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NewsHour Teacher Center Blog
April 9, 2008
Roger Mudd was recently on the NewsHour talking about the glory days of CBS news, and providing some interesting observations on the current state of news reporting. The interview provides a promising way to start a discussion between students and their parents (or another adult) about how they get their news, comparing now to the time before the student was born.

This could lead to a fruitful class discussion of the changing nature of news “broadcasting.” One idea is to divide your class into small groups to write a combined report based on their set of interviewees. videoplayer.jpg

If you don’ t have time for the full 10 minute interview, here are some good quotes:

“John Kennedy being a matinee idol, in effect, ushered in television as a integral part of daily life. And in 1963, when CBS moved from a 15-minute broadcast to a 30-minute broadcast, everything changed, and television, with the addition of satellite transmission, broke the exclusivity, the monopoly that newspapers had on breaking stories.” (starts at 7:53)

“Now the commercial pressures are such, the demands of the audience are such, the changing tastes are such that commercial television is finding it more and more difficult to maintain news divisions. And that’s the sad ending” (at 9:02)

“The NewsHour is the one place left on television where you can get a full accounting, not of the breaking news from all across the country, you get a news summary, but then you get a civil discourse about the issues that are important.” (8:30)

The interview begins with good intro newsreel footage of Roger Mudd on assignments in his early days. (0:00 to 1:20)

Once the video has fully loaded on your computer (it takes a minute or so depending on your network connection), you can drag the yellow timing marker across the track below the screen to the time cues listed after the quotes.

Note: All NewHour video segments end with a “Join you local station” splash screen that disables the yellow timing marker. To get back to the video you need to “refresh” the browser window (F5 for Internet Explorer or FireFox, cmd-R for Safari.)

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