Tom Brokaw

Paul White Awards Ceremony

Tom Brokaw speaks after receiving the Paul White Award at RTNDA@NAB on April 8, 2002, in Las Vegas. Tom Brokaw was anchor and managing editor of NBC Nightly News until 2004.

I must say, this is a little more emotional then I anticipated that it might be because as I sat here tonight, it occurred to me that it was 40 years ago this spring, as I was graduating from the University of South Dakota with a degree in political science--hoping that I might be able to find work in this profession; getting married in August without a job lined up yet--that I began to send out a blizzard of applications.

If many of you go back to your newsrooms and dig deep into your files you will probably find one of those applications there. Especially if you are one of those stations that ended your job opportunity ads in the back of RTNDA journals and Broadcasting magazine with, "Good hunting and fishing opportunities in the area."

I managed to find a man in Omaha, NE, by the name of Mark Gottier who would see me for an interview. He took me to lunch at the worst greasy spoon in downtown Omaha and I thought my career was over before it began. Two days later, he called and offered me a job: $90 a week as a general assignment reporter. I held out for a hundred bucks.

He said, "That's fairly outrageous. You came here begging for a job, I've offered you one and now you want a $10 raise before you begin." And I said, "Mr. Gottier you don't understand, I'm marring the daughter of a physician in my hometown. I have to be able to go to him and say I'm making a three figure salary as I marry your daughter."

Somehow it worked out and under his expert guidance I did learn the fundamentals of journalism and reporting on the street. I was conceivably the worst man ever to hold a film is his hands however. And the Houston Fearless Film Processor terrified me no end.

So, they made me a news editor. I did the morning cut-ins and the noon news and the Saturday night news for those of you who are worrying about your contracts, to the princely sum of $125, before I left to go to Atlanta, GA, at WSB as the 11 o'clock anchorman for double my salary.

I've often thought I should go back to Atlanta, go on the air, and apologize to the good people of that community for having given them the news as a 25-year-old Yankee anchor in the midst of the civil rights revolution that was going on in their community. And I learned more in Atlanta about another culture and another way of life and the great social conflict that was exploding across the South.

And before too long, for reasons that are still not entirely clear to me, I was offered a job by NBC in Los Angeles. And after some hesitation, I decided that we in fact could move West, and did that--going there in 1966--and have stayed at this network ever since.

Watching this video tonight was a reminder to me that I was probably wrong when I was a young man growing up in South Dakota, thinking I might like to do this line of work, but I was worried that all the big events had already happened.

It turns out that was not the case.

Now the fact is that most of you know me from my earliest days in television, but I really began in radio when I was just 16 in my hometown. And it was there that I learned firsthand the great commercial pressures that exist within broadcasting operations. The fine line that exists between commerce and news. Because I was on the air at the age of 16, having had no other experience, thinking this is the way it was done everywhere in America.

In Yankton, SD, they had a volunteer fire department and when the phone rang and the siren went off, and the phone rang at all the volunteer firemens' homes, it also rang at the station. And I had these instructions: I would pick up the phone, listen to the announcement, put it down, interrupt the radio programming that we had on the air and say, "The fire is located at 313 Locust St. Please do not follow the fire trucks. The fire is located at 313 Locust. Please avoid that area." Then after a discrete pause I would say, "Are you properly insured? For a complete line of home fire insurance needs call the Frubb H. Leech Agency."

Wait, it's not over. When the bell went off on the United Press International wire service ticker signaling what passed for an urgent or a bulletin in South Dakota--generally another highway fatality--I would again interrupt the programming, but now we had sound effects. I would hit a button; there would be a pre-recorded sound effect that went like this: "BONG, BONG, BONG." In my best 16-year-old funeral tones, I would come on the air and say, "For whom the bell tolls, 38-year-old Jim Selachek of rural Gettas, South Dakota, was killed in a one-car accident tonight two miles south of Gettas. BONG, BONG, BONG. For whom the bell tolls: 38-year-old Jim Selachek." Then after a discrete pause I would say, "Are you properly insured? For a complete line of life insurance needs see the Morgan T. Smith Insurance Agency."

So for those of you who are news directors and feel that you have commercial pressures now, you know nothing about for whom the bell tolls.

I'd like to take a few moments, if I'd may, of your time and offer you some observations. Not a lecture, but a kind of common musing if you will, as long as we are all gathered here, living during these momentous times. As they were for Charles Dickens, so they are for American journalism: the best of times; and the worst of times.

The worst of times because of the nature of the big story that defines our time: this new world war between the ideals of western civilization and the dark and bloody interpretation of Islam by a growing number of its most zealous followers. A war that transcends political boundaries as it is waged in a cunning and cold-blooded fashion by fanatics willing to make themselves the instruments of death. It is a war without front lines that next could involve biological weapons or worse.

It is the best of times, for American journalism, because after the attacks of 9/11 our profession--which had been undergoing a painful identity crisis--regained its place as a critical component of a free people to make enlightened judgments about their lives and the direction of their government. The place of relevant, credible information is unassailable in a civilized society. Within the work we do, there is of course also a place for entertaining, distracting, titillating, even silly information. But it should always be secondary and not primary.

That is the compact that we have with our viewers and listeners, and it requires their commitment as well. I believe that among the many changes post 9/11 is a heightened awareness of and a greater appetite for the substantive stuff of society and not merely the distracting.

These then are the objective facts of our time. We are at war, around the world. That war is profoundly affecting the way we live at here home. It is re-ordering priorities across a broad spectrum--political, cultural, economic and personal.

Moreover, the war comes at a time when other defining issues are reaching a critical mass in our society: the place of race in our future and especially in our determination of who qualifies for what jobs, what classrooms and what housing; the capacity of this nation of immigrants to sort through the crush of people from other lands desperate to come here for either work and or citizenship; the true value of a corporate entity and the credibility of the capital markets as they reflect the financial health of institutions; the reliability of our health care delivery system in a nation with a rapidly expanding population of geriatric citizens, including your speaker here this evening; a public education system that we know is failing in too many places in its most fundamental mission; natural resources--from the land to water to air and all the creatures who exist there--in a struggle for survival against the pressures of the population and an instinct for alteration instead of preservation.

Any poll of public concerns will place any one or combination of those issues in the top tier of the survey. Yet in too many newsrooms, including network newsrooms, they're widely regarded as too complex or too boring or too risky to be worthy of much investment.

This is not one of those occasions in which the network anchor comes before you and plays the part of the schoolmarm, rapping a hickory stick on the podium, demanding more attention to the fundamentals, and then walks away, leaving you to the cruel realities of sweeps and minute-by-minutes and gimlet-eyed general managers, to say nothing of network anchors demanding a flood tide of viewers leading into their own evening broadcasts.

It is instead a common place. A reminder for all of us, whatever level we work in this profession, that our place and our survival is at an intersection called form and substance. We cannot long keep the compact that we have with the American people if we choose only form, ignoring substance. Yogi Berra was right: if we come to a fork in the road, we should take it. Form and substance.

We have mastered the form. Now the imperative is to use that mastery to connect the viewer to the matters and issues that most affect their lives. In this new, more crowded news universe in which we toil, the brightest stars will be those that shed the most light, not just the most heat.

No more then a year ago I was asked to come to Harvard and address the Kennedy School at the Theodore White Lecture, and I made some observations there I'd like to share with you tonight as well, because I think it places in some context were we stand in the spring of 2002, the beginning of a new millennium.

There was a time in this country not so long ago when darkness came in the early evening and only two news planets lit up the skies--the Huntley Brinkley Report on NBC and the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. All across this republic, families gathered by appointment to share an evening meal and the experience--at first just 15 minutes and then a half-hour of news programming.

I was a part of that audience, an impressionable and ambitious teenager in the small towns of the Great Plains, my nose pressed up against the glass of this magical view of a world well beyond my ordinary surroundings.

It was in many ways a transforming expansion of the universe occupied not only by the working class families of my community, but by millions of others across the television landscape. We were witness--for the first time, in our own homes--to events that defined our lives. Conventions and elections, scandals and triumphs, disasters and advances. Great social causes--the civil rights movement and the anti-war protests--were beamed directly into the living rooms of America.

Still, for all of their illumination, those two planets also had deep shadows where other forms of life were not nurtured. Racial issues were covered--exclusively--but gender issues were not. Indeed, very few women had any role in determining, reporting or commenting on the news. Moreover, in retrospect, reporting of racial issues was mostly a black-white equation. There was very little reporting of the profound changes within the black culture, positive and negative.

The race for space was a marquee event in those early days of network news but the breathtaking advances in the health sciences were little noticed. Cancer, its origins, its prevalence and its treatment; cancer was a subject that was ignored socially and editorially in most newsrooms.

In foreign news, there was a heavy reliance on Europe and the Cold War, but in Asia--apart from Vietnam later--there was little about the extraordinary political and economic evolution of the region from Japan and Korea to Singapore.

At home, rock and roll was treated, if at all, as a curiosity and not as the transforming popular cultural event of the time. In some circles, to this day, the decision of NBC News to lead the broadcast with the death of Elvis Presley still is considered a heresy, a hinge event, representing a break from the secular sacraments of traditional news.

The changing role of the young as represented by the most clearly defined generation of the 20th Century--the baby boomers--was little noticed outside protest context.

There was a heavy reliance on Washington hearings, too often without a clear-eyed appraisal of their merit or impact.

It was a world that was reflecting the interests of the people who made decisions; most of them were middle-aged men from a common culture along the Eastern seaboard. They were serious professionals of unquestioned integrity and intelligence who understandably reflected the sensibilities of their time and place.

They were my role models and my mentors. After all, I aspired to their place and I shared their interests. As someone who expected to be a white middle-aged man himself, I was content to follow their lead as I set out on my own pilgrimage.

Now, back to the future. Were I a teenager back in Yankton, SD, in the year 2002, I would have access to three full-throated networks, three full-time cable news channels and a local news channel as well, two financial news channels, three sports networks, a history channel, a biography channel, two cable channels broadcasting public policy discussions all day every day, a wide-ranging public broadcasting system with its own evening news and an award-winning documentary unit.

I could probably watch the BBC News at 10 as well. With a keystroke I could call up more than 150 web sites devoted exclusively to news and information. I could read the New York Times before leaving for school and I could also read the Yankton Press and Dakotan and get my high school team's basketball game box score from the night before and find out that the morning after I had still scored only six points in the game.

So which universe best serves the public and the place of journalism in a free society? As grateful as I am to the founding fathers of broadcast news for their vision, their standard and most of all to their commitment to the idea of news on the new medium of television, I have to conclude that the universe that we occupy is richer, more accessible and more far-reaching in terms of information and communication and the dissemination of daily news.

To be sure it is a universe of considerable chaos, still in formation, imperfect in many of its elements. It represents another form of the big bang--a vast new universe of enormous potential upon us almost overnight. It demands our attention.

As we engage this process of review and definition, recommendation and implementation, some historic context is in order.

Edward R. Murrow was an icon of those of us who followed him, but Walter Winchell was at least as persuasive, if not more so, and his audience was probably larger.

We all lived through the trial of O.J. Simpson and the funeral of Princess Diana. The Lindbergh kidnapping trial, the Sam Shepard murder case and the marriage of Wallis Simpson to the Duke of Windsor created the same climate of frenzy in American journalism at the time.

We may have known too much about Bill Clinton's sex life but not enough about John Kennedy's. There were more debates in the Presidential campaign of 2000 than in all of the campaigns of modern Presidential elections.

Sunday morning has become a regular appointment for students of American politics and policy, well beyond what it was in the era when Meet the Press and Face the Nation were the only outlets, and then only at 30 minutes apiece.

Even as this quantitative expansion of the news universe is breathtaking in scope, it is the qualitative nature of this new reality that draws us to this occasion and others. Does it represent a step forward in the unending quest to know better the perils and possibilities of the precious time that we have in this life, or is it a retreat to the lowest common denominators of fear and titillation?

The short answer: it is all of the above.

But for that viewer and for those of us on the other side of the screen, the old order of trust and credibility, integrity and independence, requires a constant and vigorous re-examination. It is especially true given the pressures of time and the meteor shower of information, real and imagined, in modern personal and professional lives.

These days we have such a voracious appetite that news on some occasions is more closely akin to daycare. It is a live camera, a warm body and an event--any kind of event, however banal--that may or may not lead to something meaningful or entertaining, preferably the latter.

The various news media must be restricted entirely to an "eat-your-spinach" kind of news. They do not have the time and space to do what television does best--which is transmit experience, in the words of Reuven Frank, the founding father of the Huntley Brinkley Report. Those Californian freeway chases are the maddening hypotheoses of the transmission of experience.

But what he expected in the transmission of experience and in the coverage of news, however unsavory the topic, was that the fundamental tenets of journalism would have application. Why should we care--or not care? Is this an isolated development or part of a larger context? What is there beyond what we are currently showing you on the screen, that you should know to make a judgment about all this?

It is the application of journalistic principles that is too much under represented in what we see and hear in this new universe.

Occasionally, even when we believe those principles are firmly in place, the assumptions are about as sound as the ground beneath the San Andreas Fault. Election night, 2000, was a painful reminder of the absolute need for persistent vigilance and the maintenance of standards in a climate of competitive pressures forcing the tectonic plates of change.

Indisputably, the time and competitive pressures are greater now, for the viewers, the readers and for those of us in the cockpit. If I may, I'll offer you tonight a brief outline of the Brokaw Theorem, a new law of journalistic physics.

A piece of matter of undetermined origin, reliability or importance gets sucked into the news cycle overnight in some fashion. Fact Check is more likely to be the name of the female traffic reporter than the standard practice.

By midmorning the all-news cable outlets are treating it as "an unsubstantiated report." It is being analyzed and turned over and commented on. It is now making its way on to the noon local news broadcast. It is also the stuff of newsroom water cooler gatherings. By late afternoon it is giving me a migraine and I am saying, "Where in hell did this come from?"

It is difficult enough for me. Consider the viewer, especially the viewer with access to what amounts to an Internet chain letter. He or she can be taking this in off our screens and also the small screen. Before long it hits critical mass.

Even the discerning viewer must be confused by this meteor shower of information that is unsubstantiated, especially when it is accompanied by those journalists who appear on one medium as reporters and a moment later on another medium as commentators and as pundits.

So what are we to make of this new world where there is great anxiety about whether the Darwinian principals of journalism are leading to a bright new age of unlimited news and information dissemination and retrieval, or leading us into a steep dive into the primordial ooze?

Personally, you'll be happy to know, I am much more inclined to the former than the latter. I think we must take care not to judge the whole by the most-sensational but least-relevant parts.

Even at an age however, and a stage when I would prefer to shift to cruise control, I know that neither my colleagues nor I can go on autopilot. We are not immune--any of us in this room--to the great evolutionary forces at work in our medium.

It is so much more competitive these days. The marketplace--journalistic and economic--is so much less forgiving. The audience is not nearly as homogenous as earlier stewards may have thought. We have learned that again recently in Chicago, when they did eat-your-spinach news and quickly folded after a very short period of time.

I couldn't resist noting that in the Chicago newspapers, first the cheering and then the lamentations of the television critics for the experiments were in pages of publications that also print the horoscopes, comics, advice to the lovelorn, sports scores, gossips involving 15-minute celebrities and crossword puzzles. I've often said to my friends in the print medium, I wonder how long you could survive if you went to the news stand or home delivery with only the front and editorial pages.

However we organize our journalistic efforts and present the finished product, we have an obligation to each other and to our viewers to be guided by certain well-defined and understood principles. Just as there are fundamental principles of astrophysics that govern the behavior of the real stars and real planets, so, too, are there fundamental principles that govern--or should govern--our place and behavior.

First, news is change. What's new, what's different? But that alone is not enough. Is it important? Is it relevant?

Then, if it is new and important, is it also true? How do we determine and demonstrate the truth of what we're finding out?

If it is new, important and true, what is the effect and the context of it all? Also, where does it fit? After all, daily journalism is also about "Omigod, look at that!" The arresting picture, the unexpected and riveting event that may not have lasting consequence, the moment of humanity that is reassuring.

Finally, if it is new, important and true, how do we present it in a way that our viewers can be engaged by it and recognize it as something they should know and want to know. Those principles are neither staid nor toxic. They are critical to the health of the profession and to the bond between the viewer and the news producers. They have not disappeared, but their place is in danger of being diminished in the daily struggle to master this new, so much more crowded and competitive, universe.

After almost 40 years in this profession now, small towns and on the world stage, during times of constitutional crises, wars, natural disasters of epic proportions, social and economic upheaval, scientific triumphs and great personal tragedies, I have one enduring and primary conclusion. Our viewers--the American people--take us seriously, and we fulfill our most fundamental obligation to them and our place in this system of governance when we return the favor.

They are empowered--and so are we--by the riches of this new universe that we occupy together. We have gone by that memorable 19th century Chicago newspaper credo: Just print the news and raise hell. While it remains a stirring rallying cry, the fact is that we live in a far more complex world of news and information. As this new world takes shape beneath our feet and before our eyes and before new generations on a daily basis, we cannot just randomly stumble forward, guided only by our instincts for that day's survival. But neither can we be dismissive of the appetite of viewers and readers for a rich variety of choices, engagingly presented whether serious or trivial.

9/11 was a watershed time for this country and a triumph for American journalism. We re-earned our trust and credibility with the people who look to us to guide them through the wilderness of those first few days. We cannot squander the bond that has been renewed and re-established.

We owe it to ourselves, our calling, our time and place to raise to a higher station a constant and wide ranging dialogue on the powers that we are privileged to exercise.

I have just returned from the Middle East. I was aboard the USS Stennis. When I'd get up after a few hours sleep, I could tune in. Unfortunately it was always CNN and not MSNBC. And wherever I went on the ship there were people watching cable news or reading their hometown newspaper over the Internet or having an email exchange with a friend back home who had watched the news that day and was relaying to these young warriors what they had heard. And I was struck again about the importance of what it is we do on a daily basis.

And I went from there to Beirut, to the Arab League Summit meeting where there were closed sessions and controlled press all around us. And we had to work mightily to elicit any real information from these people who occupy that critical part of the world.

And from there I went to Israel. Where there was great chaos as a result of the Passover suicide bombing and a military invasion was being planned and was going forward and already there was great tension within Israel and certainly within this country about what may happen in the Middle East.

Without thinking about it at the time, I realized that those of us at NBC and at ABC and at CBS and at Fox and at CNN and in the local newsrooms across America that were reporting this story, that the fuse was burning from so many directions, that a possibility for a perilous World War to break out on a second level was going on in the Middle East.

The American People desperately needed the best information that we could provide them on a moment-by-moment basis about what was going on there.

That goes on in every newsroom in America, however small or large. Whether it is a war or as it is here in Las Vegas, a decision about storing nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain. Or whether it is in Montana, about the place of free speech in the northwestern part of the state where there is now another radical movement taking hold. Or whether it is in Florida, where the governor is struggling to impose on the state again his idea of new education standards.

We are the intersection through which the policymakers and viewers must pass. That intersection is called form and substance.

You can't have one without the other. It is, I believe, the most important colloquy that we can all engage in as serious journalistic professionals. And I hope this evening has been a part of that, and I thank you again for this great honor.

I'm truly, deeply touched.

Thank you all.

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