Issues

Feature: Person to Person

by Ellen Hunt

A summit of top news executives and journalists met in June to reflect on Edward R. Murrow’s “wires and lights in a box” speech, and to address with Murrow-esque candor the realities—and future—of broadcast journalism.

On the same October night in 1958 that Edward R. Murrow challenged RTNDA members in Chicago to fulfill the promise of broadcasting to serve the public good, his bosses at CBS gathered in New York to review a copy of the speech. And they were angry. Murrow had been conscious that the CBS brass might think he was “fouling his own comfortable nest,” and in fact, that was their reaction. Richard Salant, then-assistant to CBS president Frank Stanton, later said, “It was kind of like the child you’ve nurtured turning on you.”

These days, Murrow’s speech garners a different reaction among network and local television news managers, because so much of what he said is still relevant. As part of a yearlong retrospective marking the speech’s 50th anniversary, RTNDF, the McCormick Foundation and the McCormick Foundation Conference Series sponsored a summit June 3 in Chicago for 30 news managers, executives, anchors, correspondents and scholars—with a special appearance by Murrow’s son, Casey. The group’s goal: to pick up the discussion where Murrow left off, to discuss shrinking budgets, fragmented markets and how to be better at our craft.

Balancing News and Entertainment
Murrow’s attempt to balance news and entertainment is a struggle that today’s journalists still face. Mixing the frothiest of entertainment and the toughest of investigative reporting, which Murrow did, can still work today, argued Tom Bettag, executive producer of the Discovery Network’s Koppel Group. “60 Minutes has one investigative piece, one that takes you to some place, and one star profile, which has given it life and profitability, and it stands as the most credible magazine broadcast over the years,” he said.

Bob Edwards, XM Radio host and Murrow biographer, noted that Murrow did not have “artificial balance,” but would investigate, talk to as many people as he could, and reach a conclusion. He would not “bring on a liar” to balance the truth, Edwards said.

But serving the body politic by helping audiences to be informed citizens means gaining their attention, which sometimes requires straddling the worlds of hard news and entertainment, which is “an ongoing struggle,” said Mark Whitaker, Washington bureau chief for NBC News. “The greatest success comes when you can find out what the right fuel mixture is.”

Breaking news and catastrophic events notwithstanding, stations need to have some entertaining programming to keep audiences tuned in; after all, audiences are getting their news from many other sources. “The onus is on all of us to make the hardest kind of news coverage engaging,” Whitaker said.

While some consider audience fragmentation to be good for democracy— because audiences can check a variety of news sources to get several points of view—others at the summit contend it has the exact opposite effect. “The average person doesn’t necessarily want to see an opinion that he doesn’t agree with, even if it’s a fact,” said Desiree Hill, VP of news development for Pappas Telecasting. “You can go to a blog and have your position reaffirmed.”

Capitalizing on audiences’ Internet behavior (or habits) and the new tools that allow interaction between the audience and journalists is something broadcasters have yet to do. “Democracy may be flourishing, but our businesses aren’t,” said Mark Effron, president and COO of Titan TV Media. He said there has to be an almost radical change to engage an audience, yet stations have in many ways changed very little from the days of Walter Cronkite. That’s a sentiment shared by Steve Schwaid, news director for WGCL-TV in Atlanta. He spoke of a boss who gave a painful assessment: “‘I go into every market, and you all look the same,’ he said. ‘There’s a woman on the left, there’s a man on the right. Or it may be reversed.’”

One concern participants addressed is that rather than any attempts to be engaging, some newsrooms turn to excessive celebrity news and underestimate their audience, taking the news to the lowest common denominator. “There is a huge appetite for substantive news,” argued James Warren, formerly the managing editor at the Chicago Tribune. “People care about whether beaches are clean, the water is safe and the schools are capable of educating their children. But they don’t want it communicated in pro forma linear, anchorman fashion."

The challenge to local stations, which Murrow alluded to 50 years ago is to connect with the audience by showing them how national and local news relates to them. One benefit of today’s multi-platform news cycle is that if a station feels obligated to offer the celeb du jour story for its audience, they may treat such news briefly on air and direct audiences to their websites for more.

Managers and executives at the summit voiced the very real concern about losing young people—the audience of today and tomorrow—and a few reported anecdotes that some of their young station employees don’t even tune in to their own newscasts. Losing that generation will be bad for broadcasters, said Nick Clooney, former newscaster and broadcast executive. “Until we become good enough to make real news compelling,” he said, “we are headed for the dustbin.”

Are the Media Biased?
Murrow never had a blog, but the question of how to treat news and opinion is something he faced in his time as well. How can television and radio news best serve the public—by offering two opposing points of view and remaining neutral, or by presenting a story from a particular point of view? What can be gained or lost by having reporters editorialize or blog?

Quoting Murrow’s colleague Howard K. Smith, ABC News correspondent John Cochran said, “Truth is where the truth is, not midway between points.” News managers from local stations argued that to stay relevant to their audience they have to represent the interests of those constituents, advocating for the needs of their communities rather than maintaining a strictly neutral stance. “We expect our stations to get very granular and very biased,” said Susana Schuler, VP of news for Raycom Media in Montgomery, AL. “They have to get into their communities and figure out what are the problems and what are the issues.”

“As journalists, we tell a story with a point of view,” said Condace Pressley, assistant program director at WSB-AM Radio in Atlanta. “But we all struggle to be balanced and fair.”

Not only do some news managers worry that their effort to eliminate bias has created dull and homogenized news, they also feel that even their best efforts to be unbiased in reporting stories result in accusations of partisanship by people from both ends of the political spectrum. “I want our local news departments to give voice to the voiceless and hold the powerful accountable [even if those who disagree with a story accuse the station of bias],” said Dan Bradley, VP of news for Media General Broadcast Group.

What most troubled the summit’s participants was how the lines between editorializing and straight news have blurred, something Murrow himself struggled with as well. While recognizing the appeal of opinion pieces, whether in print or on air, many news managers said such pieces should be clearly designated as such.

“I don’t think it’s healthy for us to be rationalizing the expression of partisan views in the news,” said Charles Kravetz, president and GM of New England Cable News. “Editorials are great, but they should be separated from news.” When it comes to blogs, not everyone agreed that on-air broadcasters should be allowed to have them, especially if the blogs are used to express political views. “I don’t think you can do that any more than you can take part in a political rally,” said Dave Busiek, news director at KCCI-TV in Des Moines, IA.

The News Business Is Still a Business
While revenue streams may still come from advertising—although some suggested novel revenue ideas, such as partnering with nonprofits—most broadcasters have to “change the tires on the bus while it’s going 60 miles an hour,” as NBC’s Steve Schwaid put it. Broadcasters are still trying to find a way for traditional news to work with the Internet and mobile devices, requiring different kinds of images and stories, despite having fewer resources. And the industry is still expected to make a profit. “We can discuss degrees of profit, but profit is not a four-letter word,” said Media General’s Bradley. “Profit is what fed this country and will carry us into the future.”

Terry Heaton, SVP of AR&D, charged that the industry needs to redefine itself. ”We aren’t in the television or radio business, we’re in the information and entertainment business,” he said. Former CBS and NBC news executive Bill Small agreed. “It’s clear that the future is not in traditional broadcasts, but in what broadcasters can do in the digital world.”

Advertising will likely still provide the bulk of revenues, but how it is sold demands a new approach. “We’ve gotten lazy on the sales side,” Heaton said. “It’s possible to make much more money on the web than we are.”

But just as the newsrooms need to be thinking innovatively about content, so should the sales office. Some were shocked at the idea, voiced first by Mark Whitaker and then echoed by many others, that broadcasters have to “stop thinking that there has to be an absolute wall between ‘church and state,’ that we never have to talk to sales people and help them be successful.” Provided that editorial decisions are made independently, he said, journalists and sales people can partner if it is done in a transparent, open way.

As the participants broke off into five working groups to brainstorm ideas for a healthy future, Casey Murrow thanked the participants, RTNDF and the McCormick Foundation for choosing his father’s speech to provoke debate, and expressed his hope that in another 50 years, our audiences would become engaged partners in the newsgathering process. “In a sense that’s what people are trying to do right now by stumbling around the various sites on the web and trying to understand what’s going on in the world,” he said. “And if the wonderful news organizations that exist today can help in that process, I’ll bet they’ll survive and be very exciting and useful.”

Ellen Hunt is a Chicago writer and editor. For more than 20 years she has been a regular guest on WGN Radio’s Extension 720 as an expert on “use and abuse” of the English language.

Originally published in the September/October 2008 issue of Communicator. All rights reserved.