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| A CHANGING INDUSTRY | |
 November 13, 1998 
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Joining us to discuss the new news are Mr. Kalb, who is today director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard University; and Bill O'Reilly, executive producer and anchor of "The O'Reilly Factor," a news analysis show on the Fox News Channel. Welcome to you both. Marvin Kalb, you frequently mention the all-news channels like Fox News Channel as major driving elements in the new news. What's your view of the way they perform their job? |
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Five characteristics of the "new news" |
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BILL O'REILLY, FOX News Channel: Well, I differed with him back then too, which is - no, Mr. - Professor Kalb and I had some basic disagreements. I also worked at CBS, where the professor was very successful for many years, and at ABC News. I believe the American public is much better served now than they were thirty or forty years ago. And I'll tell you why. Back then, there was a tacit understanding among the power brokers in Washington and the powerful people who run the network news that we will do certain things and we won't do certain things. Now, Professor Kalb is correct when he says that the sourcing and the standards are not as stringent as they were 30, 40 years ago, even 20 years ago. However, I submit to you that because we have 24-hour, round-the-clock news, we have news on the Internet, we have news on the radio, that the American public is much better informed and scoundrels are least likely to get away with stuff than in the past. And I'll point to the fact that in Korea, in the Bay of Pigs, in the Kennedy assassination, in JFK's reckless conduct with women and nefarious figures in Vietnam, in the Gulf of Tonkin, that the American public did not get those stories until decades later. Now, that can't happen. If a big story breaks - whether it's Monica Lewinsky - whether it's an Iraq - whatever it is - the news media is all over it. Yes, we make mistakes. But there's enough information out there that the American public is no longer in the dark about what goes on. TERENCE SMITH: Marvin Kalb, that sounds like the golden new age of all news, all the time. |
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age of news? |
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MARVIN KALB: Well, it sounds like a golden new age, but I think it's very illusory. The fact of the matter is that I remember the paper that Bill wrote and it - there was a conspiracy theory in the paper - it had to do with Henry Luce and the idea of imposing his will upon "Time" Magazine and, therefore, in the way of so many other people. Bill does have a conspiratorial nature, and we have argued about this in the past. TERENCE SMITH: He's not alone, of course, in that theory about Henry Luce. MARVIN KALB: Exactly. But my point here is that at this time on these talk programs people come on and begin every sentence with, "I think." Those are the two most popular words on a talk program. I think that an awful lot of people - "I think" - did you hear that - want very much to get hard news, what it is that you know, rather than what it is that you think. And there is ferocious competition among these programs. MARVIN KALB: Bill, that is simply not true. BILL O'REILLY: Hugh Sidey has admitted - MARVIN KALB: You are making. BILL O'REILLY: -- it. Hugh Sidey, the White House correspondent for Time Magazine, has admitted it, and I have internal memos from Time, as you know, which say it. TERENCE SMITH: But, Marvin Kalb, I think the question is this: Is there - was there then or at some point a conspiracy of silence among the press and the people they covered, or were there simply different standards then and now?
BILL O'REILLY: I disagree. TERENCE SMITH: Bill O'Reilly, let me ask you this. Let me move it to this point, which Marvin mentioned earlier, which is, the - the fine line - and he would say blurred line between punditry and commentary and news and information, is that a line that is in jeopardy of being blurred in all news? |
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BILL O'REILLY: I think in some cases the professor is right; that I can't speak for other organizations, but I've seen on television people come on and state fact when they can't back it up, and I think that's very wrong. At the News Channel here at Fox, as I said, we label everything so the audience clearly know what's opinion and what isn't. But I will say this. I will say that the audience isn't dumb and that if you get out there night in and night out and say things that are wrong or irresponsible, people will not watch you. In the sense that it's not the Jerry Springer program, okay, Jerry Spring does what he does during the day and it's a carnival and people know that, in the serious news game that I'm in, in the ferocious competition that Professor Kalb mentioned, which is absolutely true, credibility is what I have to sell, and that's what I am selling. But I object to the fact that when you use the word "standards," my journalist standards are the same as Marvin Kalb's were when he was covering Washington. I want my - I demand that my staff be correct in what they say. We have - I've been on the air two years. I haven't had to apologize one time for a misleading statement or an inaccurate fact. So those are my standards, but I don't believe that people in New York or Washington should be deciding what the American people should and should not know. If a President of the United States has a mistress who's also the mistress of a Mafia figure, I think that's beyond private life. TERENCE SMITH: All right. Marvin, you write in your paper that you see the obsessive quality and coverage of the Monica Lewinsky affair as part of a trend that, in fact, has gone on for 20 years in journalism. What do you mean?
TERENCE SMITH: All right. Bill O'Reilly, a final word from you, very briefly, if you will. BILL O'REILLY: I'm not worried about that. TERENCE SMITH: Is there confusion?
TERENCE SMITH: Okay. Gentlemen, we will too. Thank you both very much. MARVIN KALB: Thank you. |
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TERENCE
SMITH: In his paper, The Rise of the New News: A Case Study of Two
Root Causes of the Modern Scandal Coverage, former broadcaster Malvin
Kalb offers this description: "The new news," he writes, "is more immediate,
more sensational, more market and profit driven than previous incarnations.
It is not merely the appearance of news that has changed, however. The
very nature of journalism has been altered."
MARVIN
KALB, Harvard University: I think, Terry, that there are five characteristics
of the new news. The first has to do with sourcing. In the past, this
was an extremely important element in a news report, but at the heat
of the Monica coverage, 74 percent of the stories had sources that are
absolutely unidentified. The public had no way of knowing whether the
information was reliable or not. The second characteristic is something
called "out there." If information is out there, if it's talked about
at the office water cooler, if you hear it on the radio as you drive
into work, it somehow or another ends up in the news and becomes something
that is regarded as serious. The third elements is a rush to judgment.
There was in this coverage a presupposition on the part of most reporters
that the President was guilty before the evidence was actually in there.
A fourth characteristic is called blurring the lines between hard news,
recognized as such, and entertainment, producing something called infotainment,
information and entertainment. And the final quality is the simple editorializing
in news columns or on these programs, whereas, once there was again
a presupposition that the information was hard, was reliable, right
now, the editorializing, the slanted bias is very clear for most people
to see. 
TERENCE
SMITH: Bill O'Reilly, let the record show that you are a former student
of Professor Kalb's at the Kennedy School, where you earned a masters
degree in public policy. But tonight, at least, you're permitted to
differ with your professor, if you care to. 
BILL
O'REILLY: That's correct, Professor. But if I had in my paper for you
not backed up my "conspiratorial theories" with hard facts, you would
have flunked me. And I back up what I say with facts. Now, on "The O'Reilly
Factor" what we do is clearly labeled on the screen, whether it's opinion,
analysis, spin, whatever it is. I submit to you, when you were at the
heyday of CBS, that there were many stories that were spiked by your
bosses. Maybe you didn't even know about them, because of cozy little
deals that were made between the President and people like Henry Luce,
and those deals are a matter of record now. They've come to life. There's
no way we should not have known about John F. Kennedy's liaisons with
people like Judith Exner who had a relationship with Sam Giancana. The
reporters in Washington knew about those stories and didn't report them.
And I'd like to know why. 
MARVIN
KALB: Terry, I think the standards were extremely different. People
were not at that time talking about the private lives of public officials.
Today, it seems that every single talk show host feels that it is his
or her right to delve into the private lives of public officials without
really a great deal of information. Bill can sound off as he wishes
about all of the information that was there at the time. It was not
there at the time. And even if it was - and if somebody like Hugh Sidey
knew it - or thought he knew it, they were not about to put that on
the air because the standards were much higher. There was a sense of
individual responsibility for what you put on the air. There is such
a rush now to get things on the air that people simply are not paying
attention to old-fashioned standards, and I think it would be a pretty
good idea if they did.
MARVIN
KALB: Well, what I mean, Terry, is something - if I can quote David
Broder, the esteemed Washington Post columnist - he was here
yesterday at the Shorenstein Center doing a Teddy White lecture, and
his lecture was entitled "Who Are We and What Are We Doing?". And what
David was focusing on was some kind of definition now about journalism.
What is it that journalism is supposed to do, and who is a journalist?
And at the end of what I thought was a marvelous speech, it ended on
a rather pessimistic note, because everything is getting mixed together.
It's extremely difficult now to know whether Bill O'Reilly doing his
program is really a first class journalist, or whether he fits in with
- let us say - Matt Drudge or whether he fits in more closely with Tim
Russert or Ted Koppel. It's also mixed together, and people are confused,
and you get confused when you have this kind of a fact, for example.
78 percent of the American people believed, according to a New York
Times poll, that the Clinton grand jury testimony should never have
been released to the public. At the very same time, 22.5 percent of
the American people watched most of that four-hour presentation. There
is that confusion, and there is a gap between what people in Washington
perceive and what the American people seem to perceive. 
BILL
O'REILLY: I'm not worried about the confusion of the American people,
Mr. Smith. I think they can sort things out for themselves. I think
information is the key to this. I resent the fact that in the past people
made decisions about what people should or should not hear. We have
standards. We don't talk about - I think it's a bunch of baloney. I
think, as I said in my opening remarks, that the republic is much better
served now. We have round-the-clock news and let the people decide.
