Extended Interview: Robert Hager

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• TERENCE SMITH:

  When you narrate a piece for the Nightly News, you use a kind of language that is different than everyday language. What is it?

• BOB HAGER:

  Well … TV speak? From my standpoint, it's just whatever to me is the simplest way of telling the story, so I guess I wouldn't have a name for it, but it's just to communicate.

• TERENCE SMITH:

  What it seems to the ear is you're putting everything in the present tense, you're dropping a lot of verbs and maybe a lot of words and giving it a sort of almost telegraphic style. Is that the purpose?

• BOB HAGER:

  The idea of putting things in the present tense is an editor's idea — I've encountered it from most of the editors that make a difference to my life here at NBC.

  They've encouraged the present tense and I don't know that the intent is precisely articulated, but I sense that it's the idea of immediacy so that the news doesn't sound stale. So that's the use of the present tense. Now, the dropping of verbs … and sometimes it's a verb, sometimes it might be an article, that's a separate thing. That was never urged on me, and I sort of slipped into it, really, partly because of time pressure, partly in an effort to keep the scripts simple and sparse, and I think I probably slipped into it a little too much actually and I've tried to pull back some from that.

  I see it as a kind of a shorthand. You get two minutes for your piece or two-and-a-half minutes. It's a terrible amount of information to cram in in a short time. You have to keep it real simple.

  I think to me it's so important that the pictures are always distracting or the person's attention is divided, so I like to keep the script as simple as I can, and sometimes when it's easier to communicate that in a sentence that's not grammatically correct, I don't mind doing that if, indeed, it's the best way to communicate.

• TERENCE SMITH:

  Do any viewers comment on it? Have you ever heard anybody say, "Why do you talk that way?"

• BOB HAGER:

  Yeah. I've got a friend who says, "Gee, you drive me nuts with dropping those verbs," and I listen to her because she used to write for the St. Louis Post Dispatch and she's an excellent journalist. And it's made me have second thoughts about it.

  There was a lively debate on one of the Internet journalistic gossip sites about correspondents in general. Dropping verbs was the subject, but I saw I got singled out in there. So, yeah, I'm aware that people comment about it.

• TERENCE SMITH:

  Now, you didn't do this 20 years ago.

• BOB HAGER:

  No. I think there was a day and age when editors were much more demanding about the preciseness of the sentences and the editing process, and I think would have been much less willing to break the rules. We were more formal 15 years ago, even ten years ago.

• TERENCE SMITH:

  What changed?

• BOB HAGER:

  Well, I wonder, in the end, is this much more competition? People are conscious of the ratings. Everyone wants to make their news sound immediate and so forth. That might explain the present tense or help to explain it. But the idea of dropping verbs is a different thing because that's really an attempt to be simple, to communicate in the easiest fashion I can.

• TERENCE SMITH:

  And to save time.

• BOB HAGER:

  Yes, save time, too.

• TERENCE SMITH:

  What would happen if you wrote a script in complete sentences with subjects, verbs, objects? Would somebody complain you were taking too much time?

• BOB HAGER:

  No, I think the complete sentences, that would be more my business than the writing style. If I wrote in the past tense or using a variety of tenses, an editor might very well say, "Gee, couldn't we put this in the present tense?" That sort of thing will catch an editor's attention, is apt to.

• TERENCE SMITH:

  So the pressure is there to do that?

• BOB HAGER:

  Not on every piece, but it comes up a lot.

• TERENCE SMITH:

  Somebody made the point to me, and I wonder what you think, that this is part of a kind of broader phenomenon that we have going on today, which is a sort of abbreviation of language. Certainly in our e-mails, which have become so ubiquitous, we tend to use all kinds of abbreviations, shortenings, fast little things, that it's a fast-paced world that we live in and this is in some way a reflection of it.

• BOB HAGER:

  It could be, that it's part of our culture. I mean, sponsors do it in commercials. You hear that kind of abbreviated language.

  I presume, too, that's the same motivation, a time saver, but also simplicity in getting through the message. So it could be cultural in part.

• TERENCE SMITH:

  Is it a good thing or a bad thing?

• BOB HAGER:

  I think it's worrisome any time you erode the language probably, but I think it's not the end of the earth in this case in a newscast. And to me, in terms of eroding the language, it would be a much more grievous error to make a more obvious grammatical mistake than a purposeful shortening of the sentence or a fragmentary sentence simply because that's the best way to convey the message.

• TERENCE SMITH:

  Does it bleed into other writing of yours, or do you see young people at NBC talking that way?

• BOB HAGER:

  No, I don't think I tend to see people talking that way. I hear reporters sometimes at affiliates who say, you know, " I like your style and so-and-so on our staff writes like that. I like that." So I sense it's had some influence and if it's not a wise thing to spread around, then probably that's too bad.

• TERENCE SMITH:

  Right. But it is somewhat generational?

• BOB HAGER:

  Oh, yes. It would be more prominent today and probably newer, younger people coming into the business might be more apt to be open-minded or be daring enough to violate rules.

• TERENCE SMITH:

  And so it's here to stay?

• BOB HAGER:

  Probably so. It would be a very difficult trend to turn around at this point.

• TERENCE SMITH:

  There's no counter-revolution in the making?

• BOB HAGER:

  Not at the moment, none in sight, no.