DEBORAH LEFF: Good evening and welcome. If I didn't know better, I'd think from the size of the crowd that people were a bit agitated about the direction of news in this country. I'm Deborah Leff. I'm director of the Kennedy Library and Museum, and on behalf of myself and John Shattuck, the CEO of the Kennedy Library Foundation, it's a pleasure to welcome you here. I'd like to thank our forum sponsors, the Bank of America, the Lowell Institute, Boston Capital, WBUR, The Boston Globe, and Boston.com. And while we're recognizing people, I see a lot of familiar media faces in the audience. And I can't acknowledge you all, but I would like to welcome the library's good friend and constant supporter, David Burke, the former president of CBS News, and my boss when he was executive vice president of ABC, as well as my very favorite Nightline correspondent, James Walker. And I also of course am very honored that Paul Kirk, the chairman of the board of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation is with us tonight.
When folks visit the museum at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, there's almost always a crowd around the section on presidential debates, because the 1960 debate between Kennedy and Nixon was the first to be televised, and many think that it changed the election's outcome. The man producing and directing the entire enterprise, sitting behind all the equipment you see in our museum, was Don Hewitt. Here's a quick glimpse of him at the time.
Video Clip:
“These scenes were taped during the preparation for the first debate between the two presidential aspirants. And they show both in a relaxed mood chatting with each other while posing for the newspaper photographers. The sounds are normal studio sounds during the preparation for an historic program such as this turned out to be. It was Mr. Kennedy’s presentation and appearance during this debate which many credit with giving his election campaign a major boost. During these few moments before the cameras and the live microphones neither candidate was aware of the camera except in reference to the instructions given them by the man behind the camera and who would direct the program, CBS’s Don Hewitt. In these few scenes, the man who was to win appeared the more confident his opponent somewhat nervous and worried. And it was during these few moments before that debate that our cameras were able to record these excellent close-up views of the two men.”
LEFF: It was Don Hewitt who took one look at the candidates and asked if they wanted makeup, a fateful question if there ever was one. Don Hewitt went on to serve as Executive Producer of the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, and then he created the remarkable and enormously popular broadcast, 60 Minutes, serving as its Executive Producer for 36 years, bringing extraordinary and important stories to the public. Mr. Hewitt is now Executive Producer, CBS News, helping to develop and launch new projects.
Now, you're watching golf, and President Kennedy's golfing partner in 1963 was none other than Ben Bradlee, vice president-at-large of The Washington Post. Mr. Bradlee was living in Washington DC when John Kennedy moved next door. The families became close friends. Jacqueline Kennedy used to complain that it was hard to have a meaningful conversation, because the men only engaged in political gossip. Mr. Bradlee was named managing editor of The Washington Post in 1965, and three years later became executive editor, a position he held through 1991. Under his leadership, The Washington Post won 18 Pulitzer Prizes. He is perhaps best known for his remarkable courage and smarts during The Washington Post's investigation of the Watergate cover-up, the investigation that led to the resignation of President Nixon. Mr. Bradlee is in Cambridge this semester at the Kennedy School's Institute of Politics.
And moderating today's conversation is Meredith White, a former Executive Producer and Senior Producer at ABC News, and former Senior Editor of Newsweek magazine. Ms. White has won just about every award in the field, including seven Emmys, two duPonts, and the National Press Club Award. She is the niece of Byron White, who was Deputy Attorney General, and later appointed by President Kennedy to the US Supreme Court. Sadly, we don't have a photograph of Meredith when she was at Justice White's swearing in with President Kennedy, but she assures me that she looked great in her pink dyed-to-match outfit and her pink corduroy tennis shoes. Meredith, I turn it over to you.
MEREDITH WHITE: Thank you, Deborah. And hello, Ben and Don.
BEN BRADLEE: Hi.
DON HEWITT: Hi.
WHITE: Well, it's hard, after seeing those pictures, I think, to jump right into the present after seeing all those photographs we just saw. So I'd like to stay just with that time for a few minutes. Debbie said you produced that first debate, Don, and we know you did. And you always say that Nixon lost the debate because of a bad makeup job. Can you just tell us a few details about that night and that makeup?
HEWITT: It was an amazing night. Jack Kennedy walked in that studio, and he looked like a Harvard undergrad. He was perfectly tailored. He was tall, thin. He was a matinee idol. I mean, it was, Cary Grant was running for president. And Richard Nixon arrived. He'd had a staphylococcus infection. He was sort of green around the gills. He smacked his knee on the car getting out, and he kind of looked like death-warmed-over. And I said to them, both of them, I said, "Would either one of you want some makeup?" And Kennedy said, "No, I don't think I want any makeup."
Now, Nixon heard him. And he figured - he, who needed makeup, better not have it, or that would be the story the next day, that one of them was made up and one of them wasn't. And it was a night that the right guy won for the wrong reason. The better looking of two people should be Miss America, not Mr. President, but that's what happened that night. And then we get the historians that go to you and say, "Well, it wasn't all about makeup. What about Kimoi and Matsu?" I always say, "Okay, where is Kimoi and Matsu, and who said what?" They don't have the slightest idea, but they spout all this baloney. But it really was one guy looked like a president nobody had ever seen before. Another guy looked like a ward boss somewhere. And that's what decided the election.
WHITE: Ben, you were at the debate too.
BRADLEE: I was the pool reporter, one of them.
WHITE: For Newsweek. And Deborah referred to the fact that you and Kennedy had become close friends, and lived on the same street in Georgetown.
The way you and the Kennedy’ used to wheel your baby carriages down the same street in Georgetown, you became great social friends. You were a foursome. How did you handle the issue of, am I a friend or am I a reporter, in covering that presidential campaign?
BRADLEE: Well, with so many people in Washington trying to handle it for me, I didn't really have much trouble. The editors at Newsweek wanted to be sure that no young politician was going to take their boy to the cleaners, that they went through all my copy with a fine-toothed comb, and so did Hugh Sidey, who was the Time correspondent, my opposite number. And if I got something in my very limited files that a news magazine allows, Sidey would go to the president and raise hell, say, "How come Bradlee got that?" And there was a little nugget that he got for the next issue of Time.
WHITE: But how come Bradlee did get that and someone else didn't get that?
BRADLEE: Because Bradlee worked hard, and--
WHITE: And was a very good friend.
BRADLEE: Don't look a gift-horse in the mouth.
WHITE: Would you have allowed that kind of reporter friendship when you were at The Washington Post, a friend covering a candidate?
BRADLEE: I don't think you can tell a reporter that he can't have a friend. And if he has a friend, if he's a good reporter, you don't have to tell him, "You can't carry water for your friend." And we had an understanding that what he said was on the record, I could use what he said, unless he told me not to. And I made that deal, and I would make it again.
WHITE: You would make it again?
BRADLEE: I would allow a reporter-- You don't have to formalize it, and get it in writing, but the whole idea of a reporter is to establish relationships with people. And they can be friendship, they can be scorn, they can be anything you want. But a relationship is going to develop. And if it's a close one, you've just got to decide whether you're going to be a friend of the famous or you're going to be a journalist, and that wasn't very hard.
WHITE: Well, let's get to the topic of this evening's conversation, "What's Happened to the News?" And when Deborah first told me that that was what the topic was going to be, when I heard it, it sounds like something very bad is happening. So, what's happened to the news? Do you think something has gone wrong with our business? It's probably way too simplistic, but is there one word or sentence that comes to mind when you think of what's happened to the news?
HEWITT: It's way too simplistic. I'm not sure--
WHITE: You're in television. Try to be simplistic.
HEWITT: That's not tough. Actually, I think what's really wrong with the news, there's too much of it.
WHITE: Is what?
HEWITT: There's too much of it. And it's become a commodity rather than a service. And, you know, you've got-- I'm not going to go too deeply into the troubles that CBS is in right now, because I would like to keep my job, and I've got a nice one. I'm not going to go that far into that.
What's happened to news? Broadcasting is a funny animal. Publishers go into news because that's what they want to do. Broadcasters went into the news because that's what they had to do. That's the only way they'd get licenses to broadcast. You had to do a certain amount of public service to have a license to broadcast, when the FCC actually sat over broadcasting. And a lot of guys who wanted no part of news or electronic journalism, or whatever you want to call it, got into this business because it was the only way they could. They had to pay back for their licenses. They weren't particularly interested in it. There were no Kay Grahams. There were no Punch Salzbergers, really, in news. There was one, and I was lucky enough to spend part of this afternoon with him. Frank Stanton, who is now 97 years old, was president of CBS when I first went there. He lives in Boston. I went to see him today. He's kind of my hero. If I have a hero in the news business, he's sitting right next to me.
Let me tell you, Ben Bradlee gave me the best piece of advice I ever got in my life. CBS was prohibiting us from running a tobacco story about a company that was up to its ears in all sort of skullduggery as far as nicotine was concerned. And they wouldn't let me put it on the air, and The Washington Post was beating the hell out of me about it. And I called Ben to complain. And that was the time I got the best piece of advice I ever got in my life. Ben Bradlee said to me, "Kid, you just got picked off first. Go back to the dugout, sit down, and shut up." Wow, it was the best thing I ever heard.
WHITE: Ben, what about you, with that question, what's happened to-- When I saw you last week, you said to me, "Well, the news is the news. That's what's happened to the news."
BRADLEE: We're in two different businesses.
WHITE: I know.
BRADLEE: And what's happened to newspapers. - And one way of judging newspapers is by their circulation. And the circulation of all newspapers, virtually all newspapers, is declining. The reason it's declining is that we can't get kids to read. In the old days when the circulation-- I mean, not so long ago, my own experience, I used to fight my dad for the sports section in The Boston Globe and The Boston Herald. And that's how I learned to read, and then quite soon I learned after that how to figure out the averages, and therefore do a little arithmetic. That's not happening now. Kids are not interested in newspapers until--… They don't become readers until they're in their late teens or early 20s.
WHITE: But will they ever become readers again? Because they're going to other sources now for the news. They turn on their computers, and they get the news there. I'm not so sure they're not interested in the news just because they're not reading newspapers.
BRADLEE: Well, I don't know the answer to that. I think they certainly join the-- They start to subscribe at a later time, but they do start to subscribe. And I don't know. The Post has, on the Internet, has got umpteen hundred thousand hits per whatever. And so some of those ought to be able to count as circulation, but they don't, because you don't charge them anything. The next American fortune is going to be made by somebody who figures out how to charge people for using the Internet.
WHITE: Yes.
HEWITT: The one word that seems to dominate journalism today is demographics.
Everybody is trying to lower the demographic of either the newspaper or television news or radio news.
WHITE: Well, for the 18 to 49.
HEWITT: Yeah, the 18 to 49s. And I sort of--
WHITE: And the rest of us don't exist.
HEWITT: Yeah, we don't exist. Nobody in this room reads the newspaper as far as they're concerned. And they're really not looking for you. They're looking for a younger audience. And I once told The New York Times that I had a great way for them to lower their demographic. They should take that section they've got called "Dining Out," and if they change it to "Making Out," I bet they would sell a lot more newspapers.
WHITE: But it's not making out any longer. It's hooking up. It's not making out.
HEWITT: Hooking up. You told me that last week. You're the only one I know who knows that.
WHITE: Well, I'm sure someone will call me tonight and say it's not hooking up any longer, it's something else. Last time I heard, it was hooking up. But I want to back to Frank Stanton, because you call him the patron saint of broadcasting. And in reading both of your books, and reading about your relationship with Stanton, and your relationship with Katherine Graham, I was so struck when I was in your office 10 days ago, and-- Ben's in an office now-- Your office is being renovated, so you're in temporary quarters. And there's one picture on your wall, and it's Katherine Graham, and you tacked it up, and she's looking at you, eye level, still. And I was so struck by that.
HEWITT: Smiling.
WHITE: Smiling, smiling. But those people aren't around any longer. With the big companies buying up newspapers and television stations and networks; people at the top don't care about news like that anymore. And you had Katherine Graham, and you had Frank Stanton at your side, and I don't think people have any idea of what that's like today, to have someone like that helping you out, and supporting you.
HEWITT: I think it's the obsession with the 18 to 49s that have made those people sort of obsolete. And I'm not sure that in today's world, the Katherine Grahams and the Bill Paleys and the David Sarnoffs and the Leonard Goldensons would be all that successful. They owned those companies. They weren't beholden always to a stock price. So they did what they thought was right. Today, I don't think you can do what you think is right. You are beholden to stockholders and shareholders. And I think that sets the tone for what you read, and what you hear, and what you see on television.
WHITE: Do you see that a lot, Ben, in newspapers today? Can you look at it and think, they're after the 18 to 49, or, they're not doing this kind of story any longer, because we need to make profits? Are you aware of it at The Washington Post?
BRADLEE: Well, I think my successor is. But I--
WHITE: But you're still there every day. You go in every day. You're in on the meetings.
BRADLEE: Well, that's because I'm sick. My wife opens the door, and I just get out of there.
HEWITT: Welcome to the club!
BRADLEE: I think that some newspapers who are lucky, still have the equivalent of a Katherine Graham.
WHITE: Not very many.
BRADLEE: Well, The Washington Post does, Don Graham. The New York Times has the Sulzberger family. I don't know the young one now as well as I knew Punch, but Punch was a very powerful force there, and The New York Times was never better than it was under his ruling. And I think the same thing can be said for the-- And there were Winships and Taylors around here for quite a long time. And so I think-…
WHITE: Right. But with Knight Ridder and Gannett and Newhouse buying up all the newspapers, that's-…
BRADLEE: That's what worries me most about them buying all the papers, is losing the community leader who is no longer a local citizen. The fact of the matter is that newspapers, the good newspapers in this country, are much better today than they were 30 years ago.
WHITE: You're the only one I've talked to in the last 10 years who says that.
BRADLEE: I can prove it to you. Get a Boston Globe of 30 years ago, and check it with today. It's larger, because they're getting more advertising, and they're getting more white space for news stories. They're better designed. It's much easier to read. It's better organized. When I wrote my book, I picked up a 1965 Washington Post, which was the day I came back to the Post. It's bloody unreadable, unreadable. Long columns, no picture bigger than a column and a half, long columns, the type blurring. The make-up is just unfriendly. And the reporters, the quality of the reporter is way better, way better, especially women.
WHITE: Yes, but most people do look at The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Miami Herald, The Chicago Tribune, and talk about how the news-well has been gutted. Their investigative teams are gone. Is this an exaggeration?
BRADLEE: Well, I don't… - I've only worked for one daily newspaper in my life. And I read several, but not, -how many dailies are there left? There's 1,000 dailies in America now?
WHITE: I think 1,200, something like that.
BRADLEE: Well, I don't read many of them.
WHITE: Don, I know you said you didn't want to talk about the CBS situation, but I think it's hard to be on this subject of what's happened to the news and not bring that up, and not try to get into it a little bit. I'm sure everybody here is familiar with their crisis. And it was the story that CBS did on Bush's National Guard service, which was based on what appear to be falsified documents. And currently an outside team is investigating what happened there, and their report is due any day. Can you talk about how you think that happened?
HEWITT: Dan Rather stubbed his toe, badly. I've already said that I wouldn't have done the story, because I didn't think there was a story.
WHITE: Why didn't you think there was a story?
HEWITT: I don't think there's any story in the fact that George Bush didn't go to Vietnam. Bill Clinton went to Oxford so he wouldn't have to go to Vietnam. I would venture a guess that the entire graduating class at Yale that graduated with Bush, maybe 1 or 2% of them ever went to Vietnam. People got out of going to Vietnam. First of all, Vietnam has a lot of Iraq about it. You know, Bush may have told us a lot of baloney about atomic weapons. Lyndon Johnson told us a lot of baloney earlier about the Gulf of Tonkin, and got us into a war that we never should have been in.
And, you know, it's a little like, - I love what Jon Stewart said about the whole thing. He said, about John Kerry, "Why would anyone want to vote for somebody who was too dumb not to get out of going to Vietnam?" which is sort of like that great story of the guy that was on trial for his life, and somebody said, "Do you want to be tried by a jury or by a judge?" And he said, "No, I'd much rather be tried by a judge. I wouldn't want to leave my fate in the hands of 12 people who were not smart enough to get out of jury duty." So, you know, the whole ... It was at Ben's birthday party this summer that John McCain said to me, "I begged Kerry, 'Don't get into Vietnam. It's a loser. Forget it. There's no way.'" Now, if anyone was ever a war hero, it was John McCain. He was in a prison there for a long time. Why he ever brought it up, and why Rather got involved in it is beyond me. But he did, and now he's paying for it.
WHITE: But, back to the Bush story. Bush claimed that he had fulfilled his service, and so I think that…
HEWITT: A lot of guys claimed a lot of things.
WHITE: We know a lot of people who got out of, but he made a point of it…
HEWITT: You know how many guys got out of going to Vietnam because their fathers bought them out of it? If I had had kids that age at that point, I think I would have done the same thing.
BRADLEE: Don't say that. Don't say that.
HEWITT: No, come on. I was there. I used to say to them, "What are we doing here?" I could never figure out what anybody was doing in that country.
BRADLEE: I disagree with you about it being a story. Of course it was a story. And if the facts that they were investigating had been true, and weren't discoverably (sic) wrong beforehand, it was a story, I think.
HEWITT: You better have a nail with that hammer. If you're going to take a shot at the president of the United States, you'd better have pretty good aim.
WHITE: Yes, you have to have a nail. But Bush had made a point out of the fact that he did fulfill his duty. He did his service in the National Guard, and he did it according to the rules, and that's what that story was about.
HEWITT: But that story was told when he ran against Al Gore. There was a whole thing about, that Bush never went to Vietnam. It was not new. It wasn't worth jeopardizing a career that Rather had that many years, for a story that you weren't really sure of. And to this day, I don't understand why it got on the air without more examination.
WHITE: There's a headline in today's USA Today, and I think they were quoting Andy Rooney, of the impending doom at CBS.
HEWITT: I spoke to Andy about that.
WHITE: Well, what's it like there now, to have--
HEWITT: I don't see the doom there, but it might happen. But my favorite quote is, - Andy Rooney in that story, who is a very old friend, said that if you diminish the evening news, you diminish the public's ability to make intelligent decisions. And all I could think was: what intelligent decisions? I don't know about any intelligent decisions that the public has made recently that you have to worry about. [Laughter].
WHITE: Well, I don't think we're going to get you to say much more about this. I understand. I'm going to back off.
HEWITT: I want to go back to work tomorrow.
WHITE: I don't mean to just pick on television. It hasn't been a great few years for print either. You had Jayson Blair at The New York Times, and Jack Kelley at USA, to name two star reporters who fabricated parts of big stories. Ben, you know a little bit about handling a public crisis.
BRADLEE: I sure do.
WHITE: Most people, I'm sure, remember that in 1981, a young Post reporter named Janet Cooke won a Pulitzer for a story she did about an eight-year-old crack addict she called Jimmy. It turned out she made the whole thing up. You had to return the Pulitzer, and she resigned. How did you ever recover from that crisis, and get your readers back?
BRADLEE: I didn't know anything-- I've never taken a course in damage control after I left the Navy. But if your paper's reputation has been shattered like that, the only way I can think of is to tell absolutely every fact, and tell it to the readers. We have an ombudsman at The Washington Post, and we asked our ombudsman to investigate it, take as long as he wanted, so long as it didn't exceed three days.
WHITE: How many days did it take?
BRADLEE: It took him three days. Well, it may have even taken him two. I don't know. It was four pages in the newspaper. We gave him all the help he asked for. And the way we got through that is because there has never been a fact about the Janet Cooke case that was not in The Washington Post on that story. Every rotten detail was out there.
WHITE: It was very tough on some of the editors at the Post, I remember.
BRADLEE: Yes. It was a miserable week. Until The New York Times trouble this time, I thought that Janet Cooke was going to be the second paragraph of my obituary.
WHITE: Now it will be the third.
BRADLEE: No, it won't. I don't think it will. I'm going to outlast the guys.
WHITE: Well, it comes down to trust. You can't keep track of everything that's going on at a newspaper, and you have to trust your reporters. You have to trust your producers. You call trust the jugular of journalism. And Janet Cooke…
BRADLEE: Did I say that?
WHITE: You did. It's in your book. I love that part of your book.
BRADLEE: I like that phrase.
WHITE: It's great. Remember that next time. Janet Cooke and Jayson Blair and Jack Kelley certainly exposed that jugular. What safeguards do you have if a reporter is willing to lie like that?
BRADLEE: You have none. You've just got to wait, hunker down, because it's coming. We investigated every word she ever wrote at the Post, and we couldn't find anything, except there was a quote from some woman actress that we had suspicions about, but it wasn't a bad quote. It didn't make anybody look bad. It was just too good a quote. But she didn't do that as a habit. She did it once.
WHITE: Janet Cooke did it once.
BRADLEE: She was extremely ambitious, and--
WHITE: I thought that was interesting, that when you went back and you looked at her other stories, there was nothing else. And it's usually different in these other cases. When they went back and looked at past reporting, they found-- Jayson Blair, or Jack Kelley, they found a lot of other instances of that.
BRADLEE: The training to be a reporter, or when you hire an experienced reporter, is to develop this relationship of trust. And it gets to be automatic.
WHITE: Well, nowhere was it more crucial than in your reporting of Watergate. You had two fairly inexperienced reporters.
BRADLEE: Very inexperienced.
WHITE: Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. They were relying on a source to lead them through key points of the story, someone we later knew as Deep Throat. And you didn't know who that was. And you say today that you would never have tolerated that. And I just wanted to know why, in looking back, you think that you wouldn't have--
BRADLEE: Well, I find that rather hard to explain, that I didn't ask until after the fact, when there began to build a little bit of sort of jealousy, and anti-Post prominence over it. And I thought that Deep Throat-- and Deep Throat was in the movie, and in the garage, and he was hanging around like that, very dramatic. And I asked him, I think before the movie, "Who the hell is this person?" I knew where he worked. I knew that he was a he. And I knew, roughly, his rank in the pecking order of Washington. And he told me, and that was the end of it.
WHITE: Were you surprised, when you found out who it was?
BRADLEE: No, I can’t answer that question.
WHITE: But you do say in your book that you can't believe other people haven't guessed who it was.
BRADLEE: I did say that.
WHITE: You say it's so obvious, you can't believe--
BRADLEE: No, I didn't say it was so obvious.
WHITE: Well, I wish I had the book here.
BRADLEE: Excuse me. What I said is, it seems to me that in this age of computers, and how you can recreate the decision making process on a computer, by putting in all the alternatives every time you get-- Was it raining that day? Was it-- That's the only thing I can think of. And just ask the questions. And you would say, "That eliminates so-and-so, because he wasn't in Washington then. He was somewhere else." That you could do it, you could guess it, and I ruined a lot of people's sleep. They were trying to do it.
HEWITT: You're not going to admit it. But the front-runner is John Dean. John Dean is the name you hear the most.
BRADLEE: That's right. He's written two books identifying another person, a different person as Deep Throat.
HEWITT: Well, sure. Wouldn't you?
BRADLEE: He's got a third one out, and I don't know if he's got another candidate yet. Don't put your money on it.
HEWITT: Okay, that eliminates one. [Laughter]
WHITE: We think.
HEWITT: Yeah.
WHITE: Let's talk about the red state/blue state hysteria, since the campaign. One network anchor said the other day that he's going to hit the road so he doesn't report on red state issues from a blue state broadcast. And the editor of The New York Times said, "Maybe he needs to reopen their Kansas bureau." And the president of ABC News says, "Maybe we need people who live in Michigan, so we understand the attitudes out there." What do you make of those statements?
HEWITT: Baloney.
BRADLEE: The last one is the dumbest statement I ever heard.
HEWITT: It's really dumb.
WHITE: Because?
HEWITT: If you can't figure out this country from wherever you are, get in another business.
WHITE: I thought these statements actually would backfire, because it makes it sound like we in New York are going to go out of our big offices and come out and see what you little folks are all about.
BRADLEE: Well, it proves he never was an editor, or ran a bureau. "Oh, let's call that guy up in Michigan. Where does he live, now? What town in Michigan?"
HEWITT: That's not the way you take on New York. Move to Boston if you want to take on New York.
WHITE: Do you think that the media is isolated from-- Do you think there is a media elite in this country? Why there's such a belief that there is-- It's like, those of us who come from other parts of the country, when we come to New York or Washington, we lose our minds, and we become someone who has no idea of what's going on anywhere else. Do you buy that at all?
HEWITT: No, no. The guys who work for me are just like everybody else. They've got mortgages. They're trying to put their kids through school. They're paying on a house. Just because you live in one place geographically doesn't mean that you've lost touch with the rest of the country. I don't believe that for a second.
WHITE: We all hear that thing over and over again, too, that there's a liberal bias in the media. And I know in your book, you said you got so sick of hearing it. What do you say to people when they say that? You guys don't play it down in the middle.
BRADLEE: I'm sure that there are more Democrats than Republicans on the staff The Washington Post, but not much more.
WHITE: But how are you even sure of that?
BRADLEE: I don't ask anybody, so I'm not sure.
WHITE: Yeah, we're not aware, when we work with people, often, whom they vote for or what their political affiliation is. It's an assumption.
BRADLEE: Well, I'd be more interested in that if I could think of a way of changing it. If I am going to say, "Oh, wait a minute. We've got 53 Democrats, and you would make the 54th, and that would put you ahead." You can't do it that way. If you can't spot bias when you see it, you ought to be in another line of work. And I think the good papers do that.
HEWITT: You're absolutely right. Listen, I've worked for this ultra-liberal CBS all my life. And when I left, the first guy that tried to hire me was Bill O'Reilly. So I'm not too worried about it.
WHITE: What do you think of Bill O'Reilly?
HEWITT: He ain't the worst guy in the world.
WHITE: He called Mike Wallace his idol, his model for what he became.
HEWITT: Yeah. There's a lot of PR that goes with that. But he ain't the worst guy I ever knew. I've known guys that are worse than that. The Bill O'Reilly’s-… He actually said that he hadn't made up his mind between Kerry and Bush; - Now, whether that's true or not, I don't know, at one point. And he also said, - Mike had asked him about gay marriage. And he said, if there's a choice between a little kid being brought up by two men or two women who live together affectionately, or going to an orphanage, he'd much prefer the kid be brought up by a couple, whether they're the same couple or not. I didn't sort of expect that to come out of Bill O'Reilly, but it did.
WHITE: Do you watch Bill O'Reilly, Ben?
BRADLEE: No.
WHITE: Do you watch Fox News? No? Never?
BRADLEE: On Sunday when they run the football games, I watch them.
WHITE: So, you don't think you're missing anything by not…?
BRADLEE: I really don't. I probably watch more news than anybody you know. I mean, in Washington, you can see both CBS, - you could see two out of the three nightly news. I see two of them, and then join the Jim Lehrer show…
WHITE: What's the third one you leave out? You watch two every night.
BRADLEE: It's in the process of being changed, if you want to know. I used to watch ABC at 6:30, because I was anticipating seeing Jim Luten…
HEWITT: Great, terrific.
BRADLEE: … whom I think is the best television correspondent alive today. Unfortunately, he's in a fight with the managers, so they never have him on the show. And then I watch Brokaw. And he's gone. Jeez, my life is going to change. Then I watch Lehrer. So I'm going to wait until the CBS thing shakes out a little bit, and then make a new lineup. But it's an hour and a half of news.
WHITE: With the CBS situation changing in March, and we know that the nightly newscasts need younger viewers, do you think it's the time to just take that, for CBS to take that half hour and just blow up the whole thing, think of a completely different way to--
HEWITT: My gut tells me-- I know this for a fact. When Mel Karmazin ran Viacom, he tried to buy CNN. And Dick Parsons didn't want to sell it. My gut tells me that some time in the next five years, ABC, NBC, and CBS will have cable news channels of their own. In fact, I once got permission from CBS to call Michael Eisner and Eiger, and suggest that CBS and ABC should pool their news operation, and run a cable channel opposite MSNBC and CNN and Fox. Eisner didn't want to do it.
But, somehow... The evening news is a strange animal. If you were locked in a room for a year, and you could only watch Rather, he could only watch Brokaw, and I could only watch Jennings, at the end of the year, none of us would know anything the other one didn't know. It's the same broadcast. It isn't like a liberal newspaper and a conservative newspaper. It's the same broadcast, and it's a popularity contest. Instead of Miss America, it's Mr. America. Who has won the popularity contest? And it's got nothing to do with the news. It's, who do you like? If you like Rather, you watch Rather. If you like Brokaw, you watch Brokaw. Or you watch Jennings.
And somehow, the CNNs and the MS-NBCs are going to eventually take over this business. Because they've got more bureaus. They spend more money. They're more serious about what they do. And I think eventually you're going to find that CBS News is going to be part of a, -- not on its regular network, but it's going to be a cable channel. ABC will probably be a cable channel. And I would think MS-NBC someday may take over whatever NBC does on their air now. And if you want to go watch it, watch it, and if you don't want to watch it, don't.
WHITE: But CBS is still going to have that hour from 6:30 to 7:00.
HEWITT: I'm not sure of that. I'm not sure that these guys haven't figured out that this is a drag, and they can do better with Jeopardy, or Entertainment Tonight.
WHITE: Or Jon Stewart.
HEWITT: Or Jon Stewart.
WHITE: I'm glad to know you get your news from Jon Stewart too.
HEWITT: Yes. Or maybe they're going to take their news and put it into an all-news cable channel, which is not a bad idea, incidentally. There's nothing wrong with that. If you want news, you know where to get it.
WHITE: I'm so struck when I go on the web site of The Washington Post or The New York Times or MS-NBC. On the computer, it looks like everybody is morphing into the same thing. Because newspapers are constantly updating their stories, and they're adding video. And the networks' web sites are just making their stories longer. And they're all, in that computer, starting to look like that we're morphing into the same delivery system. I've seen computers in both of your offices, but I don't think I've ever seen you use one.
BRADLEE: Is it on or off?
HEWITT: I should have died in the last century. I can't make contact with this one. It just goes over my head.
WHITE: But that surprises me about you, because you--
HEWITT: It surprises me about me too.
WHITE: Well, you used to take every single new invention that came along in television, and figure out, how am I going to use this?
HEWITT: I'm too old.
WHITE: No, you're not.
HEWITT: Let me tell you a bit about being old. When Al Neuhoff (?) retired as chairman of Gannett and the founder of USA Today, he was toasted in Washington by Tom Daschle, who said that he had a problem he could never solve. He was too old to work for a newspaper, and he was too young to work for 60 Minutes. And then Teddy Kennedy took up the same theme. I got introduced at a roast in Washington, and Teddy said that I was the guy who had come up with the idea of embedding reporters with the troops. He said, "How else do you think Mike Wallace got into George Washington's boat?" That's why I don't mess around with the computer.
WHITE: But I like the fact that you both have them behind here, to make it look like you--
HEWITT: Yeah, make it look like we're doing something.
WHITE: I said to Ben last week, "Can I send you an e-mail about … And you pointed to your assistant outside, and said she takes care of me
BRADLEE: She turns the computer on, and once it's on, I can write letters on it.
WHITE: Well then, I guess I can't ask you about my next question then. I was going to ask you if you believed in the power of the bloggers, since they're the ones that discovered the mistakes in the CBS…?
HEWITT: I sure do.
BRADLEE: I do. They're great. I don't read them, but they're great.
HEWITT: They keep us honest.
WHITE: They're becoming our fact checkers. I think there are more people-- I think it's actually going to become so much harder to make mistakes on stories, because as soon as you have put something on, people are commenting on it, either on your own web sites, or they go online somewhere.
HEWITT: What's great about that? That's pretty good.
WHITE: I think it's great.
BRADLEE: I don't think it's great. How do you know who the hell these people are? I mean, at least if you buy a newspaper or turn on a set to a network news, you know who the hell they are, and you know the people. But how do you know who is signing a blogging thing and saying all… ?
WHITE: You mean whether or not they have any-…
BRADLEE: They’re fraudulent. They haven’t any expertise at all.
WHITE: Well, a lot of them do. It's just become much more democratic out there. People have a way to get their information out there. They have the technology to be heard. And using it…
HEWITT: The Drudge Report has broken more stories than any other news organization in America.
Well, he's one of numerous…
HEWITT: He's wrong sometimes, sure. So are we.
WHITE: We're going to start questions probably in about five minutes, so if people want to line up, if you have questions for either Don or Ben, I'm sure they would love to hear them. Ben, I was going to ask you, one of the greatest things that I think you did at The Washington Post is start the Style section. I lived in Washington when it first came out, and I remember looking at that section and thinking, wow, can you really say that? Can you really ask those questions? And I just thought it told more about the way the Capitol worked than many of the news stories. Why were you so convinced that you needed a Style section? It's been imitated by every single newspaper in the country.
BRADLEE: I think the women's pages were the dullest pages I ever read. I mean, starting out at the Post, the section was called "For and About," and then in larger type, "Women." But the type was sort of—ornate, you know. “Women,” like this.
WHITE: You even did menus, recipes, I think.
BRADLEE: Oh, God, out the ears. And it was outrageous. It was outrageous. It was very insulting to women, as a matter of actual fact. The birth of Style was one of the great times I've had in the business. And I got Katherine Graham interested and she was so excited about it, but she didn't want to lose all the pals at the Ladies Friendly who were going to say, "Oh, you can't say that about this." I think it's having a kind of a rough time now. I think it's a little bit boring. But I think they'll change something…
WHITE: Well, it sure wasn't when I was in Washington. It turned people into human beings.
BRADLEE: It was also the first section a lot of people read, including men. Instead of fighting for the sports section, you'd see the dads go for the style section.
WHITE: It was hot copy. It was really what you talked about.
BRADLEE: We've got to get it back.
WHITE: Is there anything you'd add at the Post if you were running it today? Any other section? Anything beyond style?
BRADLEE: Don't ask me.
WHITE: Why can't I ask you?
BRADLEE: Well, because I don't want to be sour grapes. I've been out of there 13 years.
WHITE: But you're not out of there. You're still there.
BRADLEE: Yeah, I'm still there. But I'm not answering that question every day, either. I don't think I would be. Sure, there are some things. And I know there are some things that Len Downey, who's my successor, would change. We've got to change…- Think of what happens when Baghdad breaks out. You have to change the paper. You have to change the staff. You've got to try to find money to man a four-man bureau that you didn't have before, a four-person bureau.
WHITE: Don, what about you? When you came up for the idea for 60 Minutes, it was about the same time that Ben came up with the style section. I think 60 Minutes started, I think, the year before. And you called it a combination of high Murrow-- referring to Edward R. Murrow-- and low Murrow. Why were you so convinced that was the right time for 60 Minutes?
HEWITT: After I did the Cronkite news, I was doing documentaries, and I was bored silly. And I realized that 7% of the audience watched documentaries, the good ones, the bad ones, didn't make any difference. They loved documentaries. And one day I had lunch with Norman Isaacs, who used to run the Courier Journal. And during lunch he said, "Do you know how many people read editorials?" I said, "I don't know." He said, "Seven percent." I said, "Oh my God, they're the same people who watch documentaries." I said, "There's got to be a way to raise that number."
I used to direct a thing with Ed Murrow called See It Now, which was very prestigious. It was on Sunday afternoons. But not many people watched it. And then Murrow did a show called Person to Person, where he visited people like Marilyn Monroe at home. And it wasn't very good, but it was wildly popular. And John Crosby and the Herald Tribune coined a phrase, and he called it high Murrow and low Murrow. And I looked at it, and I said, "Oh my God, that's the answer. You put high Murrow and low Murrow in the same broadcast. You've got a winner." You could look in Marilyn Monroe's closet if you're also willing to look in Robert Oppenheimer's laboratory. And you want to mix up the Conrad Adenauers and the Winston Churchills, and the President of the United States, with Robin Williams, Jackie Gleason, Katherine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy. And that's what Life magazine did so well, and that became the formula for 60 Minutes, so that it wasn't an elite, holier-than-thou, as most of these documentaries were, which nobody ever looked at.
And for reasons that still stun me,- David Burke knows this very well, because he was there during those days, we had 22 years in the top 10. I don't know why. No one was more surprised than I was at the success of it, but it worked. And the formula was that simple.
WHITE: I think it's the most successful television show in history. Hasn't it been, so far?
HEWITT: It made $2,200,000,000 dollars profit over the 22 years it was in the top 10, and no news broadcast ever did anything like that. The Today Show comes close. I think The Today Show makes more money than any other show in television today. And we did at that time, and now they want to lower the demographics, and old guys like me are out. We don't know anything about it. I read People, I read gossip columns. I never heard of the people. I don't know who they are. I see names. I go, "Who are those people?" I don't know. I live in another world. That's why they want to make a change.
WHITE: We'll go to questions in just one minute. I was struck by the fact that, in the first few pages of both of your books, you each mentioned a Hitchcock movie as being very pivotal, and inspiring you to go into journalism. And the movie was Foreign Correspondent. And Ben, I know you say that you used to just cry your eyes out, watching it over and over again as a teenager, I think. And you said all you wanted was the look, you know, the foreign correspondent look. You wanted the trench coat and the hat…
BRADLEE: That's right. I wanted a trench coat more than anything in the world.
WHITE: You then had such a romantic vision of the kind of work you wanted to do…
BRADLEE: Sure, still do.
HEWITT: It’s a romantic life….
WHITE: That's what I wanted to ask you.
BRADLEE: That's right.
WHITE: So it turned out to be a little bit more even than you thought it would be.
HEWITT: I had two favorite movies. I didn't know whether I wanted to be Hildy Johnson in Front Page or I wanted to be Julian Marsh, the producer in 42nd Street. And I walked into a television studio, I thought, oh my God, I can be both of them. And that's what happened, more or less.
WHITE: Well, thank you so much. I think we should go to some of our… And if you want to identify yourselves, you can…
HEWITT: You don't have to…
WHITE: And we'd like questions, and not statements. So why don't we just start with this line right here.
AUDIENCE: Hi. My name is Oly Tangin. I live in Boston. I'm an aspiring journalist. And I'd have to say that one thing that I notice with people my age is that there is some kind of disconnect or some kind of disinterest in the news. And I was wondering, especially from you, Don, if the lack of young faces on television news and on broadcast news, - I mean, I can't think of anyone below the age of 40 or 45 that's in national news, or that's in network news. And I'm wondering if that's a reason why young people feel a disconnect from broadcast news.
HEWITT: Sure. That's why we're here, and we're not working.
BRADLEE: But sure, it must be. It must be. You can't see how old the reporters are, but they're a lot younger.
AUDIENCE: Why is that …
WHITE: Why won't they have?
AUDIENCE: Younger faces, younger people in those ...(inaudible)
HEWITT: Every day, they're getting younger and younger, and that's what they want. They want you, and Ben and I don't know that much about how to reach you, so they're getting guys who know how.
AUDIENCE: For what it's worth, I think that youth is greatly overrated, as these gentlemen onstage have shown to us this evening. I would love to have these qualities in our so-called leaders. They can tell stories, be relaxed, and be honest and direct. I have a couple of points I would like to make in the form of a question, which is not necessarily something for you to respond to right now, but something to consider. And that is, stories by commission and stories by omission. You referred to some stories. I came here a little bit late from work. It's tough coming through traffic in Boston. But welcome.
The stories of omission is the story that's not being talked about, and that is, - Or at least, if it is, I'm among the 7% that still hasn't seen it really being talked about. And that is why the Hart-Rudman Commission and the reports that also preceded it, but especially the Hart-Rudman Commission and the opinion of Joseph Nye of the Kennedy School of Government, said that ...this is report in October of 2001, which is the first inkling I had that there were indeed warnings, contrary to the 9/11 Commission report that came out more recently, saying that we should have been shocked, yes, by what happened, but not surprised, because we were all told. That's one story.
The other story I refer to as the January 20, 1988 story. Hart campaigns secretly funded, which Bernard Kalb of the Kennedy School of Government says was a grossly exaggerated story. And yet it was taken as truth, connecting the ’84 and ’88 campaigns. Another story is the December 17 story, and that was where Christine Keeler was pictured on the boat with Linarment(?), and she was the one that befriended Donna Rice.
Mandy Rice?, that's correct. And Christine Keeler, as we know, maybe 30 years ago, for those of us that are not young and lightheaded, was wise and older, and knew about these things brought down the British government in 1963. So those are just a few thoughts I'd like perhaps that you might look into as something to investigate or look at. Thank you.
WHITE: Thank you.
HEWITT: Thank you. Christine Keeler? I haven't heard of her in a long time.
AUDIENCE: Hello. Oops, wow, that's very loud. My name is Ann Collins. I live in Boston. I'm an editor. My question is about war coverage. When I was a kid, I used to sneak down to the basement and go through old Life magazines to learn about World War II. And I learned about the good and the bad and the ugly. What I notice about current war coverage is we're not even allowed to see a coffin, let alone a dead body or a mutilated body. And though it might gross us out, I think it might get us the hell out of that war if the news people could present us with what war is really like.
BRADLEE: You've got to be kidding, you haven't seen dead bodies on television and newspapers. They're everyday. You don't see coffins because they won't let you into the Dover, Delaware Air Force base where the coffins fly back. But I mean, my God, if you haven't seen enough dead bodies on television, you should see a shrink.
AUDIENCE: I'm seeing a shrink.
BRADLEE: Is she a shrink?
WHITE: She's seeing a shrink.
BRADLEE: I didn't mean that in any way insulting.
WHITE: I think actually some of the most powerful writing is being done out of Iraq right now. I think of Dexter Filkins…
HEWITT: … and John Burns and Dexter Filkins have been sensational.
BRADLEE: The trouble with Iraq right now is that it's so dangerous that the reporters--
HEWITT: Can't even go out.
BRADLEE: They don't even go out much.
WHITE: Can we go right over to this line?
AUDIENCE: Frank Rich and other commentators have been concerned with the appointment of someone like Brian Williams replacing Tom Brokaw. They're concerned about reducing and redefining the content of the news. Don, in your position, can you be a hero and devote yourself to talking about higher standards of content for broadcast news? And can someone replace Dan Rather with Dan Rather, a Dan Rather?
HEWITT: First of all, I called Frank Rich after that column, and I said, "Frank, you have laid out in detail all these crimes against journalism that were committed by broadcasters, which you omitted from your piece was that all of those things happened on television stations owned and operated by The New York Times. The New York Times will sit in judgment on what television does and doesn't do, and yet it all happens, they own 8.... They own four CBS, two NBC, and two ABC stations. They run an editorial about how disgusting Fear Factor is, and Fear Factor runs on two New York Times owned and operated stations.
One more thing about Frank, who I like very much. Frank Rich called me one day, and he said, "I think it's disgusting that CBS ran a sitcom the other night instead of a presidential news conference." And I said, "Let me find out about that." And I found out that CBS gave all of its affiliate stations a choice. They could have the sitcom, or they could have the presidential news conference. And the two New York Times stations took the sitcom. I mean, there's a hypocrisy…. The Washington Post will sit down and do a piece about something that's on television that's disgusting, and they're probably right, but they run it. It runs on Post stations…
BRADLEE: I don't know that.
HEWITT: What?
BRADLEE: That the Post stations do that.
HEWITT: The Post stations are affiliated with the networks.
BRADLEE: I know they are, but I don't know whether they ran this or they went--
HEWITT: Not that, but they run broadcasts that the television critics of the newspapers find atrocious. And they run on the stations owned by the newspaper. Someday, I would just like them to say, "We own a station that carries this broadcast that we think shouldn't be on the air."
AUDIENCE: But Don, I asked whether you--
HEWITT: I wouldn't want to hang by my thumbs until they do it!
AUDIENCE: I asked whether you could be a hero, and do something about that. Are you in a position to?
HEWITT: I think maybe you're looking for somebody a lot younger, who's been… I've been around there too long.
WHITE: Over here. We'll just go back and forth.
AUDIENCE: Mr. Hewitt touched on an interesting subject, the Gulf of Tonkin, briefly in passing. Mr. Bradlee had some very interesting comments to make about that a few years back in London in '87, when he discussed the Gulf of Tonkin incident which led to America's intervention in Vietnam. I'd like to quote some of those observations from him. "I would like to talk about government lying, calculated lies, the willful deception of the public for political end, especially under the disguise of national security, and what an awful price we pay for such lies under any name. Misinformation, disinformation, deceit, deception, or just plain dishonesty. In America, the press is curiously shy, even embarrassed, when faced with the need to use some form of the verb, to lie." And he went on to say, "We are too often close enough to the establishment ourselves--" we the press-- "to be comfortable in calling a lie a lie. These processes have of course have continued in--"
HEWITT: Who said that? Who are you quoting?
WHITE: Quoting Mr. Bradlee, from remarks made in London in '87, when he discussed the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
BRADLEE: That's not fair, pal, not fair…. [Laughter] But I'm not sure I disagree with it.
AUDIENCE: I hope not. I agree with it, even if you no longer agree with it. I'd like to know if you can amplify on that, given what's happened in Iraq, given what happens in Palestine, these processes going on continually. Why is the press more concerned about exposing their pals in power and their lies than they are about the deadly consequences of these lies to the millions of victims of American aggression around the world?
BRADLEE: I've been worried about that since I was a child. I'm teaching at Harvard on this subject. I can't say that I'm teaching lying at Harvard, but I am conducting an inquiry into how come? And I'm talking to psychiatrists. I'm talking to professors of religion, philosophers, about what makes, - how come lying is more and more popular, and the liars are paying less and less of a price? Part of that, I know the answer is business. There's more crime in the Business section of our newspapers now than there is in the Metro section. But I don't think… That quote sounded pretty good to me, and I don't like to hear old quotes all that much, because you never know what the hell you said, especially in London.
AUDIENCE: My name's Nita Gonzalez. Gentlemen, I was 12 years old when Watergate broke, and today I brought my 12-year-old and his 12-year-old friend to meet you. So, thank you for coming. My question is, in the citizen journalist new age of journalism, Joe Trippy, who's a fellow with you at the IOP this semester, has started a citizen journalism blog on the MS-NBC web site, where anybody can go on and report. What golden rules would you have for these citizen journalists, choose sources? Can you name three or four things that you help journalists, young ones and others, keep today?
HEWITT: There's only one thing I've ever required of any journalist who worked for me: Is the story you are reporting a true and accurate representation of what you found out? And that to me is the only thing I care about. If I can be assured that what he is reporting is true and accurate, and exactly what he found out, that's good enough for me. That's my only gauge of reporting.
WHITE: What about you, Ben? Would you have anything to tell the bloggers, people who are going online to start out as reporters?
BRADLEE: I'm not sure I want citizen reporters. That sounds like a letter to the editor to me.
WHITE: What's wrong with citizen reporters?
BRADLEE: Well, who hires them? Who pays for them? And who… No. You don't-- How about citizen doctors?
WHITE: Not the same thing.
BRADLEE: Well, I didn't mean to speak harshly.
AUDIENCE: Hi. My name is Billy Glucroff. I'm a freshman journalism student at Emerson College. When I was younger and I would do something wrong, my parents would sit me down and ball me out, and I'd say sorry. And my mom would give me her famous line, "Don't apologize. Fix it." Earlier this year, The New York Times, and I believe the Post and other papers, analyzed their coverage of the run-up to the Iraq war. And they said, "Yeah, we screwed up, and we're sorry." And that was very nice, and it was very noble, but I haven't seen it being fixed.
And I open the newspapers today, and what do I see? I see genocide of Sudan on the back pages. I see The New York Times had a very lovely fact checking during the campaign, but it was this tiny little box, also on the back pages. I turn on the TV. I see Lacy Peterson, Michael Jackson, the Dan Rather, Rather-gate, as Fox News has coined it, and not that we went to war based on false pretext, and not that innocent people are dying in Sudan, etc., etc., etc. When is the media going to fix it?
HEWITT: Ben, you’re on, kid, I have no answer for that.
BRADLEE: When, I mean, that is, - when is the media-- Okay, who is "the media"? Twelve hundred newspapers, umpteen thousand talk shows, nightly news shows. What are you talking about? What are you really talking about? What paper?
WHITE: What papers are you reading?
AUDIENCE: Well, there's thousands and thousands, but they're all owned by five people, five organizations. So…
BRADLEE: That's not fair. That's not true. Most papers… One company owns, I think-- Is it 100? That's a lot.
HEWITT: Gannett owns--
BRADLEE: On the other hand, some of them are real small, birdcage material.
AUDIENCE: I think you're avoiding my question. What I'm saying is that the major papers, the Post, the Times, the major TV stations, are still covering these sensational things.
BRADLEE: Do you read those and listen to those?
AUDIENCE: Absolutely?
BRADLEE: How?
AUDIENCE: How? My library at Emerson College has the Post-- not the Post. The Times, The Christian Science Monitor, The Wall Street Journal. I have a TV with cable.
BRADLEE: You read those papers?
AUDIENCE: Absolutely, every day.
WHITE: You're not seeing a lot of war coverage in The New York Times?
AUDIENCE: It's not a matter of the war coverage. It's a matter of the analysis. It's a matter of where it's being placed, the framing of it. It's a matter of, what kind of play is it being given?
BRADLEE: Well, I disagree with you. Sorry.
AUDIENCE: Okay, that's fine. Is that all I'm going to get, though? Is that it?
BRADLEE: Yeah, that's it. I think you're wrong.
AUDIENCE: Why do you think I'm wrong? How do you think you fixed-- The Washington Post did admit that they didn't do enough adequate coverage of the lead-up to the war. So how do you think you fixed that, since then?
BRADLEE: Well, I think probably… What you're suggesting is they do nothing? They did something.
AUDIENCE: I'm saying they're not doing enough.
BRADLEE: I was embarrassed by that piece, if you want the truth. And I thought that The New York Times piece was just as embarrassing. I don't think they really have a hell of a lot to hang their head about. I think the-- And let me talk about the Times. The war correspondence in the Times has been excellent, excellent. The big newspapers, good newspapers, all have Arabic speaking journalists there, now. I think it's been terrific. I really do. I'm not so sure about the papers that I don't read. And I don't talk about television, because that's too complicated for me. But if you really want to find out what's going, it seems to me that you can pick… - There is a handful of good newspapers in this country that you can read, and you know the answer. And if you think that maybe this story stretches this too much, maybe this doesn't exactly fit your preconception of it, you've got to lump that.
HEWITT: I think you've got to look at The New York Times differently. Above the fold is the old New York Times. It's beautifully written. It's important. It's all good stuff. Below the fold, there's stuff that I can't figure out how it got on page 1. So I think they're a little schizophrenic. I think they're trying to go for two different audiences, and I think maybe they're underestimating what youth in this country wants. But it looks to me… - I get the Times every morning.
BRADLEE: He’s youth, he wants it.
HEWITT: But I think if you look above the fold in The New York Times, and you read John Burke, you read Dexter Filkins, you read what's coming out of Iraq, it's not pulling any punches, and it's telling it like it is, and it makes you kind of wonder, what the hell is the matter with our government? And they've done that pretty well, I think. But I don’t want to…
WHITE: And Nightline I think has been doing some terrific reporting.
AUDIENCE: But ABC is wanting, I think, to dump Nightline now.
BRADLEE: Yea, it’s going to dump Nightline, sure as hell.
WHITE: Let's go over here.
AUDIENCE: Hi. I have two questions, both related to the question already asked and answered about bias, political bias specifically, in the news. The first one was, I was wondering if you had an opinion on whether networks and newspapers were either significantly or even unduly concerned about appearing biased. And the second question was more, if a young reporter was being swayed to take a story in a direction that appeared to them to take a point of view, like by an editor who had a point of view that was not supported by the facts of their story, what advice would you give them in continuing the story as accurately and truthfully as they wanted to?
HEWITT: I don't understand the last question.
AUDIENCE: If a reporter was being swayed by their editor to take a story they were writing in a biased direction, do you have any advice…
HEWITT: I don't know of any case that this happened.
BRADLEE: Let him quit.
HEWITT: I don't know of any case where an editor has tried to swing a story one way or the other because it fits his own perception of what's true and what's not true. If he's worth being an editor, he doesn't do that.
AUDIENCE: What if he's not worth being an editor?
BRADLEE: What would you do if you… - Same situation in a bank. If somebody was working in a bank that didn't like the way the bank was being run, what do you think he should do about it?
AUDIENCE: Well, it's a good question. That's why I asked it.
BRADLEE: Out, out. Just let him get out.
AUDIENCE: You think quitting is the only answer?
BRADLEE: Well, I mean, I think you could make your opinions known, but I think you would be closer to the door than you know.
HEWITT: I think the bottom line is: reporters are not as good as they think they are. And they're a lot better than you think they are. I think that's maybe the bottom line. I think that journalists-- and I hate that word, because it sounds like you've got a doctorate in journalism. I much prefer to be a reporter than a journalist. But I think they have an exaggerated sense of their own importance. And I've said this at several confabs of journalists. The question that's frequently asked of journalists, "Who died and left you in charge?" is not an invalid question. I mean, sometimes we act that way.
I'll tell you something that a lot of people think is heretical. I'm not sure that the Founding Fathers meant as much as we think they did by the First Amendment. There were no hidden cameras. There were no hidden microphones. There was no thing about invading people's privacy. And I think we've extended… After all, there was a guy named Tom Paine, and he was turning out a pamphlet. And he had every right to say what he wanted to say. I think that we have assumed that the Founding Fathers meant a lot more. And I think we do tend sometimes to invade privacy, and make ourselves unpopular. That's why they call us the media. The media is a pejorative word. They call us the press when they like us, and they call us the media when they hate us.
AUDIENCE: I'm sorry, just the first question was about whether you thought networks or newspapers were significantly or unduly worried about appearing biased.
HEWITT: I think everybody is. I think department stores are. I think banks are. I think everybody in business in America is worried about their image. And you've got to realize, a network is a conglomeration of local stations. They're owned by all sorts of businessmen all over America. And they all form this thing called a network. And the network is beholden to those guys, because they're the ones that put them on the air. So sure, they worry about their image. Sometimes I disagree with what they worry about, but they run it. It's their candy store.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
WHITE: Let's go over here, and try to get through the rest of these questions.
AUDIENCE: I actually have two questions. The first, do either of you men feel that with the new era of journalism, news available online, radio, that this generation will produce another evening news anchor such as Rather or Brokaw?
BRADLEE: Do I think they should do what to Brokaw and all those-- Be like them, or succeed them.
AUDIENCE: With less and less people watching the nightly news, in the next 10 years, 20 years, that there will be another person of iconic stature such as Brokaw or Rather?
HEWITT: Sure, yeah. And it will probably be a woman. And for my money, as good an anchorman as there is anywhere on earth is Judy Woodruff. I think women are, - Every day, there are women coming up in journalism that just never happened before. And they're taking over, and they're great. And I think CBS would make a serious mistake if they didn't give serious consideration to teaming an anchorman with an anchorwoman right now. They did it once with Dan Rather and Connie Chung. It didn't work because the chemistry was all wrong.
AUDIENCE: Why do they have to team someone? How about just a woman?
HEWITT: Because right now, I think that's the first step. And I think if we make that step, that eventually, - because besides Judy Woodruff, I don't see anybody who I think can carry one. There's a BBC woman who was in Washington for a while, and went back to London. They didn't want to hire her because she had a British accent. But there are great-- You know, Christiane Amanpour worked for me. She's sensational.
And I think that the age of the woman is, - You know, it's just like, I keep wondering, where are Benjamin Franklin and John Adams and Thomas Jefferson? What happened to them? They all disappeared. And I think if we ever find another one, it won't be a George Washington or Abraham Lincoln. It will probably be a Georgette Washington or an Abigail Lincoln. And I think the same thing is going to happen in journalism. Women have come on so fast in journalism, it's amazing. And they're good. They're very good. Gals like Nora O'Donnell and Susan Malveaux, they're really, really topnotch.
AUDIENCE: Good evening. My name is Gary Ludwig . I'm from Hingham, Massachusetts. My question goes back to the topic of reporting on the war in Iraq. If the goal of reporting is the report the truth, then I'd like to know your comment on why there's such a void of reporting any facts on the number of civilian casualties for the Iraqi people or the other militants. There's virtually nothing reported, especially in the media, across the board. I know there's some written press, but it's not part of the mainstay of information being provided.
BRADLEE: I would like to know the answer to that question about the civilian casualties. How would you go about getting that story?
AUDIENCE: Again, you indicated earlier that you felt that the reporting in Iraq was excellent, that they had Arabic translators. They're on the site. It's hard to believe that somebody doesn't have this information, or at least a very good estimate.
HEWITT: Can I ask you a question? Is there anyone in this room who doesn't believe that Iraq is a monumental screw-up? I mean, where did you learn it? You learned it from your newspapers, and you learned it from television. You wouldn't have known it if we didn't have people there. It is maybe the worst chapter in the history of the United States. And if you know it-- and you all know it-- you know it because you read his newspapers, and you watch our television.
AUDIENCE: But there were some who had that conviction before we actually engaged in the war. We didn't have to be told that…
HEWITT: Yeah, Colin Powell, who never gets to get up and say it.
BRADLEE: But I wish there was a reporter here from Iraq who could answer that. I mean, I think the story now is so hard to cover, so dangerous to cover. I mean, you can't send somebody into Mosul now and start counting bodies on the street. I don't know. I'm going to ask our foreign desk tomorrow, next day, if we've ever done something on that, and if not, why not. Let's give it a stab.
HEWITT: The one best story I've seen out of Iraq was Scott Pelly of CBS doing a story on a typical Iraqi family that said, "For God's sake, get out of here and leave us alone, because every day you're just making things worse for us." And that told me more than anything else I've seen out of there. No, I think we have. If you don't know that Iraq is a mess, then you're not watching or reading anything because it dominates the news.
BRADLEE: … and so did Vietnam
AUDIENCE: The second question is for you, Mr. Hewitt. In my journalism class, we just read Gay Talese's article for Esquire magazine entitled, "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold." Did you read that article, and were you surprised…?
HEWITT: Yes, by Gay Talese. Know it well.
AUDIENCE: Were you surprised…
HEWITT: Yeah. He said he wanted to send his fist in the mail to me.
AUDIENCE: What was your reaction to it?
HEWITT: I don't know. That gets too complicated. Sinatra and I had a fight. But that's what that thing was about. It ain't worth rehashing, I don't think.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
HEWITT: Thank you.
WHITE: I think we have time for maybe one more question.
AUDIENCE: Do you think the ownership changes affect the quality and content of the news, such as the AOL and Time/Warner merger.
WHITE: Could you repeat that?
AUDIENCE: Do you think as the ownership changes, do you think it affects the quality and content of the news, such as with the AOL and Time/Warner merger?
BRADLEE: Well, if the ownership of a paper changes, the paper will change.
AUDIENCE: Do you think it will affect the…
BRADLEE: - And I'm not sure that if the head of ABC changes, that the news content won't change. I'd be very interested to see what happens to Koppel's show at night. The word around town is that that thing is on its last legs. And that will only be because they want to replace it with a big, fat, commercially important and rewarding program. But I think as far as the ownership of a newspaper, these aren't toys. If you want to own a newspaper, and have the wherewithal to buy it, you can run it any way you want. That's important. But I mean, you don't have to work there, and you don't have to read it.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
HEWITT: You mentioned AOL-Time/Warner. I don't think Time magazine changed one iota when they merged with AOL. I mean, they may have screwed up badly in their own corporate accounting, but I don't think it was reflected in either CNN or Time magazine.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
WHITE: Thank you. I'm sorry we couldn't get to these other questions. We've been told that we need to stop at 7:00. Thank you all for coming, and especially to Ben and Don for coming up here and answering questions, and having this conversation-- it's just been great-- and to the JFK Library for having everyone here.
BRADLEE: Thank you.
HEWITT: Thank you!