Cover Story: Politics Live

By Angie Kucharski

The Paul White Award is one of the most distinguished individual honors in our industry. RTNDA established the award in 1956 to honor the broadcast news pioneer who served as the first news director at CBS. Presented annually at our convention, the award recognizes an individual’s lifetime contribution to electronic journalism and celebrates those rare individuals who embody the very best in our profession -- a dedication to craft, a commitment to service and a passion for excellence. Sam Donaldson has been a guiding force in broadcast journalism for half a century and is this year’s Paul White Award recipient.

As part of the award’s tradition, the RTNDA past chairman or chairwoman spends a few moments with the honoree reflecting on current events, his or her career and the state of our industry. I was privileged to meet Donaldson in his office just a few days after the primaries in Ohio, Texas, Vermont and Rhode Island. He is a reporter known for the tenacity with which he has covered the White House and politics in general, so you can imagine he had a lot to say about the current race for the presidency, among other topics. Here are some excerpts from our visit together:

With your experience covering so many campaigns, what are your thoughts concerning this campaign season?

Donaldson: We like to think we are observers on the scene and bring our experience, and that we can divine things. But, the truth is we use the same indexes as most people -- the polls, and what the so-called ‘people close to candidates’ have to say. Last June, how could you have said anything about John McCain, whom I admire, other than ‘he’s washed up’? His campaign had imploded, he was out of money, he was about four percent in the polls, his people had left him or been fired. Who was going to say, ‘Oh, that doesn’t matter, he’ll be the nominee’?

I believed -- up until November, at least -- that Hillary Clinton was going to be the nominee of the Democratic Party. She still may be, but if she turns out to be the nominee, I can’t claim that I knew it all the time. Now, I do recognize Senator Obama. We’re always looking for the ‘non-politician’ politician who hasn’t gotten his hands dirty, dealing in the backroom with lobbyists. Barack Obama is a tsunami, but all tsunamis recede at some point. The question is: Will he recede in time to still be the nominee of the party, and then the President of the United States? But there’s always a reevaluation. The insiders, the conventional candidates, those from the establishment are well known. Everybody knows Hillary and has made up their mind about her. She’s not going to sway huge numbers of people. By now Barack Obama is fairly well known, but still, people in this country don’t have a good handle on him. He has some room to grow. But we’re always looking for that other guy.

The media said they wouldn’t repeat the mistake made after the New Hampshire primary. Yet, before the Texas and Ohio primaries, some still predicted Hillary’s campaign would be over. What have we really learned covering this campaign?

One thing we learn as reporters is to report on what we see, not on what we think is going to happen. I think one thing we learned is not to get ahead of the story. It’s fine to evaluate what you see, to say, ‘Hell of a week. Where do we stand now and what are some of the likely outcomes?’ But we’re not going to be dumb enough to say, ‘This is what’s going to happen.’

What we’ve learned so far is in the caucus states where Clinton didn’t organize because she thought, arrogantly, that she was the nominee. One of her husband’s rules is, you win the next election or there won’t be an election after that. They didn’t work to win the caucus states, whereas he would have fought very hard to organize on the ground on the caucus states.

Another thing that is remarkable this political season is the number of viewers and voters who are still paying attention, watching more than 20 debates and tuning into Sunday morning programs.

One reason people are energized by this campaign is because George Bush has angered them. They’re saying, ‘Get us out of this.’ The second is the obvious one on the Democratic side. A woman? An African American? Both having a good chance? Wouldn’t you be energized? I know I would, but the point is, so is the average layperson. I think Senator Obama gets some credit for this, because he shares at least one trait with Ronald Reagan that made him successful: the voice, the use of rhetoric. Reagan knew how to use that voice. Obama does it better.

I was there in August 1963, covering the Martin Luther King Jr. dream speech. Not since then have I heard anyone able to take this Baptist minister’s approach, this African American cadence, like Barack Obama. In some respects, he’s as good as Dr. King. For example, when he proclaims, ‘It won’t do. It won’t do. It won’t do!’ It doesn’t matter what it means; you want to hear it, you’re thrilled by it. I’m not saying that’s all he does -- that he’s an empty suit, or that that’s all he’s got. But if he just was an ordinary John McCain-type orator, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

How do you feel about accusations that the press is taken in by this, helping foster Obamamania?

This guy has the Bill Clinton people touch. The reporters that cover Obama are good reporters, but we’re susceptible, and we like the guy. He’s likable. We’re not going to sell out for that, but we like new faces. When Obama burst onto the national scene, we didn’t know anything about him. We watched him early on, when he would walk up to a reporter and kind of put his arm up around his shoulder, flesh and blood.

Some of the reporters kind of like Hillary Clinton, too, but she’s not the new kid on the block. She’s got a history, and we all know it: Gennifer Flowers, the Rose Law Firm papers, the first attempt at health insurance reform. To reporters who are looking for a new story, for someone fresh, she’s not it.

What should reporters do these next few months? And what are we doing well that we ought to continue?

See, everything kind of rights itself. Thanks, some people say, to Saturday Night Live, we’re coming to our senses. What we have to do is charge, countercharge, and look at them equally. Digging is just old-fashioned reporting. And fair coverage of the campaign and remembering that fairness isn’t six of one and a half dozen of another, fairness is: What are the facts here? If the facts, no matter your theory or emotion, show that the scales are this way rather than this way, well -- then that’s what you report. Someone makes a charge and you investigate it in its whole cloth.

We do a lot of that better now, fact checking of ads and things. Although the public, particularly independents, decide on instinct: ‘Who will I trust? Who do I like? Who makes me feel comfortable? Who cares about me? Who understands my problems?’ Rather than, ‘Let me look at the position papers.’ Specialists will look into that and they’ll make a judgment: Well, does it really cover everyone as he says, or does he leave out 15 million people as she said? The general public will just come to a conclusion of who do I trust more, who do I have confidence to keep things on an even keel -- and they vote.

You were among the first traditional network journalists to start a news program on the Internet, and now you’re broadcasting a political program specifically for a digital channel. What is it like covering news with today’s technology?

Well, the digital world, and the show we’ve been doing on our digital channel, is really no different. We put out a program from our control room that looks like and is a conventional television program. In 1999, I started the first regularly scheduled news program on the Internet. Most days, it’s a decent television news program. We’re on the money, but we talk about what that day’s news is. It’s what the process does to it after that that makes it different. Now I watch people today watching streaming video, all this new digital service of ours, on their cell phones an inch and a quarter by an inch and a quarter, and I’m appalled! Now, if that’s all you have, it’s better than nothing maybe. If you’re on the train, walking down the street, or what have you, but I don’t want to see that tiny thing, I want a big screen.

You said a few years ago that when your Internet program started, your staff was composed mostly of women. In your book, published a few years before that, you mentioned the discrimination that you saw in the industry. Have the roles and perceptions of women changed?

At many local stations today, there are two women anchoring. The weather person is a woman, and the sports person could be a woman. Now I’m not saying that you are going to push every man out of a job, but I am saying that the effort to address years of grievances has really come to a great point.

Look at Katie Couric. She started in 1979 as a desk assistant. She was bright, perky, you know, get the coffee, rip the wire machine -- that’s how we treated desk assistants in those days. She went out in the country, which was then the right way to do it, and I think still, I would advise that. She worked in Miami, learning the business. Got hired by NBC and they sent her to the Pentagon as number three, and then she became successful.

But in our business, there is still a glass ceiling: no woman has yet become the president of ABC News, or CBS News, or NBC News, although several women have become president of ABC TV Networks. Women are making a lot of progress in our business, but there are still places to go.

You covered Vietnam, and now for five years we’ve had the Iraq war. What are your thoughts on how we’re covering it?

We cover things that Americans are interested in. We hold journalism conventions at which we promise each other that we will cover things that Americans need to know about, like the genocide in Darfur. But that box is in competition with every other box, and all of our companies except PBS maybe and Pacifica Radio have bottom lines to stock holders. Now you and I can say we’re going to put the hole in the ozone layer on night after night to convince people that if we don’t reduce chlorofluorocarbons we’ll all die, our children will die of melanoma. We can say everything we want to, and it’s the right thing to say, but we do what we need to do in the marketplace. So, at the moment, the violence is down and Americans say hey, whew, the surge is working! We’re not covering Iraq, we’re covering politics.

Are there differences in today’s coverage of the White House beat from years ago?

I watch the press conferences -- and have for years -- even though I’m not there anymore. The regular White House correspondents are a good bunch, they’re a smart bunch, but they can’t penetrate Bush. People used to say to me, ‘Oh, we wish you were back there,’ and I’d tell them, ‘I couldn’t do any better.’ This veil of secrecy dropped when he was at the height of his power. You cannot get through. George W. Bush’s attitude has been, ‘Look, you elected me to do a job and I’m going to do this job as best I can in the way that I think is good for the country. If you need to know something, I’ll let you know. Otherwise, butt out.’ Whereas, now if you watch him, it’s over and he knows it’s over. Frankly, he looks much more comfortable, he’s become a freer man. At his press conferences, before the jokes were strained, now they’re coming easy.

I have so many more things that I would love to ask you, but in the time left, what would you say to inspire the journalists coming up?

As a journalist you have to understand, this is a business. They will have to make some compromises, and they will not always be able to do the stories in the way that they think they ought to be done. Everyone wants to eliminate poverty, get the slum landlords, but there will be times when the news director or the manager of the station or the network president will say, ‘That’s a story of choice, but let’s do this other story.’ If they’re not willing to say, well, OK, in this case, we can do the other story, then get out of the business.

I love this business and I tell people that it’s like that old bromide -- if you love what you do, you never work a day in your life. It’s true, and that excitement I could never have imagined. I’ve gone around the world eight times, and I couldn’t have done it on my dime. I haven’t made history, but I’ve watched people make history. I was five feet away from John Hinckley when he shot Ronald Reagan and three other people that terrible day.

Coming into the business, you will be able to do some good. It’s just that sometimes you’re going to have to bend a little bit. Sometimes, compromise is life. My wife wants go out, I want to stay home, we compromise -- we go out. The point is, everybody in their right mind knows that to get along, as old Sam Rayburn used to say, you have to go along. I think it’s a wonderful business that we’re in and it gives people the opportunity to have fun and a good time on a personal level and then if you do it right, the satisfaction that maybe you brought people information that really does help them.

Some of the best work I did was not as a beat reporter but on PrimeTime Live; some of the investigations we did I’m proudest of … Except for the specials with Michael Jackson, whatever brought in the big audience one time, we actually did some good.

For what do you hope to be remembered most?

Sometimes people flatter me and say, ‘Oh, you’re one of those that will be remembered.’ I don’t think so. Like Woodward and Bernstein? No. I’ve not broken any big story like our great anchor people. I have not marshaled the country to watch a newscast that has mattered. I’m proud of a lot of my work. I don’t think I’m ashamed of anything, but I do regret getting it wrong as I have done on more than one occasion, or being sloppy, or lazy, which I’ve done on more than one occasion. I don’t want anything on my tombstone, I don’t want to be remembered in any way, ‘Well, he said so and so, and he was the one who said such and such, and he was the one who held up the light of morality and brought some purity to our profession.’ Nah. Do your job.

Angie Kucharski is vice president of media strategies for CBS Television Stations Group and RTNDA’s past chairwoman.

Originally published in the April 2008 issue of Communicator. All rights reserved.

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