a radio station could pick them up right away, or a local station could cut in with a bulletin. Or, if you were one of the few people who actually had access to a wire, you could read it as it happened. But, in terms of mass communication, CNN really kind of led the way. Sure, there were 24-hour news radio stations and that kind of thing, but CNN and the impact of the television picture led the way. What we did 20 years ago has been replicated a million-fold now because of the Internet because everybody’s real time. Nobody has a down time. During the Monica Lewinsky business, we were coping with on-line submissions, real-time on-line submissions from Time Magazine -- Whatever happened to their once-a-week deadline? -- from The Washington Post--One newspaper isn’t enough; they can publish on-line at any time during the day -- from The Wall Street Journal, from the Dallas Morning News -- I mean these are just some of the publications that were publishing as they got the stories, irrespective of when their newspaper came out. So, it’s not just CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, Fox, local channels, the networks any more. It’s not just those. It’s almost everybody. And it’s going to intensify even more. As we start going to broad band, now, as television and the Internet marry and come down the same pipeline into your home, into your television/computer, literally any channel, which will also be any Internet site, can -- will be able to do that because the technology and the speed to bring those pictures into your home and that information into your home in real-time will exist. First of all, people are always going to want to hold something in their hands and read it. They are going to want to read it at their own pace and hop around the way they want. So, I don’t think newspapers are going to go away any time soon, but I think their mission has changed and will continue to evolve.

(3). An issue for contemplation in a real-time news world

And I think there’s a very interesting part of this that I’d throw in just for contemplation. The real-time world that we are entering raises profound challenges to the kind of society we are and the kind of decisions we can make. Just imagine if we had been in this environment during D-Day -- World War II -- thousands of men going ashore being cut down, cut in half, and there had been a live picture from that place, or there had been tape that had was turned via satellite or a reporter on a Sat phone within minutes or hours. World War II is an extreme example because it was a tremendous and clear threat and national unity. But the idea of absorbing those sorts of images and what that does to public opinion and how that has clearly changed the challenge of policy makers who must mobilize and retain public support for any kind of military operation where people are dying -- that’s huge stuff.

5. Deaf People in Journalism

I think that aspiring deaf journalists like aspiring journalists of any sort have vastly more opportunity in this interactive world that we’re entering. And what’s interesting, challenging, and exciting, all at the same time about it is, at all levels, we don’t even fully appreciate or understand what this is going to be all about. We’re dealing with this every day. We are discovering almost every day some new application of our interactive journalism. Uh, and, I think that, as we develop this more and more, there’s great opportunity. Now, that being the case, I do not want to be a Pollyanna about this sort of thing. I think nobody knows better than aspiring deaf journalists themselves the degree of challenge to progress in this or any field for that matter. But I think that probably the most important single task is the determination of the individual and the receptivity and creativity of the organization to which they would like to go, to search together to find something to make something work. Television--we have very peculiar constraints because it is an audio-visual medium, and so, if someone is especially challenged in one of those two parts, we need to find a way to get around that or to compensate for it. That can happen in a number of different ways--some of it technologically and technically and some of it through how we choose, you know, to task somebody. Obviously, we would not have a deaf journalist being the audio engineer on a news show, ok? But there are other places where -- where some of those skills can, in fact, be compensated for by other skills, whether it’s research, whether it’s some form of production that is partnered with somebody else, whether it is out in the field conducting interviews like this one. We have invested in some of these things. We have a great commitment to trying to be a very open and diverse workplace. But I will consider it successful when I have a graduate from Gallaudet working here.