Confessions of a Network Newsman
Eastland, Terry
PRESSWATCH CONFESSIONS OF A NETWORK NEWSMAN IT doubt there are better ways to chart trends in American journalism than to observe the career of Fred Graham, best known for his work as CBS law...
...A: I went to CBS for $36,000...
...In those days, because it was rather new to have the TV people along on a lot of stories, print reporters just weren't used to hearing those basic questions...
...Graham recently signed on as anchor of the first full-time cable channel devoted to legal affairs, an initiative of the crafty Steven Brill, publisher of the American Lawyer...
...A: Well, when I first got into journalism it was almost like that...
...Q: Tell me about the relationship in the early 1960s between the Washington media and the presidency...
...We are following the CNN model—young people, low salaries, no unions, lean and mean, hard workers...
...I phoned Graham in his New York office, and we talked about his odyssey as a journalist...
...Still, 'W...
...There was a special kind of affinity between the Kennedys personally and some elements of the press...
...People are almost stunned by the array of choices on the screen, the array of effects that they see when they watch the thing...
...I got a big increase...
...I really didn't talk about it...
...He grew up in Texarkana, on the Arkansas side...
...I went in to cover the Justice Department right after Bobby Kennedy had left...
...Q: The number of Americans watching network and local news is declining...
...Newspaper readership has effectively declined, since it has remained flat for some while now even as the population has increased...
...Q: And would you say that this might be better, healthier for the industry in the long run...
...In television, you are expressing ideas through pictures...
...It made a pretty interesting trial...
...Where I part company with the networks is that in their eagerness for high ratings, they overemphasize the visual aspects of television in order to make it look more like prime time...
...And there's confusion in the minds of people, as they watch television, as to what is fact and entertainment...
...All I can say is that based on my experience I am going to resist that...
...People, really fine journalists, wanted that job...
...A: Yes, but there's a parallel phenomenon in which the presidency has learned to use the media...
...Another reason—which I write so much about in my book—is the "infotainment" element...
...Q: Why was that...
...Q: You worked seven years for the New York Times...
...There are so many channels and so many types of fare that people are confused by it all...
...The editor, Coleman Harwell, was one of those Southern gentlemen types from Sewanee who felt that a gentleman really could be a reporter...
...But they were holding out for someone with legal training...
...The reason is that journalists are by profession voyeurs, not normally participants in events that bring out revealing facets ofhuman character...
...Was it a hostile relationship or was that to come with Vietnam and Watergate...
...Watergate was a media event, and it also seemed to change the media...
...So I started saying–I`Where else can I direct my legal background in journalism...
...Q: A definition of infotainment...
...But the media generally had not been very critical...
...Q: Do you intend to have "happy talk," as you call it, on the American Trial Network...
...The network had "standards" and "prestige...
...Terry Eastland is resident scholar at the National Legal Center for the Public Interest...
...And so, as a result of doing happy talk, I know how to look at the right camera and . . . talk...
...Infotainment" became the ruling standard in the early eighties...
...I had a kind of compact with myself that after I had stayed on that job longer than Anthony Lewis had, I would re-evaluate things...
...I know in your book you address what you call the "coziness issue...
...And there is a technological and psychological interaction going on with the American people that is unprecedented...
...They average nine seconds long...
...Here's the early resume: Yale, the Marines, Vanderbilt Law, Oxford...
...It had not covered the Kennedy Administration in a critical way...
...One was that as a legal journalist, I had done all I could at the Times...
...Q: Why did you become a journalist after being educated at Yale, Vanderbilt, and Oxford...
...In this evolving relationship the media is trying to figure out what it's supposed to do...
...And print people were unused to a basic fact of television—that it asks "dumb" questions...
...A: If anything, it was the flip side of that...
...Whether there will be three networks, and if three networks, a news division for each, is unclear...
...A: I think it is uncertain...
...And the public did not seem very judgmental...
...It had not been covered in a very critical way...
...Those were the days when the media, to a great extent, was on the team with the Kennedy Administration...
...Far more important than the viewer seeing whether the guy is going to get convicted of biting a guard, or of attempted murder, are all of these issues of AIDS, of whether prisoners should have access to AZT and all of those things...
...Q: Why...
...There always were hard feelings about the higher salaries paid by television...
...Nobody really knows where it is taking us...
...A: That's right...
...And you have to ask a fairly basic question to elicit that answer...
...It'll be fun if I can write an article in five years saying that for the most part we've done okay...
...Some people in print felt threatened...
...Q: Was that because people saw Watergate as the exceptional case...
...Q: In your experience over the past twenty-five years, has there again been that kind of affinity or closeness between government and the media...
...A: It started at CBS in 1981, after Dan Rather replaced Walter Cronkite...
...Q: Are you saying it changed and, if S4 when did it change...
...Q: Let's stop on that point...
...A: If there is an upside to what's happening, then the opportunity we have is it...
...If you ignore the fact that you are communicating through pictures, then you're not giving television its due...
...Douglas Kiker had done it, but not many had...
...For the first time ever, viewership is down...
...Q: That's a different priority for someone who's worked in Washington...
...A: That's what everybody was originally...
...When I left the Times and went with CBS News it was really very exciting, in my mind, and I think it was justifiable to see the network in that way...
...A: That's already happened...
...PRESSWATCH CONFESSIONS OF A NETWORK NEWSMAN IT doubt there are better ways to chart trends in American journalism than to observe the career of Fred Graham, best known for his work as CBS law correspondent during the seventies and eighties...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1990 31...
...Their news operations seem to be increasingly in trouble and their future in doubt...
...And that was so rare in those days that it almost came down to me...
...A: What we want to find is a case that has an issue in it that is important to the population beyond the fact of who gets convicted and who gets acquitted...
...Q: When you went to television in 1972, did print people look down upon television...
...Something is happening technologically and psychologically...
...He wore a "soap-opera Afro," learned that anchoring is little more than news reading, and tried to engage in the "happy talk" required of local co-anchors...
...Q: What's the future of network news...
...It was just a great stroke of luck on my part...
...Will you move up from the trial level...
...The sum total is that not as many people are saying, "I have to get my journalism fix today...
...One of the things about being a journalist is that you have the luxury of standing aside from and above the fray and being judgmental...
...When he died, I got a job with Labor Secretary Willard Wirtz, writing speeches...
...Nobody knows how many channels we are going to end up with...
...Today, I would assume there would be two dozen...
...The New York Times deby Terry Eastland cided to reassign Anthony Lewis from the legal beat to the London bureau...
...Television was a natural...
...A: No...
...The Tennessean was encouraging people who had a good education and other career prospects to go into journalism, because it was an interesting career...
...I sort of concealed my background in government for a number of years...
...My question: Are journalists, these professional voyeurs, uninteresting people...
...At the New York Times, you made $19,000 in 1965...
...A lot of them have really flourished by pitching themselves at special interests...
...They really didn't hold our feet to the fire and say, "Wait a minute, is this such a good idea...
...What we are finding is that all of those we are now taping have one of these issues...
...He thinks serious journalists must stay in it and try to redeem it...
...A: I suspect not journalism but television is responsible for it...
...Q: If cameras are allowed into the Supreme Court, will the American Trial Network become the American Appellate Network...
...Q: So television people might have felt some superiority based on higher salary...
...Because basically what I do is presideover the televising of trials and talk with judges and lawyers involved, to get them to explain what's going on...
...Those of us covering Watergate were so successful in aggressive, somewhat adversarial tactics, and it seemed to us appropriate...
...On this matter of pay, I was interviewed on television the other day by John McLaughlin, and he was saying he is doing a lot on cable now, but, boy, the pay is really lower here, isn't it...
...Does the First Amendment now stand for inarticulate grunts in the guise of news...
...Very shortly after Watergate, as we employed the same sort of tactics to other news stories thatcame along, people started saying, "Wait a minute...
...Graham, now fifty-eight, is the son of a Presbyterian preacher...
...Q: When did infotainment begin...
...And when I had stayed longer than Tony, I asked myself, "What am I going to do next on the Times...
...It was the exceptional case that made people overlook some of our flaws...
...And as I say, I found it pretty dull...
...Q: Did that experience help you as a journalist...
...And so I went up to Washington on Senator Estes Kefauver's staff...
...Or is the future more limited...
...The media realizes it's being used but has to go along on the theory that there might be some news to cover...
...I don't think it's been figured out yet...
...I was a political appointee...
...I practiced law for about five or six years and found it dull...
...A: Television was becoming respectable...
...Q: That may be the upside, but doesn't it also mean that salaries in television are going to come down...
...They felt that they wanted to continue the tradition of having a legally trained person on that beat...
...Q: In your book you talk about how network news sound-bites have become "so short as to defy understanding...
...I was about the only person around that fit that description...
...A: In some ways, yes...
...Are they flai one-dimensional characters...
...Suppose you were at the New York Times today and thinking about switching to network news, would your calculation be different from the one you made in 1972...
...Graham lasted fourteen months...
...Q: Ratings started to drive television, rather than good journalism...
...Did national journalists become arrogant at a certain point, in Watergate...
...David Broder and others have written about that A: I have seen those stories Q: And I am wondering how you view that...
...Generally speaking, at that time [the mid-fifties] people who had a college education didn't become journalists...
...Is the media today going through a process of trying to sort itself out in terms of its attitude...
...Why did you leave the Times in 1972 to go to CBS...
...When you left in 1972, CBS paid you almost twice as much...
...I think it casts us in a very glamorous and interesting role sometimes, but I don't think it makes us very interesting people...
...And print people were jealous...
...We are going to be a network for people, not for lawyers...
...If you are not intellectually comfortable with some of the stories that you are going to be required to do, that's not very satisfying...
...And I was told by the Times to take a more critical look over there...
...And I said, yes, that's been my experience, too...
...It gave me an idea of how government worked...
...But when I got to CBS, they had all been in broadcasting for fifteen to twenty years...
...It didn't last...
...Catherine's College for a year on a Fulbright...
...In those days, too, the New York Times was the uncontested numero uno of print journalism...
...A: There was a taint in those days, much more than there is now...
...The younger ones, people like Lesley Stahl and Connie Chung and Bernard Shaw—they were all brought up in television...
...We were print-style journalists who showed pictures while we told the news...
...During that time a new trend set in—local news across the nation started losing big chunks of its audience...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1990 29 A: Well, that's probably too strong...
...Do these trends bother you as a journalist...
...But not many people in journalism thought that...
...A: No, I don't think there has been...
...It was beginning to challenge print for prestige, for personnel, for acceptability...
...Graham, pulling down $255,000 in 1985, joined the long list of those purged by a management less and less interested in substance...
...A: Well, it was a combination of two things...
...Soon enough, I got a chance to switch into journalism...
...A: We may come under some pressures to go towards flash and trash in order to make this a commercial success...
...This was just at the time it was becoming permissible to go from print to television...
...We are going to make it very clear that this is intended for non-lawyers...
...For instance, we just finished one where a prisoner with AIDS bit a guard...
...A: It's a mixture of information and entertainment designed to capture ratings...
...Q: It's hard for me to imagine a network hiring an Edwin Newman or a Fred Graham today...
...Q: But what about the revolving door between government and journalism...
...Graham remains a believer in television...
...We had not had much in the way of raises at the Times...
...A: You make it sound as if it's almost a job unbefitting a person who . . . Q: I didn't mean to put it quite like that...
...A: Right...
...Broadcast news—two words that could be uttered without irony back then—also came of age in the early seventies, and Graham joined CBS in 1972...
...And it was a choice between staying for the rest of my career in that job, which I decided not to do, or go to another position on the Timesin which I would be less well qualified than what I was doing...
...W. Norton, $19.95...
...A: No...
...In those days there was an affinity between the media and the presidency that involved a commonality of political interest—liberalism...
...Q: You've written that the 1970s were golden years for television news and CBS in particular...
...Q: The press was almost an adjunct of the presidency...
...I took a job at the Nashville Tennessean as a way of working my way through the Vanderbilt Law School...
...A: Well, no one has been hired like that lately, have they...
...Q: This seems a good time to ask you about your new effort with the American Trial Network...
...We are going with something new, with a big premium on youth and vitality and enthusiasm...
...With Graham's bittersweet and well-written memoir in hand, Happy Talk: Confessions of a TV Newsman,' the task is made easy...
...Q: The Times was not concerned...
...What you have 30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1990 are the hard-core journalists leaving, and no one roughly equivalent to that joining the networks...
...A: "Arrogant" is the appropriate word...
...A: I was at St...
...There he pioneered the network's law coverage—and was well paid, indeed "overpaid," he writes, his salary climbing to $100,000 by 1979...
...It had just become acceptable...
...he thought television news worth the candle and signed on as a local news anchor, in his adopted hometown of Nashville...
...On the weekends, we are going to do some programming for lawyers...
...Can it expect the kind of golden years it once enjoyed...
...A: First of all, the networks don't have the commanding position that they had then...
...Watergate changed that, as the Washington Post beat what Graham calls the "sleepwalking" Times to the punch...
...So what you had was people from print who were veterans who had been in broadcast so long that you almost forgot that they were once print people, or you had the youngerpeople who had never been in print...
...The American Thal Network will make its debut in early 1991...
...A: I think it did...
...And is journalism a cause of these trends...
...Gradually CBS—and the other networks as well—lost viewers of their news programs...
...There are more and more channels, more and more effects that you see on the TV, more motion, faster movement, more graphics, visually a more active screen...
...A: That's a loaded question...
...A: We would be there on a very limited basis...
...A: I don't know...
...People in print did not understand that you have to get the person on camera saying some rather basic, essentialthings about the situation...
...Today the networks seem to be in continuing decline...
...I think they thought the people who were asking them were dumb...
...I saw that happen, and I participated in it, and it's regrettable...
...Q: You have a fair amount in your book about Watergate, which CBS hired you to cover initially...
...Am I giving you too much credit...
...That's to the detriment of telling the news...
...And that's when the bug bit...
...Graham says the seventies were the golden years for CBS News...
...Q: The attitude of the national media toward the presidency has changed dramatically from the time you worked in the executive branch in the sixties...
...And he sees multiple opportunities in the rise of cable television...
...Q: What will keep the American Trial Network from lapsing into infotainment...
...Then I returned to Nashville and practiced law...
...A: The print people certainly looked down upon television...
...A: My experience in Nashville, benighted as it was, has really been kind of helpful in this new enterprise...
...A: I don't think I would do it...
...It may be that "narrow casting" will present opportunities for the kind of specialized journalism on television that we have seen in magazines...
...And so that's probably where we would put the Supreme Court...
...Q: But you went to Oxford somewhere in there...
...Q: Although, long before then, hadn't most people in television come from print...
...Q: When you worked for Wirtz, were you a political appointee or just a regular career official...
...He wrote with Tom Wicker at the Nashville Tennessean, and worked in the Kennedy Administration before joining the New York Times as its law correspondent in 1965...
...I have in mind the Deaver business...
...A: I think so...
...Q: Recently you wrote an extraordinary first paragraph in a review of Alex Haley's The Evening News for the Washington Post Book World: "One of the feats of modern communication is that the stars of the network evening news manage to be glamorous without necessarily being interesting...
...Nobody knows if anyone is going to be left with enough of an audience to mount the kind of news operation that you need to be first class...
...If you look at the more senior people at CBS, almost all of them had been in print at some time: Marvin Kalb, Bob Pierpoint, George Herman...
...And the combination of those two things is causing a splintering of the audience...
...Or did television look down upon print...
...A: That's right...
...That would be very important to me...
...It's not gotten that bad...
...And nobody knows why this is...
...And because of my stint I have never been subject to the assumption that everything in government is the result of a conspiracy, of some sort of venal motive...
Vol. 23 • August 1990 • No. 8
