Dan Rather came to The Poynter Institute this week to speak to members of the public about his years as a broadcast journalist. Before Rather’s talk, I interviewed him about the state of today’s news industry and what can be done to improve it. You can read a full transcript of the interview below.
Mallary Tenore: In a Washington Post column last year, you wrote that newspapers are the foundation on which hard news rests. More specifically, you said: “The old news model is crumbling, while the Internet, for all its immense promise, is not yet ready to rise in its place and won’t be until it can provide the nuts and bolts reporting that most people so take for granted that it escapes their notice.” I’m going to violate journalism rules and ask you a three-pronged question: Can you say more about why you think the Internet isn’t ready to rise up to the old news model? What will it take for it to rise up, and do you think it ever will?
Dan Rather: Well I did write the story in The Washington Post and I believe it to be true that with journalism, the old order is gone and the new order is not yet in place. … We have to deal with the here and now. It’s all good to talk about the future of journalism and the Internet, which I’m optimistic about and I think there’s a great future for journalism and a lot of added value to be had on the Internet, but we’re still in the first, early stages of the Internet’s potential. … I think American journalism is in crisis. The crisis has to do with part of the old model falling. The old business model is gone and no viable business model has yet emerged.
There are very few journalism enterprises on the Internet, keeping in mind that the Internet does a lot more than journalism. (It does information, education, marketing and a lot of other things.) But on the journalism side of the Internet, most of what’s on the Internet is gathered from other original sources.
In other words, there are not enough boots on the ground, there are not enough working reporters making calls, wearing that shoe leather, doing original reporting. There’s a word for it that escapes me at the moment. What is it when they gather information from other places and they sort of accumulate stuff from newspapers, magazines, radio, television and other places on the Internet?
Tenore: Aggregating?
Rather: Yes.
The point is, they don’t have what Alex Jones at Harvard has called the iron core of journalism, which is to stay staffs of reporters, including my own preference, particularly on international reporting or investigative reporting. This is labor-intensive work. I do think the Internet has added some value with bloggers sort of gathering up information for other people, but they don’t have original reporting. By and large, it doesn’t exist on the Internet. It feeds on itself, and on other established — shrinking, but established — news enterprises.
So we come back to the question of what do we do with this interim period? Now when I wrote the piece in The Washington Post, I admitted and acknowledged that I don’t have the answer. I don’t know of anybody who does have the answer. Some very good minds and a lot of bright people have tried to find the answer. So what I had is an idea. It was almost immediately rejected and it didn’t go anywhere.
We have a crisis in one of our most important crafts — businesses if you want to call it that. And in the past when we’ve had these crises, for the automobile business, for the early stages of the microchip business, for the steel business and what have you, it’s not that unusual for the president to call together the best minds and say we may or may not have the government intervene.
I thought it would be a good idea for him to call together some of the brightest people in the country, including those in journalism but not confined to that, and say, let’s see what we can do. An independent, — a truly independent and truly free press, a fiercely independent but necessary press — is the red beating heart of freedom and democracy, and it’s absolutely essential to our system.
Now I did not call for the president to give government help and I did not want any laws passed. I don’t want the government in newsrooms. It was immediately attacked as a move in that direction. I didn’t intend it to be, and I think any reasonable person trying to be objective when they read what I proposed would come to that conclusion.
How do we preserve this vital business, this vital industry, this vital craft of the country, since it’s absolutely essential? Whether it is, as Dan Rather thinks, in a crisis or not, it’s clearly in serious trouble with newspapers closing, staffs cut. But the idea didn’t go anywhere and I don’t think it is going anywhere. So now I’m at the point where, OK that was my idea, now what’s your idea? We’re floundering at the moment and we’re floundering in the midst of crisis.
Tenore: At the Democratic National Convention in 2008, you said the news is now filled with “so-called political debates, where the one thing assured not to happen is genuine debates and where the questions the public really cares about seldom seem to get asked.” What do you think needs to be done to improve political coverage?
Rather: Well the first thing is that those of us who are in journalism, and I do not exclude myself from this criticism, need a spine transplant. I said it before and I’ll say it again here. We need to suck it up and get back to delivering to the American people quality, integrity-filled journalism, in this case, applied specifically to political coverage. So much of political coverage is about the horse race — who’s up and who’s down — and that’s generally based on polling.
You never me anybody who believes less in public opinion polls. They’re valuable in that they can be a snapshot of a given moment, but the moment changes. But so much of the new coverage is, well, there’s a new poll by Joe Blow and the poll shows so and so, and that passes for coverage. What’s needed is deep digging, reporting of this sort that, for example, follows the money.
It’s an old axiom in journalism, and a valid one: If you want to know what’s really going on, as opposed to what others want you to believe is going on, then follow the dollar and the kind of political coverage that asks and seeks an answer to questions such as the following: Who is giving what to whom, expecting to get what? And that’s just one example of where I think political coverage, including my own, needs drastic overhaul and improvement.
So number one is journalists need to get back to their business of being patriotic journalists in a free and democratic country and perform their function as watchdogs, as part of the system of checks and balances. We all know that huge sums of money are corrupting the whole political process, beginning with elections.
For example, the last presidential election in this country, when all was said and done and you put everything together, costs more than $2 billion. That’s what was spent through the primaries, through the general election, all told. That money, not all of it came from special interests, but the bulk of it came from special interests — big pharmaceutical companies, big broadcasting networks, television, radio, electronic, big labor — and that’s a very short list. But you have a more recent example here in Florida where just to win a primary, at least two candidates spend what, more than $50 million or $60 million of their own money. This has reached the serious out-of-whack stage.
So you say how can we improve coverage? Getting serious about where the money comes from, who gives it to whom, for what purpose — and most of it is given for a purpose. The case can be made — and I’m here to make it — that very large, international corporations, conglomerates control the government, and I would include some elements of big labor in that.
The public is not well-served by political coverage as it is today. And I think it has to be noted, and there’s no joy in noting this, that in many important ways, very big business is in bed with big government and whoever’s in power in Washington, whether it be Republicans or Democrats — not in the public interest, but in the business interest of the huge corporations and in the staying in power business of those in Washington. And this seriously affects news coverage.
Someone might say, well what is he talking about? Well let me give you an example. As recently as the 1950s, mid 1950s, there were more than 50 news enterprises, which is to say businesses, in the country that could accurately be described as having national distribution or large regional distribution.
Now, there are no more than six, and I would argue only four, very large conglomerate, international corporations who control more than 80 percent of the national distribution of news. This is out of whack. Let me pause and say I’ve never worked for anybody in the enterprise other than a profit-making enterprise. I believe in the capital system, but as applied to media, we have in no small degree monopolies now.
Now a great Republican president, Theodore Roosevelt did his party great service, and more importantly his country a great service, by breaking up the trust, which is to say the monopolies at the turn of the 20th century. … I’m not a business person, but in the end I think they’re not in the best interest of American business. I recognize that one gets criticized very heavily when get into this area, but I’m at the age and stage in my own career where I try to draw from my experience.
I love this country, I want the country to be better for my children and grandchildren as most Americans do. And when and if the public finally get focused on this — that too few big international companies control too much of the national news distribution — then I think it may change. But until the public really understands what is happening with this, and understands that it is not a special pleading of journalists such as myself, can we come back to a really vibrant, truly independent, fiercely independent press that is important to the survival of freedom and representing government as we know it.
Tenore: Along the lines of educating people on political matters, how effective do you think PolitiFact, and other efforts to fact-check political news, are?
Rather: Well, I applaud those efforts, and I certainly think they’re worthwhile. You can put this under my opinion, but I think the facts in the ground bear it out, that up to and including now, their impact has been too minimal and too small. But God bless them for trying and may their tribe increase.
Tenore: So you don’t think enough people know about them, then?
Rather: No, I don’t think enough people know about them. I think their distribution and their readership is too small, and too diffused to make much of an impact, but I want to emphasize I admire what they do. This is what every good newspaper, every television station, every network ought to be doing. But in so many cases — it’s not unanimous, there are some exceptions — but by and large, this is not what they do.
So often, particularly covering politics, enterprises describing themselves as journalistic enterprises, and journalists who describe themselves as journalists, have in fact become just transmission belts. The reporters are transcribers who transcribe what is said and just put it out there. And this is important to recognize. Let me back up again and say I include myself in this criticism, that we now know that in the run-up to the Iraq war, that not enough tough questions were asked, not nearly enough tough questions were asked.
Very few tough questions were asked, not enough facts were checked, not enough of the attitude that says, ok, this is what the government says is the situation, this is what the president says is the situation, now listen, let’s put that against the known facts, let’s try to find out some facts. I am not saying we wouldn’t have gone to war with Iraq anyway. We might or we might not have. The point is, we never had a real national debate about it.
We accepted the government’s view, and blindly accepting the government’s, any government’s view, leaves you open to propaganda. And what happened in the run-up to the Iraq war is that the administration of that time commanded the narrative, and the press bought that narrative. Anybody who didn’t buy that narrative was sort of shunned off to the periphery. And this led, by any reasonable objective analysis, to a strategic blunder of historic proportions.
Tenore: You said in a UC Berkeley interview that you didn’t realize the power of bloggers until a group of conservative bloggers questioned whether the documents were falsified and spread the news on the Web. I’m curious about what role you think bloggers, (or the so-called “Fifth Estate,”) play in today’s news media industry. Would you say their relationship with the mainstream media is symbiotic, or would you characterize it as being more adversarial?
Rather: Well, this may surprise some people, but I think on the whole and in general, the development of blogging has been a good development, that’s number one. Number two, I think it’s easy, perhaps a little too easy, to over estimate it and to over dramatize it.
After all, a blog is only one part of the huge Internet. The Internet does a lot of other things. I’d be happy at another time to discuss my own case, but this was an example of how a carefully orchestrated for partisan political and partisan ideological purposes can distort the facts and distort the truth.
I am not saying everybody who didn’t like our report fits that category. But in discovery and deposition of the lawsuit that I filed, in the end, the appeals court in New York didn’t let us go to trial. I wish we had. But it was clear to demonstrate in what discovery and in what depositions we did get, that the corporate entity, which is to say Viacom and CBS, did not handle this story and this case as CBS News had historically handled controversy and attacks from partisan, political operations.
But, whatever one thinks of my case and our story, your question has to do with the larger “blogosphere” as it’s called. And put me down as saying, I think it has its problems. The biggest problem is accountability. That you can put anything on the Internet, and pretty much be assured of anonymity, or something close to anonymity, no matter what you say.
Let me say in an asterisk spot on the page, and with our story about George Bush’s military record, the story was true. It was true then, it’s true now, and evidence of that is neither the president nor anyone close around him, so far as I know, (and I think I would know if they had), has ever denied the narrative of the story, which led to such things as the then-president had defied a direct order to have a physical examination. He did not meet his requirements for the National Guard, he got an honorable discharge under circumstances which others without his name or influence would not have gotten.
I don’t seek to go over this ground all over again, but I do think it’s important to point out that the story was true, and for those who didn’t like the story, for their partisan, political, or ideological reasons, that’s the reason they had to attack it so fiercely and, as it turned out, yes so effectively, I’m sorry to say. But even with the documents, up to and including this time, no one has ever proven that the documents were not what they were purported to be. Could I be wrong about that? Yes, but nobody has ever proven it.
Again, I want to say I’m not here to retry the case. We took a big pounding, and some very good journalists who worked with me lost their careers over it. But having said all that, and pointing it out as an example of how the blogosphere and how the Internet can be used, for highly partisan, political and ideological purposes, most of it is not useful. But it comes back to the core problem, which is accountability. If you can manage your neighbor, you can say something really awful about them, that they molested children or something like that, and it spreads worldwide. It’s not a fact and it has no basis in fact. But it’s frequently impossible, if not always impossible, to prove what the source is.
Now, I think this problem, this weakness of the Internet and the blogosphere will eventually be addressed. I don’t have the answer to it now. I’m not in favor of government control of it. I’m not in favor of censoring it. I think it needs to be free and open. I don’t know how to deal with this problem.
And let’s note that when you’re in the newspaper, if you make that kind of accusation, either your name is on a story or it’s easy to ascertain. It’s public knowledge who wrote the story. And even with the letters to the editor, responsible newspapers require verification of who wrote the letter. So how to get this kind of accountability with the blogosphere and the Internet, I do see as a big problem. And I’m not in favor of government interference to solve it.
Tenore: In a Huffington Post story, you said that until recently, you had no idea what Twitter was. “Much of what we tweet, or post, or chat away at under the guise of news, are distractions,” you wrote. Lots of journalists nowadays, though, use Twitter to report and disseminate stories. How important do you think social media is to today’s journalism?
Rather: Well, it plays a very big role. But the term “social media” encompasses so much. It encompasses Facebook, Twitter, iTunes — we can go down the list. Again, I think overall and in the main, that it’s good. I don’t twitter a lot, but I’ve become convinced by the people I work with that when one does what I do, you need to twitter. And we do have Facebook for the program for “Dan Rather Reports.”
Do I have a personal Facebook? I don’t think so. But that’s not because I’m opposed. It’s just there’s so many hours in the day, and my desire and my destiny is to spend my time reporting, so for every minute I spend on Twitter or Facebook or some social media, it takes away from how I want to spend my life.
But I think it’s increasingly important in politics and in business and in personal relationships to have these so-called social media. And I think there’ll be more of them, not fewer. Some of them will go by the wayside. Twitter is the big thing now. Who knows what’s going to be post-Twitter.
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