Television Journalism as Oxymoron

...Bingo...

...None of this made it into the broadcast...

...If Schorr was embarrassed by the Goldwater episode, his memoir shows no signs of it...

...What lends Schorr's career some special interest, though, was his own knack for creating controversy—not a talent that TV news executives, of that generation or this, highly prize...

...The insouciance here is almost endearing: From the start Hewitt thought of journalism not as a means of advancing the public good or elevating the citizenry—none of that Fred Friendly, high-minded baloney for him...

...And again: "You know," [CBS Washington bureau chief Bill Small] said, "I think you are one prize son of a bitch...

...Hewitt, like Schorr, is hard to embarrass...

...In his memoir, he objects that the actor who portrayed him in The Insider was physically unappealing, but it seemed to this viewer, having read the book and then seen the movie, that the actor had Hewitt down cold...

...But it was not to be...

...It was a masterpiece of sanc-timony—the straight-backed, flared-nostril self-righteousness that many journalists can summon at will...

...Just as long as it wasn't too serious...

...Not coincidental-ly, however, the segment aired on a Sunday night before a Monday meeting scheduled between Schorr and his network bosses to discuss his professional future...

...Whoever the ghost was for Tell Me a Story (it appears, from the acknowledgments, to have been a journalist named Michael Ruby), the book employs the ruthlessly breezy tone that writers adopt when they are trying to stitch together the disconnected reminiscences and opinions of their not-terribly-involved subject...

...Not surprisingly, 60 Minutes has often been sued...

...In his own autobiography, Goldwater gives a fuller account, quoting at length from Schorr's actual report...

...Sometimes he even sounds as avuncular as Cronkite himself...

...The segment was delayed for three months when Hewitt and CBS executives became worried that it might expose the network to a lawsuit from a tobacco company...

...Wallace's interview with Schorr, Lesher notes, went on for seventy-five minutes and was cut down to thirteen...

...Much of The Insider is simply wrong...

...President] Johnson awoke me at midnight to say, on the telephone, "Schorr, you are one prize son of a bitch...

...Tell Me a Story, by Don Hewitt, the creator of 60 Minutes and a former colleague of Schorr's at CBS, is a different matter...

...He scarcely gets inconvenienced...

...Goldwater, he went on, had given an interview to Der Spiegel, "appealing to right-wing elements in Germany," and had agreed to speak to a conclave of, yes, "right-wing Germans...

...First, to condense a gripping ten-minute story from a large mass of information, Hewitt's producers have to construct a moral universe that is, to say least, uncomplicated...

...Nowhere does he admit to being a son of a bitch, leaving readers to draw their own conclusions...

...They took so many liberties with my position that I was portrayed as a CBS lackey, which people at my company and other networks know damn well is far from the truth....A lie is a lie...

...In a few years he was back in Washington, reporting on a constellation of social-welfare issues that formed the Great Society initiative...

...As managing editor of his high school yearbook, he allowed his staff to write the blurb that appeared under his class picture...

...There were no hidden cameras, no "ambush interviews," no jumpy footage of Wallace chasing Schorr down back alleys and hotel corridors...

...It seemed an unusually parochial exercise for a program devoted to national news, and Schorr came off badly...

...Nowhere in his memoir does Schorr discuss his personal politics, but anyone who has followed his career from CBS to NPR will know that they are the standard-form liberalism of the professional journalist—that tidy little packet of principle and prejudice that gets issued along with the press card...

...And again: His face ashen from fatigue and strain, [CIA chief Richard Helms] turned livid...

...But his colleagues and supervisors at CBS saw it otherwise, as a craven evasion of responsibility...

...Delighted with his scoop, Schorr petitioned CBS executives to publish the report as a book, much as the New York Times had done with its purloined Pentagon Papers...

...Gold-water denounced CBS at a press conference and barred its reporters from his campaign...

...For a certain kind of audience, The Insider must be a marvelously effective movie...

...Being branded an enemy by Nixon made Schorr an instant celebrity, and he was to dine out on this elevated status for the next twenty-five years and counting...

...The contagion was strong enough that Schorr caught it in Germany...

...But one project in recent years seems to have upset him mightily: the 1999 Hollywood movie The Insider, about an aborted 60 Minutes investigation of the tobacco industry that was supposed to air in 1995...

...This manipulation, in fact, becomes the point of the story...

...Schorr's testimony before the committee was carried live on public television...

...The untutored reader of Staying Tuned can only wonder what the fuss was all about...

...Hewitt is evidently not a reflective man, and even under the guidance of his amanuensis the narrative flops around incoherently...

...They would spend their time mainly at an American army recreation center in Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps...

...soldiers sometimes, too) and good guys (Mike and Morley and the gang), and more often than not the good must triumph over the bad...

...Together with his admitted egotism, an eerie detachment seems to be Schorr's primary personal attribute, and he describes it with—no surprise here— an eerie detachment...

...Youngsters familiar with Daniel Schorr only from his association with National Public Radio may be surprised to discover that so many people, over so long a span of time, have considered him a jerk...

...Like many great media honchos—from Henry Luce to Harold Ross to David Sarnoff—Paley was a Republican who hired only Democrats...

...He quotes often from his own broadcasts...

...The show's success built slowly until, after ten years on the air, it became the most profitable show in the history of television...

...His first serious bout of trouble came during the presidential campaign of 1964, when the national press corps was seized by anti-Goldwa-ter hysteria...

...There are a few good stories in Staying Tuned, and one or two funny ones, but for the most part Schorr recalls his experiences with the same talent for the obvious that has made him so indispensable to NPR...

...It's a great job, and by his own admission Schorr enjoyed it immensely...

...His first experience as a journalist came at age twelve, when he saw a woman fall to her death from the roof of his apartment building...

...Alarmed at the leak, and with its customary logic, the House of Representatives voted not to issue the report as scheduled but to keep it secret instead, notwithstanding that all its secrets had just been revealed...

...He's hardly ever offensive...

...From the program's debut in 1968, Don Hewitt and his colleagues— especially Mike Wallace, who actually conducted the interview with Schorr— had taken the workaday hit piece as practiced by most reporters, with its sly insinuations and careful shadings and imperceptible elisions, and buffed and polished it to a gleaming perfection...

...There are bad guys (usually businessmen, sometimes doctors...

...But Schorr's views had a sharper edge, and unlike his colleagues he was clumsy about disguising them behind the niceties of journalistic convention...

...And not at all entertaining...

...CBS suspended him...

...For one thing, the martyr never gets martyred...

...Though different in tone and style, and in quality too, the two memoirs are worth considering together as windows, fixed at different angles, into the world of television journalism, which seems to be filled with sons of bitches...

...Today Schorr's story, with its hints of paranoia, seems merely quaint, an almost comical artifact of the era that gave us The Manchurian Candidate and Seven Days in May—except that this was broadcast as a genuine bit of news, in the middle of a real campaign...

...Even some executives at the network, notably its founder William Paley, grumbled privately about Schorr's reporting...

...It resembles nothing so much as a 60 Minutes segment stretched out and turned into a movie...

...The press's hostility toward Nixon was even more intense than its hostility to Goldwater (though Nixon-phobia, of course, was far more rational...

...Murrow did genuine news reporting on his show See It Now, which solidified his reputation as a newsman...

...You simply cannot pay ghostwriters to be this confusing...

...One would have hoped for a real book from Hewitt, for he is indeed the large figure that his boosters say he is...

...The AP's got the story," he shouts, "and they've been calling Mike and I!" I bet it's the only authentic line in the movie...

...So did the House Ethics Committee, which summoned him to testify about how he had obtained the original report...

...He is outraged, and in Tell Me a Story he writes about the controversy with unaccustomed heat...

...The only technique Wallace needed was the classic "sandbag," in which a subject is lulled into complacency by a sympathetic-seeming interviewer, who then edits the taped interview to fit his (unannounced) thesis...

...Her fiancé was a writer for the paper...

...Over the course of several nights he disgorged the contents of the report on CBS...

...Hewitt's innovations, by the way, are ideologically neutral...

...His apparent attempt to shift attention to Stahl, he writes, was all a terrible misunderstanding...

...The story is more fully told by the reporter Stephan Lesher, in his book Media Unbound, published in 1982...

...The producer who put together the story eventually resigned in protest, but not before portraying Hewitt in newspaper and magazine articles as a tool of the corporate power structure...

...No man has had a greater influence over the way television presents the news...

...So, like, they had seen all this before...

...For a journalistic enterprise, this would be a problem...

...It eats its children," wrote the poet Buchner about Danton, guillotined by his fellow revolutionaries...

...Now back to you, Walter, and have a nice day...

...Republicans...

...Thus," Schorr concluded, "there are signs that the American and German right wings are joining up...

...Bright, bloodless, with a curiosity about human beings that never intensified beyond the purely clinical, Schorr had the makings of a good reporter...

...Hewitt's genius was to take the documentary format and "make the information more palatable and feed it [to viewers] in shorter and more digestible bites...

...He immediately phoned in the story to his neighborhood newspaper and got $5 for his tip...

...The bulk of it was given over to Schorr's ruminations about the ethics of leaking and effusive praise from Wallace: "Dan," Wallace said as the tape began to roll, "you have my profound admiration and that of your colleagues here and elsewhere...

...Here he describes how he invented the television "chyron," a technique for superimposing letters over a televised picture: "It suddenly hit me: White letters superimposed on a black background is the way you superimpose names on the screen because the camera will not pick up the black, and you can superimpose that shot over anything you want to and show the letters and the picture simultaneously...

...Though easily checkable, it was false in all its particulars...

...you can fill in the blank...

...No wonder Hewitt is outraged...

...The story's relation to events in the real world is always incidental...

...Which he was—certainly when measured against the standards of TV journalism, where most of the practitioners are happy to piggyback on the work of their colleagues in newspapers and magazines...

...Goldwater had spoken vaguely of vacationing in Europe but had made no plans to visit Germany, and he hadn't spoken to Quinn, an old friend, in more than a year...

...We did make some factual errors in reporting the Illinois Power story," Hewitt writes, adding, not coherently, "although we were right on the facts—the plant was years behind schedule and the cost overruns were huge—we made some mistakes and frankly admitted that we had...

...The rebuttal included tape it had made of 60 Minutes producers filming interviews of Illinois Power executives, which demonstrated the tendentious editing their comments had received...

...they can work just as well on the other side of the political divide, as witness the equally manipulative reports from the right-wing libertarian John Stossel on ABC's 20/20...

...By mutual agreement, Schorr's employment at CBS was terminated...

...In the nation's news rooms, if nowhere else, the relationship seemed obvious: Goldwater means right-wing, right-wing means fascist, fascist means Germany...

...A distinction without a difference, as the scholars say...

...The tape instead was cut to concentrate on matters much more interesting to CBS executives—the Stahl affair, and other in-house problems Schorr had had with his superiors and colleagues at the network...

...But it must be said that whereas Schorr's memoir is a real book—that is, a book that appears to have been written by its author, with occasional flashes of wit and intelligence—Hewitt's is a celebrity quickie, mostly ghostwritten and lighter than air...

...William Quinn...

...Serious journalism was a way to acquire prestige...

...When CBS asked him for a story, he writes in his memoir, he learned from his reporting "that Gold-water had plans, as yet unannounced, to leave directly after the convention for a vacation in Germany as guest of...

...The morning after his report aired, Goldwa-ter's political enemies placed a transcript under the hotel room door of every delegate in San Francisco...

...Trust Walter: That is exactly what Staying Tuned is...

...Several memoirs of the period, most recently one ghostwritten for Schorr's CBS colleague Lesley Stahl, allege that Schorr, facing the wrath of his network bosses, led them to believe that Stahl herself had leaked the report to the Voice...

...When they declined, he leaked his leaked report to the Village Voice, which published it entire...

...But it has become the condition of television news programming, which is seldom informative but never fails to entertain...

...Surely there is some irony in the fact that Dan Schorr, pioneer of so many patented hatchet jobs, should fall victim to a CBS hatchet job himself...

...Schorr's account here is, to put it kindly, incomplete...

...Khrushchev was cunning, Adenauer imperious, Jack Kennedy ironical, Bobby passionate, Nixon devious, Agnew vulgar, and so on...

...For this the gruesome martinets who manned the parapets of the Nixon White House placed him on their famous "enemies list...

...To this gloomy childhood he attributes his own emotional remoteness and his uncommon sense of self-sufficiency...

...While facts can't be invented, facts that gum up the story line must be carefully ignored...

...There's never much question about what emotions the producers are trying to extract from the viewer: awe, revulsion, contempt, admiration...

...This is too bad...

...But the story was inaccurate in many of particulars, as well as its overriding allegations of mismanagement and malfeasance...

...Johnny Carson mentioned him in monologues, and the New York Times crossword puzzle used his name as the definition of "TV Reporter...

...Why German reaction...

...Hewitt didn't revolutionize television journalism so much as extend it and intensify it, by drawing out the elements of show business and entertainment that had always been latent within it and making them essential to the telling of news stories...

...Again: "Yeah," [President Nixon] mused, "the only exception, of course, was that son of a bitch Schorr...

...On the eve of the Republican convention in San Francisco, Schorr was asked to prepare a report on German reaction to Goldwater's impending nomination...

...Berchtesgaden was famous as Hitler's favorite retreat...

...Is it any wonder, then, that Walter Cronkite, in his back-cover blurb for Staying Tuned, describes the memoir as "Schorr's detailed report on why numerous heads of state and other officials have called him a son of a bitch...

...and he did fluffy celebrity interviews on his show Person to Person, which made him lots of money...

...Only after the Washington Post identified him as the leaker did Schorr admit to what he had done...

...For Schorr watchers, the biggest surprise in Staying Tuned is that the author waits until his second page before mentioning the enemies list...

...So many hatchet jobs, so little time...

...Hewitt's account of the controversy is inaccurate, too...

...The second drawback is related to the first...

...He is clearly, to judge by his book, a boor and a vulgarian, but he is also, to judge by the achievement of 60 Minutes over three decades, a genius, too...

...Don Hewitt—corporate tool...

...When the books appeared he discovered that they had written a bit of doggerel in his honor: I love me, I love me / I'm wild about myself / I love me, I love me / I've got my picture on my shelf...

...They demanded an explanation from Schorr...

...This story would have been complicated, however, and difficult to tell...

...Schorr did not disappoint...

...Within days he was transformed from a pariah—the cad who tried to blame the girl—into a First Amendment martyr...

...This, along with the obvious enthusiasm of right-wing Germans for Goldwater, I reported from Munich in my analysis...

...The Revolution, once again, is eating its children...

...He was a master at constructing brief narratives—few segments on 60 Minutes run longer than thirteen min-utes—and he surrounded himself with producers who had the same gift, along with on-air correspondents who had gravelly voices and looked marvelous in trenchcoats...

...In early 1976, Schorr was leaked a copy of a report prepared by the House Intelligence Committee, which had been investigating CIA covert activities...

...Goldwater's interview in Der Spiegel was a reprint of an interview that had appeared elsewhere, and he had not even considered addressing the group Schorr mentioned...

...He got a job with a Danish news service after the war and became a stringer in Europe for the New York Times...

...The day after 60 Minutes presented Daniel Schorr to its millions of viewers," Lesher writes, "the erstwhile knight in shining armor was battered...

...By the standards of 60 Minutes, the Schorr take out was rather low-tech...

...Having been with CBS for fifty years, and having overseen 60 Minutes for thirty-three of those, he has so much else to discuss...

...At NPR, where all political commentary must fall into one of two categories—the obvious or the untrue— Schorr tends to specialize in the former...

...Hewitt doesn't mention Dan Schorr in his own memoir...

...The theme of the segment was, of course, the dangers and expense of nuclear power, and the emotions, drawn from the viewer with customary Pavlov-ian relentlessness, were indignation and fright...

...Its defenders point out that it has never lost a lawsuit in court, but this is a consequence of CBS's massive legal arsenal and the near-impossibility of bringing a successful case under American libel law...

...The same could be said of countless other 60 Minutes stories that have been proved fallacious: its exposé on "sudden acceleration" in Audi automobiles, for example, or its fire-bell warnings about the danger of the pesticide Alar on apples...

...What happened next is a matter of dispute...

...He reprints these lines without comment or contradiction...

...Of course, in America the martyrdom of reporters follows a peculiar course...

...The casualties of 60 Minutes's distortions have sometimes managed to develop methods of their own anyway...

...Yet the unvarying theme of Schorr's reporting was that this vast expansion of the welfare state was either nonexistent or insufficiently vast—presumably on the grounds that, since it was happening under Richard Nixon, it wasn't happening...

...His celebrity was magnified spectacularly a few years later, in yet another controversy—one that was to end his network career...

...He says now that the committee's interest in his work was particularly upsetting to his parents-in-law, who "were refugees from Nazi Germany...

...Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...More important, the story was false in its obvious implication of an Anschluss between German neo-Nazis and U.S...

...He had some scoops along the way...

...Interestingly, Hewitt in his book mentions only one example—the Illinois Power Company, of Clinton, Illinois, whose huge cost overruns in the construction of a nuclear power plant brought the attention of 60 Minutes in 1979...

...I felt no particular sense of awe or emotion about the first dead body I had ever seen," he writes...

...I could go on, but you get the idea...

...Schorr opened the report like so: "It looks as though Senator Goldwater, if nominated, will be starting his campaign here in Bavaria, center of Germany's right wing" also known, Schorr added helpfully, as "Hitler's one-time stomping ground...

...It showed that the three on-air sources used by the program either had no expertise, no firsthand knowledge for their allegations, or were anti-nuclear political activists who were not identified as such...

...The causes of the cost overruns were misidentified, and the producers apparently misunderstood the plant's construction schedules...

...He cites the patron saint of TV news, Ed Murrow, as an inspiration...

...For CBS, there would be fewer public problems from shrugging off an unworthy than there would have been from trying to unhorse a hero...

...As Lesher notes in Media Unbound, "The elements existed for a sound story filled with furious and significant disagreement among company officials, [state power] commissioners, environmentalists, anti-nuclear activists, citizens groups, and others...

...His ambition had always tilted toward newspaper work, but when CBS and Edward R. Murrow offered him a job, in 1953, he took it, and remained ever after transfixed by the "exposure and remuneration" that television uniquely offers...

...At one point, the Hewitt character objects that something has leaked to the press...

...In his memoir, Schorr prefers to dwell on his testimony before the committee, which foolishly persisted in its effort to compel him to reveal his source...

...He and his producers admitted their mistakes only after Illinois Power publicized a videotaped rebuttal to the 60 Minutes story...

...He began his network career covering the Army McCarthy hearings in Washington, followed by a decade abroad, first in the Soviet Union and then in Germany, returning at last to the Washington bureau in time for the launch of the Great Society...

...By this measure, to judge by his new memoir Staying Tuned, the former CBS News correspondent Daniel Schorr is one first-rate, top-of-the-line, gold-plated—but let him tell it...

...It is entertaining above all, and most likely has nothing to do with the events as they actually happened...

...Because the primary purpose of a successful 60 Minutes segment is not to convey interesting or useful information but to manipulate a reaction from the viewers, the chances of any given story being true—the chances of it presenting an accurate picture of reality— are only about fifty-fifty...

...On 60 Minutes, of course, producers actually report the story, and Mike and Morley and the other fellas parachute in to do interviews and narrate the text when the cameras start to roll...

...But when 60 Minutes came to call, he was simply outclassed...

...When a camera malfunctioned, requiring them to begin the interview again, Wallace repeated his encomium twice more...

...Whether he's chewing the fat on Saturday mornings with his interlocutor Scott Simon, the host of Weekend Edition, or offering one of the several on-the-spot homilies he produces throughout the week, Schorr is usually content to summarize the same news stories the rest of us have already read and add a sprinkle of his own leftish sarcasm...

...I say mostly ghostwritten: Mixed in among the many paragraphs about how essential "good writing" is to the TV news business, one finds passages so inept that Hewitt could only have written them himself...

...Schorr refers to his 60 Minutes interview only glancingly in his memoir...

...What happened...

...With his nightly agitations on the CBS Evening News, Schorr became a kind of exemplar of press bias...

...Hewitt had an epiphany: "Why not put them together in one broadcast and reap the benefits of being both prestigious and popular...

...He was born to impoverished immigrant parents in 1916, and his father died when Schorr was six...

...And, of course, he was right...

...he Revolution is like Saturn...

...And I'm passing over John Ehrlich-man, who said Schorr was a "prick...

...Since the late 1980s Schorr has been NPR's "senior news analyst...

...Hewitt's method—revised and adapted, to be sure, by practitioners less skilled than he—has since become a kind of house style for features on television news, from the local cable channels on up to the flagship nightly news broadcasts on the networks...

...It is expertly paced, beautifully photographed, acted with uncanny skill...

...Instead he gets famous, makes lots of money from speaking engagements, and for the next several years is routinely called the "conscience of . . . "—his generation, his craft, his country...

...There are a few drawbacks to his approach...

...They weren't necessary...

...CBS News executives, believing the report to be the network's proprietary work product, were not pleased...

...In Staying Tuned, Schorr's account of the episode is characteristically spotty...

...the passages don't advance the narrative, but they do give a reader the impression that he thinks them rather finer than they are...

...Joe McCarthy, just in case you didn't know, "brutalized people who may have had left-wing leanings at some point in their lives...

...He stayed on the beat through the first years of the Nixon presidency, during which social programs were enlarged beyond the wildest dreams of Lyndon Johnson...

...His celebrity softened the resentment of higher-ups at CBS—nothing impresses TV people like fame—and for a moment it seemed that Schorr might be reinstated from his suspension...

...It constructs a small, uncomplicated moral universe with good guys (the 60 Minutes producer and a whistle-blower) and very bad guys (corporate executives and Don Hewitt), and the good guys win in the end...

...The Insider casts the producer's story as a heroic struggle against capitalist villainy...

...You son of a bitch," he raged...

...Still, the disdain of his acquaintances seems to have been constant from his childhood onward...

...Schorr knew his tenure at CBS was over when, not long after his testimony, Don Hewitt and 60 Minutes said they would like him to sit for an interview...

...To betray a source," he announced, "would be, for me, to betray myself, my career, and my life...

...There was of course a good story to be told about the exploding costs and schedule delays that almost killed the nuclear power industry in 1979...