Dan Rather

RTNDA Conference and Exhibition

Dan Rather speaks at the RTNDA Conference and Exhibition on September 11, 1985, in Nashville, Tenn. Dan Rather was the anchor and managing editor of CBS Evening News as well as contributing to 60 Minutes.

My congratulations to the winners of tonight's awards. I also commend Lou Adler for moving the program along so smoothly. Even so, as I look at my watch, I guess I'll have to miss "Nightline" again tonight.

I understand Peter Jennings will be speaking to you tomorrow morning. If our sometimes overly critical newspaper friends write headlines about Dan Rather putting you to sleep and Peter Jennings waking you up . . . I'll be disappointed but not surprised.

In addition to enjoying your company, I am happy to be here because I quietly enjoy getting away once in a while from my desk in New York. When I do get away I often think of an incident related by Mr. Rogers, the host of "Mr. Roger's Neighborhood." He was making a personal appearance before a group of small children and one of the children looked up at him and asked, very seriously, "How did you get out?" - Meaning, of course, how did you get out of the tube? Well, tonight you got me out, and I appreciate it.

But I shouldn't complain about my work schedule. As some of you from CBS affiliate stations may have noticed, I missed eight days at the end of August because of a viral infection. Maybe that's what comes of my doing the broadcast without a sweater.

The Evening News got along fine without me, which is good - theoretically. I really don't like to be away from the broadcast for very long. Woody Allen says that showing up is 80 per cent of life, and I think it is at least 80 per cent of being an anchorman.

I am truly delighted to be here this evening. It is an honor and a pleasure to speak to you - my friends and fellow professionals - and I think you for offering me this opportunity.

When I say "friends and fellow professionals," that is genuinely how I feel. You and I may sometimes disagree about what network news in general and CBS News in particular does and how it does it. And we may sometimes have differences of opinion over how to handle our mutual problems: ratings pressure, the criticism of political and ideological extremists, increased and often journalistically unconscionable competition, and the ever-present danger of overemphasis on entertainment values - to name only a few.

The point is that all of us in broadcasting who care about the integrity of news share many of the same problems, pressures and fears. I know because, after beginning with wire-service and newspapers, I spent many of my early years at little KSAM Radio in Huntsville, Texas - not-so-little KTRH Radio in Houston - and KHOU Television.

One of my favorite singers, Ricky Skaggs, has a song called: "Don't Get Above Your Raisin." I try not to get above mine by remembering, often, what it is like, what it is really like, fighting for your professional life while trying to keep the standards you believe in - when you are the only reporter at a small station or the news director at a big one, when you're doing drive time hourlies or the six and ten.

Remembering my own struggles to survive in the cauldron that can be any newsroom large or small, gives me special affection for this group. If I may paraphrase a slogan used by one of our more virulent critics, I am "Rather biased" toward RTNDA.

Tonight we observe, addition to the RTNDA awards, the 20th anniversary of the death of Edward R. Murrow. I don't have to tell you what a heritage Ed Murrow left to broadcast journalism - the tape we saw earlier did that as well as it could be done in a short time. But I do want to assure you that the spirit of Ed Murrow is alive and well in the corridors of CBS News. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that "an institution is the lengthened shadow of one man." CBS News has been shaped by many great men and women, but if there is one influence we are most conscious of it is the lengthened shadow of Murrow.

Since I received your invitation to speak I've given a good deal of thought to the present condition of radio and television news. I've realized that part of what strikes me most about our business is how much attention it has been getting lately. When I say lately I mean the last year or so, and when I say attention I mean newspaper headlines and columns and business page stories and magazine pieces and talk shows and congressional inquiries. I can't remember a time - I don't think there's been a time - when our profession has been in the public spotlight so much. We've made more news recently than most medium-sized countries, and it's hard to get used to our astonishingly high profile.

It's anybody's choice as to when all this started. Maybe it was when we stuck by our "60 Minutes" story about a doctor, his medical mill and insurance fraud called "The Galloway Case." The story was true, we had handled it responsibly and we proved it. We did not want to go to court, but we did not fear to go. Ed Murrow did not build CBS News on a foundation of fear.

We stood up, told the jury the truth - and they agreed that we had not defamed the doctor, we had exposed him. The amount of coverage that trial received in some quarters surprised me. Frankly I thought then and believe now that it was overplayed. For example, one of our competitors, who later tried to take us over, replayed videotape of nearly the whole trial. They called it live coverage. But perhaps I am wrong about the possibility of overplay. I have no complaints and while I'm not sure it's true, I wouldn't argue with anyone who said the recent emphasis on coverage of broadcast news started then.

If not then, perhaps it was with the CBS News - Westmoreland trial beginning last fall. That was clearly a built-in good story, with a retired general using political and ideological big-money to challenge the integrity of a network news department over a war whose wounds were still fresh. The stated goal was to destroy a news organization. Even so, it was astonishing to me just how much continuous national press the story received, how many columns and pounds of news clippings it produced. In the end, that trial re-established a valuable principle - that in a free society a news organization is within its rights to question the conduct of a war and to report on high command decisions, no matter how harshly that reporting may reflect on public officials. Whether you agree with how CBS News did the documentary or not, you can agree that re-establishing that principle was important. The trial also provided fuel for those editors who believe the public is sometimes as interested in the news business as it is in the news.

Even before the Westmoreland trial was over another spotlight was turned on television news, this time by a Senator. This Senator, not one for half measures, decided that suing a network was one thing but trying to take it over was even more satisfying. His target was CBS. But anyone who has heard his bill of particulars against the press should agree that CBS was also a surrogate for what he calls the "hate America" media.

The most memorable point in the Senator's takeover campaign may have come on March 1 of this year, when the Senator made a speech which included several statements we carried high up in the CBS Evening News that night.

Respectfully, I ask that you listen to and consider the exact quotes. One statement was: "These newspapers and magazines and television programs are produced by men and women who, if they do not hate America first, they certainly have a smug contempt for American ideals and principles." The other statement was: "We know very well about the threat created by socialism, everywhere in the world. But the real threat to freedom, the real threat to freedom of speech, and the real threat to our constitutional system, is on our TV screens every evening and on the front pages of our newspapers every day."

A short time later, one of the men most closely associated with the senator in his takeover CBS movement made a statement in Chicago saying he questioned "whether Dan Rather believes in God."

I may say these statements are memorable only because they tell us so much about those who uttered them. They illustrate how ready some people are to allege the most obnoxious motives to their fellow citizens, how casual they are in suggesting that one or another group in America is ungodly, disloyal or subversive.

I do not believe - most Americans do not believe - that a patriot is someone who thinks other people are not patriots.

The Senator still heads a mail-me-money group to keep his network takeover campaign alive. At least I think that's what it's for - these political pressure groups take in each other's wash and I'm never certain which of them is aimed at what.

For that matter, I have never been quite sure how much of the campaign to take over CBS can be credited to ideological fervor and how much to the nagging pressure of an idle mailing list.

But at any rate, this particular takeover campaign seems to have slowed. Its passions perhaps have been cooled by indications from the public that while they don't think television news is perfect, they do think the Senator's takeover plan is an idea that needs a good leaving alonel

But as if the Senator's effort hadn't given CBS enough unwanted attention, on the very day the Senator made the speech I mentioned, Ted Turner appeared on the scene with his takeover attempt. That one is history now. Mr. Turner has gone on to other things, leaving CBS unconquered but with its finances rearranged to a greater extent than it might have wished.

For those citizens and viewers who hadn't got their fill of media news, meanwhile, along came Capital Cities Broadcasting to takeover ABC. As a news event it was brief. But the ABC takeover got banner headlines and broadcast coverage, fueled speculation about its effect on ABC News and in general added to the public supply of news about broadcasting.

Other events during these months provoked public speculation on the practices and responsibilities of broadcast journalism - But none of these stories compared in passion or complexity with the one that began when TWA flight 847 was stolen by two Shiite Muslims in the skies over Greece. Suddenly we in network news found ourselves in the middle of a tense international incident, and covering it in a more intimate and dramatic way than any of us wanted.

Our coverage was central to the story, and we couldn't have been more in the public eye.

Reaction to what we did in those 17 days was extraordinary. It was not true that we were spending hours on the air live so we wouldn't have to read the reviews of our coverage. It was true that the reviews of our coverage included an abundance of criticism.

As far as we could determine, mostly it was not the general public that was complaining. Most of the howls of protest came from newspapers, magazines - our natural competitors - and politicians. The criticism in most cases wasn't cool and analytical, it was angry and emotional. We were accused, condescendingly, of not understanding national security concerns; of having no standards beyond getting on the air with whatever our cameras or microphones captured; of pumping up our enemies and endangering our countrymen; of these and scores of other sins against journalism, patriotism and humanity.

But in the end I think most of the criticism fell of its own weight. It did so, I think, because it lost sight of both the demands and realities of that hijacking situation.

It was said of us, for example, that we gave too much air time --- some would say aid and comfort --- to Nabih Berri and the hijackers. Well, we did talk when we could to Nabih Berri. Sometimes he was the only person who knew anything who would talk, so why shouldn't we talk to him? We could have spent more time instead interviewing officials from our State Department. That would have verified our loyalty, but it wouldn't have told our audience much.

And apart from that purely journalistic instinct, there was certainly another reason for talking with the hijackers. Many of you have covered hostage situations - in a prison riot, perhaps, or during a bank robbery or a kidnapping. You probably remember that the authorities always want to keep the captors talking - because if they're talking they're less likely to injure the hostages. I don't think it's inappropriate to apply that logic to the situation in Beirut.

The same thing held true for the picturing of the hostages themselves. Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post put it best when he said afterwards: "As soon as the hostages appeared on television they were safe."

Some critics said we didn't put enough emphasis on the fact that the hostages, when they were interviewed, were under duress. That charge assumes at least a very low level of attention on the part of the American people. It assumes they don't realize that someone who has witnessed a brutal murder in the sky, has been imprisoned in an embattled city, and is surrounded by hostile rifles, is necessarily under some degree of duress.

One print journalist - whose name I won't mention in this context because I like him - suggested that the networks agree on some principles, and that one of them be that they "will not show in a terrorist hijacking situation any terrorist-produced events." Now, it seems to me that the hijacking itself was a terrorist-produced event, which under the proposed agreement would seem to rule out coverage altogether. But assuming he was referring just to news conferences and interviews, one still has to ask: "If you are covering a hijacking and you aren't going to cover the activities of the hijackers --- even if they're staged - then aren't you in the wrong business?"

These same critics were repelled by the frenzied news conference in Beirut where five of the hostages were displayed to the press corps - the first time any of the hostages had been seen. Well, those weren't mostly American television crews who were crawling all over each other that day - they were journalists from all over the world. Many of them were photographers, who would have performed the same acrobatics at the wedding of a rock star or the divorce trial of a multimillionaire. Don't misunderstand me: I think it was a disgraceful event.

And if we had boycotted that news conference, what would have been the result: radio and television journalists from elsewhere in the world would have covered it, and pictures and sound would have trickled back to the American audience second-hand. If you were close to Canada you would have got a fill on what the U.S. networks had decided you shouldn't see or hear. And if you lived in the southeastern United States, I can't help but wonder if you wouldn't have heard excerpts from the news conference piped in by Fidel Castro - probably on something he would have called "Radio Free America."

The truth is that there is such a multitude of news outlets in the world that the refusal of the U.S. networks to carry an event of that importance would serve more to frustrate and confuse American viewers than to quench the enthusiasm of the people who were holding the event.

Another criticism that deserves mention was particularly prominent in Washington. It was that the television coverage of the hostages and their families so humanized the situation that it tied the hands of the President and his policy-makers - that they were compelled to put first emphasis on the safety of the hostages even though that might not have been in the best interest of the nation. I'll let someone who has expert knowledge answer that question - former presidential press secretary Jody Powell, who suffered through the Iranian hostage situation and is now a journalist. Powell said: "Presidents are big boys and deserve to be held accountable for their actions. Blaming the press for bad policy cannot be an acceptable out."

And finally there is the notion, expressed by some critics, that on a story like this the networks are consumed by opportunism, that they have no set of principles to guide or sustain them. That simply is not true-or at least it is not true of the network I work for. We have our own little "Bible" at CBS News, called the CBS News Standards. This is a collection of specific suggestions that cover a multiplicity of circumstances a news organization might find itself in. One of the subjects it includes is the coverage of terrorism. I am familiar with the terrorism section because I had some part in writing it. It has been in our book since 1977, it is there for us to consult whenever we confront a story involving terrorism, and we do consult it.

Am I trying to say we didn't make any mistakes in our coverage? Of course not. For one thing, in retrospect (and this is not an all inclusive list), we tried to do too many special reports. We also perhaps should have been better at putting some reports into context. We are not, thank heavens, thoroughly experienced at live coverage of a terrorist hijacking. But, overall I believe we were accurate and fair - we tried the best we could under the circumstances and I believe most of our viewers understand that.

In discussing the great public attention that seems to have been attached to broadcast news, I do not mean to suggest that the condition is unique to networks. Most of you, I'm sure, have felt the same thing at the local level. It may have been a controversy about one of your stories, or a financial maneuver involving one of your stations, or - in too many cases - a libel suit. Whatever the cause, you have probably had reason to notice that broadcasting and broadcast news have become a continuing source of news themselves. Nor in mentioning this trend do I mean to exalt it. Almost the opposite. Like most journalists, I am uneasy when our profession is on stage instead of in the gallery. But even when we are chagrined about our prominence, we ought not to be surprised - not expect it to go away. Tom Wicker of the New York Times put it this way recently: "In the United States television has become the national nervous systems - and the satellites are making it an international nervous system, too."

In the midst of all the attention, we as journalists have to concentrate all the harder on keeping our heads about us and doing our jobs. However it may appear on the outside -the substance of our work is not glamour, or power or prestige. It is reporting. It is providing the information that a free society needs to make enlightened decisions about its future.

One person who understood these simple verities about broadcast news was Ed Murrow. He charged at his job, he fought to make his profession important, he never gave up believing in its potential. He felt that broadcast news had a special mission, and in his hands it did.

And in our hands it can.

Twenty-seven years ago, in 1958, Ed Murrow addressed the Radio and Television News Directors Association. Near the end of that speech, he said, about television, "This instrument can teach, it can illuminate, yes, it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise, it is merely wires and lights in a box."

Let us remember, then, that despite the great power and influence of the medium we work with, it is only wires and lights, it (is) only microwaves and satellites, unless we bring it to our own best abilities as journalists.

We cannot all be Edward R. Murrows. Probably none of us can. But all of us, in our own ways and in our own places can be dedicated and determined to be the best journalists that we can be.

We all have our limitations and our vulnerabilities. We all make mistakes. But somehow, in every newsroom we must never let the stars of professionalism, or integrity, of courage - go out.

Thank you again for getting me out of the box. I'll be back in it tomorrow night.

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