>> "The Kalb Report" is funded by a grant from the Ethics & Excellence in Journalism Foundation.

♪♪ From the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., this is "The Kalb Report" with Marvin Kalb.

>> Hello and welcome to the last scheduled edition of "The Kalb Report."

I'm Marvin Kalb.

And, yes, you heard that right, the last scheduled edition.

On September 29th, 1994, 28 years ago, I did my first "Kalb Report" at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., and now 103 programs later, I'm doing the last "Kalb Report."

And I have to tell you, it's been quite a ride.

My theme on these programs has not really changed.

It's always been the press, what a lot of people call the media, and its interaction with American democracy.

Both at the moment seem to be in trouble.

And I'm wondering whether this might not be a good time to look back on these programs, but also to look ahead.

And joining me is my friend and colleague, Ted Koppel.

For many years, the esteemed anchor of ABC's "Nightline."

He's also a successful author, currently an essayist for CBS' "Sunday Morning," and whenever I have a question about journalism or anything else, for that matter, I turn to Ted.

So welcome, Mr. K. And my first question to you is a very simple one.

Do you believe that the American press over, let's say, the last 20, 30 years has been helpful to American democracy or has it been harmful?

What do you say?

>> I say the American press has been almost incapable of doing anything about the technology that has grown up around it.

I fear that the technology, particularly the Internet, has been so damaging that there is almost nothing that the American press has been able to do to separate itself from that technology.

What I mean by that is, in the old days -- And you and I are going to be talking about the old days over the course of these next few minutes.

During the old days, the technology didn't get in the way quite as much as it does right now.

I'm saying that, obviously, from the vantage point of a broadcast reporter.

We like to feel that we were controlling things.

In these days, I fear that the Internet is controlling things.

But I'm getting ahead of myself, Marvin.

This is a program really about you and about your long and distinguished career.

We were joking with one another before we went on the air, and over the course of how long now you and I together have worked how many years?

>> About 125 years, I think we figured out.

>> Exactly.

125 years in broadcast journalism.

And am I correct in saying that you'd never worked a day in your life?

>> No, no, no.

You're not right in that.

I think that it has been glorious to work as hard as I have.

>> When you started "The Kalb Report" -- And I'm going to assume that at our age, it's okay to talk about age.

When you began "The Kalb Report," you were already 64 years old and the age at which most people in this country think about retirement.

That's when you began a whole new project, and a wonderful one it has been, too.

Why?

>> What would I do if I retired?

I mean, the thought actually never entered my mind, ever.

>> What did you have in mind when you and Michael Freedman, your wonderful producer -- when you got together and you set out to do this program, what did you have in mind?

>> Well, as I remember, I was on a sabbatical.

I had been up at Harvard for seven years, and I was sprung for a year.

And I was at GW and met Mike Freedman, and we thought it would be terrific if we had the opportunity, with the National Press Club, of bringing to the club wonderful journalists -- people like Ted Koppel.

Bring people like that to the Press Club.

We would talk to them for an hour.

We would open them to questions by students.

They would feel good explaining to the students what was going on.

They would learn, the students.

And everybody would be better off for it.

And the first program, Ted, I will never forget.

We invited 16.

I mean, it's crazy now.

We invited 16 professors, politicians, students, scholars to the National Press Club.

And I kind of walked in front of them back and forth, pumping questions, and we ended up with this theme about the press' impact on American democracy.

And that suddenly struck me as a central issue that ought to be explored in all of the other interviews that we did.

>> Well, that brings to mind a very particular interview that you did.

And I think we have a brief cut from that interview.

It's when you brought together two Supreme Court justices, Ginsburg and Scalia.

>> Yes.

If you had to pick one freedom that was -- that is the most essential to the functioning of a democracy, it has to be freedom of speech.

Because democracy means persuading one another and then ultimately voting in the majority.

The majority rules.

You can't run such a system if there is muzzling of one point of view.

So it's a fundamental freedom in a democracy, but much more necessary in a democracy than in any other system of government.

I guess you can run an effective monarchy without freedom of speech.

I don't think you can run an effective democracy without it.

>> Do you feel we could have endured as a democracy from then to now without a free press?

What do you think, Justice Ginsburg?

>> I don't think so.

I think the press has played a tremendously important role as watchdog over what the government is doing, and that keeps the government from getting too far out of line because they will be in the limelight.

So, yes, there are all kinds of excesses in the press, too, but we have to put up with that, I think, given the alternative.

>> As you look back on that conversation with justices Ginsburg and Scalia, do you think you would get the same reaction if you picked any two justices from the current court?

>> No, I do not, Ted, and that is a very sad fact.

The Supreme Court has changed.

The Constitution of the court has changed.

Its purpose ought to be the same.

But we would get a different answer today.

Scalia made it very clear.

He said that freedom of speech was the essential ingredient.

Ginsburg said that freedom of the press was the essential ingredient.

But they were both talking about freedom not constrained by government overreach.

I think that was a word they both used -- "government overreach."

They were concerned about that, and now it appears that that is not a concern of the current court.

But you raise an interesting question there as to what can the press do at this point to solidify its position in American society as a force for good, for education, for advancing knowledge, for trying to bring people together?

Is there any -- I mean, I throw the question to you.

I know you're supposed to ask me, but what can the press do at this point to salvage itself?

It's being trapped in the politics of our time.

The press today is not what I was brought up to believe is the right way of doing business.

It isn't.

There's such anger.

There's such a desire to nail somebody, not to give anyone an opportunity to speak sometimes.

Ted, let's listen to what you said on this program four years ago.

>> I got a call, oh, about 30 years ago from a New York Times reporter.

No, actually, I called him because I wanted him to come on as a guest on "Nightline."

And he went to check with the then-executive editor of The New York Times, fellow by the name of Abe Rosenthal, old friend of yours.

And he called me back later and he said, "I'll tell you what Abe said.

He said, 'You want to go on Koppel's program?

You go right ahead.

Only don't come back to The New York Times.'"

His point being twofold.

One, "You work for The Times, and that's all I want you to do."

And, two, Koppel's going to ask you a lot of provocative questions, and I don't want my New York Times reporters expressing opinions."

Well, them days is long past.

From "Morning Joe" to Rachel at night on CNN on MSNBC, the spear-carriers are there from The New York Times, from The Washington Post.

And they are trying very, very hard to be what they are, first-rate objective reporters.

>> But?

>> But when you are in the presence of Joe and Mika Brzezinski in the morning and you are on that program, where, quite clearly, the agenda is anti-Trump from start to finish, if you appear on that program and you sit on that desk morning after morning after morning, the public is going to identify you as being anti-Trump.

And you can do the best you possibly can to be an objective reporter when you're doing your stories for The Times, and people aren't going to believe you.

That leads me almost inexorably into another little sound bite from a fella by the name of Rupert Murdoch.

>> There appears to be two Foxes.

There is a Fox in the evening with highly opinionated anchors, and then there's Fox News during the day, which is pretty much what it would be in almost any other network.

>> No, we think it's different.

I think that's our strength.

Could we have both sides?

>> You have.

>> Both sides.

>> You have both sides of -- >> Yes, in our news shows, our politics, or whatever, we have, you know, Democrats and Republicans and Libertarians, whatever.

>> But the other networks have?

>> Well, I think they tend to be Democrats.

>> They tend to be Democrats.

[ Laughter ] >> Yeah, come on.

Let's be honest about it.

>> Rupert Murdoch's vision of the press was political.

And he said it as much, that this group of press is Democratic, and that group of press, we presume, was free and independent and Republican.

That's not the kind of leadership of the press that we need.

We need a non-political press, if that is at all possible.

And that is my concern now, Ted, that we're at a point where the press itself is split down the middle between a group that is very political and feels an obligation to take sides -- who's right, who's wrong?

-- and another side that tries to continue in the proper channel to just explain things.

>> My concern is and always has been that as long as there is money to be made -- And Mr. Murdoch certainly demonstrated that there is an enormous amount of money to be made by catering to the right, politically, in this country.

And then folks over at MSNBC realized that they could do the same thing on the left.

Not quite the same thing, but certainly more partisan than what you and I had been accustomed to over the course of our careers in journalism, and that that would make a great deal of money.

And I suppose, Marvin, I have to throw the question back at you.

As long as there is so much money at stake and so much money to be made by partisan journalism, what hope do we ever have of getting back to the less-partisan quality that you and I enjoyed when we began this business?

>> I have to believe that somewhere in this great country, there are the ingredients to recapture an earlier time.

I am familiar with Jon Meacham's new book on Lincoln.

One of the fascinating aspects of that book is that he is talking about what drove an American politician to take such dramatic action as to end slavery, the great curse in American history from the very beginning?

And he ends up with the idea that it is something within the individual.

It was something in Lincoln.

And one of the things in him was a religious belief in the ultimate goodness of mankind.

And if you can reach into that and have that be what drives you -- and he felt what drove Lincoln -- you can ultimately, in the American experience, produce new Lincolns.

And he feels that no matter -- This is Meacham.

He feels that no matter how deep the crisis is today, there is a tomorrow, and we're going to be better at it, because unless you have that in your gut, you're not going to move on it.

And he felt that Lincoln had it in his gut.

>> When we talk about television journalists and we point to some of the giants in television journalism, there is one name, of course, that -- Well, there are a couple of names -- Ed Murrow, and we'll talk about him in a moment.

But, first, I want to go to a more recent giant of television journalism who appeared on your broadcast, Walter Cronkite.

Let's listen to what the two of you had to say.

>> Walter, do you have any concerns when you look back at where journalism seems to be heading these days, that some people in a state government or a national government will sit back one day and say, "You know those reporters can't get it straight.

They need help.

We've got to either legislate some.

We're doing it in their best interest, mind you, but we have to legislate ways in which they can function, because, clearly, they've lost their way."

Is this a concern that you have, given the state of journalism today?

>> It would only be a concern if I thought that our democracy was already crumbling away, that our judicial process had been itself impeached, if you please, by the appointments made by a series of administrations so that the Supreme Court was totally unbalanced and perhaps that the country itself had gotten to such a state as Germany got into after World War I.

The Weimar Republic collapsed, and the entire way of life goes, and people react to a dictator.

I think we were in little danger in the McCarthy era.

That was not -- You know, we came close.

So it's conceivable that it could happen.

But if it happens, the country's gone.

If that happens, we're finished as a democracy.

>> What is fascinating about that, Ted, Walter very, very rarely discussed politics.

Very rarely.

But this was a man who covered World War II, and the experience of covering Hitler and fascism and the fight between freedom and fascism deeply affected Cronkite.

He didn't discuss politics unless it was late at night and he had had a couple of drinks.

But I was surprised when he said that on air, because he rarely would talk about it unless it affected that fundamental thing in his mind, which was the Supreme Court.

If the Supreme Court, in his mind, began to go south, began to lose its objectivity, began to be connected too much with a political party or a political movement, then democracy, as Walter understood it, as I understand it, would become endangered.

And that is what I think he was trying to say.

Right?

>> As you look back now on that conversation and as you hear Walter now -- I mean, Walter has been gone for quite a few years, so that interview had to have been done -- >> 1998.

>> 1998.

So we're talking about 24 years ago.

>> Yes.

>> It sounds almost prescient, doesn't it?

It sounds almost as though Walter had taken a peek into the future and seen us today.

>> I think that he did.

And, again, it goes back to this fear that of the fundamental elements of a democracy as he saw it, the Supreme Court occupied a paramount role.

And if the court, in his mind, ever began to become enveloped in a political movement or domestic politics, it would lose its authenticity, its legitimacy, its connection to the public, and democracy itself would suffer, and, as he said, we would be almost finished as a democracy.

So, yeah, he was very concerned, and it always started in his mind with the court.

>> Let me roll the clock back even further to a point when you were just a young stripling, a very young man.

And I don't know how many people today realize -- "A," I'm not even sure how many people today even remember the name Edward R. Murrow.

But anyone who's ever spent any time in journalism in this country will remember that name and, I hope, honor it.

You were the last of what were referred to as the Murrow Boards.

Talk about that for a moment.

>> Well, it's a label that I certainly don't deserve.

And it was generally associated with that group of reporters that Murrow hired to cover World War II.

And I happened, in 1957, to have written a piece for the Magazine section of The New York Times about Soviet youth.

And I wrote about it because it was a poll, the first one ever done in the Soviet Union.

I had just come back from 13 months in Moscow, working at the U.S. Embassy.

And so The Times asked me to do this piece.

I did it.

Murrow read it, liked it, called me the following day.

I was at Widener Library on a Monday morning, and the librarian came over and said, "There's a man who identifies himself as Edward R. Murrow who's on the phone, and he would like to talk to you."

And I said to her...

I don't even know now how I did this.

I said to her, "Murrow is not calling me.

He's probably some quack.

Hang up on him."

And I went back to doing what I was doing.

She came back at about 5:00 that afternoon.

She said, "You know, Marvin, it's the same man.

He sounds so distinguished.

Why don't you pick up the phone?"

I picked up the phone, and the minute I heard his voice, I realized what a total jackass I had been.

And I apologized profusely, and he said, "Forget all that.

Can you be in my office tomorrow at 9:00?"

I said, "Yes, sir.

What about?"

He said, "Well, I read your piece yesterday.

I liked it and I'd like to talk to you about it."

The secretary had set aside 30 minutes -- 9:00 to 9:30.

At noon, three hours, Murrow asked me every conceivable question about the Soviet Union, about Soviet youth, their lives, their religion, their sex patterns, everything.

He was so intensely curious about the country that was the principal adversary of the United States.

And when the conversation was over, he got up, put his arm around me, and said, "Oh, by the way, how would you like to join CBS?"

And, Ted, it took me a long time.

I mean, it might have taken 4 seconds before I said, "Yes, sir."

And that was the end of my career as a scholar and into journalism, and I have loved every minute of it.

>> Well, and let's keep talking about that for a minutes, because being a broadcast journalist in those days -- We're talking now about what?

The early '60s?

>> It was -- Well, I started in '57.

>> '57.

>> Yes.

And was in Moscow for CBS in 1959 and again re-established the bureau in 1960.

>> Marvin Kalb, CBS News, Moscow.

>> The deepening rift in the Russian-Chinese alliance may force the Chinese communists, however reluctantly, to seek economic assistance this year from Western nations.

>> I mean, we'll get into this aspect of your life a little bit later in our conversation, but you're a man who has written, I think, about 13 -- 13 books or more?

>> 17.

>> 17.

Forgive me.

And one of them deals in some detail with your experiences as a young journalist in Moscow, going over to Russia for CBS News, most of the time for CBS Radio, some of that time for CBS Television.

And what struck me in reading that book, Marvin -- and I'd like you just to sort of dwell on this for a minute or two -- was the extraordinary interest that the managers of CBS News in those days had in some of the really almost arcane details of Soviet foreign policy.

I mean, doing pieces in those days, wasn't a whole lot of video that came out of Moscow.

It was substance.

Talk about the difference in coverage then and now.

>> But, Ted, bear in mind, I mean, you were a young man, so you may not remember this, but 1957, early '60s, we were in the midst of the Cold War.

The Soviet Union was the -- perceived to be and, in many ways, was the mortal enemy of the United States.

It was the head of the Communist world, and we were the head of the capitalist world.

And we were in a state of collision.

And during the Cuban Missile Crisis, that collision could have led to a nuclear exchange, because -- in my judgment.

Because Nikita Khrushchev was then the leader of the Soviet Union, there was someone in Russia with the humanity to back off, to recognize he had made a huge blunder, a terrible miscalculation with the Communist goal, that harebrained scheme of introducing missiles and 50,000 men into Cuba to change the balance of power in the Cold War against the United States in favor of the Soviet Union.

He was caught, he backed off, and saved the world from a catastrophe.

To be in Russia at that time, the story itself was, in a way, my asset in trying to talk to the leadership of CBS in New York.

They, too, were absorbed with the Cold War and with the Soviet Union, and they wanted to know more about Russia.

And, fortunately, at that time, I spoke Russian very well.

I had been teaching Russian history.

I had lived in Russia for 13 months.

I knew the place.

And so when they sent me back there in May of 1960, I was able, almost from the day I arrived, talk to them and explain to the American people what the Russian people were like.

This is Marvin Kalb in Moscow.

The people who work back here in the Kremlin are convinced that the balance of power in the world has shifted in their favor.

I happened to have met Nikita Khrushchev.

It's a wonderful story there.

I am 6'3".

Khrushchev was about 5'6", in both height and weight -- width, rather.

And he once asked me, "How tall are you?"

I said, "I'm 3 centimeters shorter than Peter the Great."

Well, he loved that answer, burst into laughter.

And from that time on, he would always refer to me as -- "Here comes Pyotr Veliky --" Peter the Great.

And I managed to get -- I wasn't close to him.

That's kind of -- I managed on occasion to get close enough to him and speaking Russian where I could throw him a question and get an answer.

And with a lot of other answers and reading the press and talking to people on the street, I had a sense of what was going on, and I did my very best to convey that.

And I found -- Ted, and you know this.

Radio -- they gave me a lot of time.

I was able to write pieces, not just bat out something in broadcast.

I was able to sit there and write it and think it through.

And they appreciated that, and, apparently, the people who listened appreciated it, too.

>> I don't want to draw too close an analogy between the days of the Cuban Missile Crisis and where we are today, but there are some similarities.

There has been talk again of the possibility of the use of nuclear weapons by Russia.

There has been talk of the sort of wide separation, the gulf, the void -- ongoing talk -- that exists between the United States and Russia today.

And, yet, I don't hear a lot of the kind of coverage that you were just talking about.

And it's not the fault -- There are some excellent, excellent reporters who are over there covering the news, but there just isn't the same appetite.

>> There isn't the same appetite, unfortunately.

I think part of the reason is that when the Cold War ended in the beginning of the 1990s, it's a funny thing and a sad thing, but at American universities, for example, courses in Russian history were dropped.

Courses in the Russian language were dropped.

Who would want to know anything about Russia?

Now people are so disgusted by what it is that Putin is doing to Russia and through Russia to us that they're put off by the whole subject.

And, unfortunately, the reporters -- terrific reporters, by the way -- who are in Russia right now, those who know about the country and speak the language and can get through to people and find out a little bit of what's going on below the surface, they're doing a terrific job of explaining the war in Ukraine and Putin's attitude toward it, his attitude toward the West.

So it's not awful, but it isn't the way it was because our interests... they're all over the place, but they're not concentrated.

And I fear that we are not now able, because of the various distractions, of concentrating on, for example, an enemy, an adversary.

We just throw these words around, but they don't have the meaning that they had during the Cold War.

>> There is one really, truly excellent news program that is still on the air.

It grew out of the so-called "MacNeil/Lehrer Report."

And I want to bring up a sound bite here from the Lehrer half of that team, whom you interviewed on "The Kalb Report."

>> Tell me, when was the first time that you were paid to speak into a microphone?

>> It was in 1952.

I was a ticket agent at a Continental Trailways bus depot in Victoria, Texas, and one of my duties was to call the busses on the P.A.

system like this.

"May I have your attention, please?

This is your last call for Continental Trailways.

8:10 p.m. Silversides air-conditioned Thru-Liner to Houston now leaving from Lane 1.

For Inez, Edna, Ganado, Louise, El Campo, Pierce, Wharton, Hungerford, Kendleton, Beasley, Rosenberg, Richmond, Sugar Land, Stafford, Missouri City, and Houston, all aboard!

>> The thing is, Ted, that I listened to Jim Lehrer, and -- That's a funny routine.

And I think that this was a reporter who was invited by the president or the person wanting to be president to do the -- every four years, to do these interviews with presidential aspirants and presidents.

He was asked by both parties to be the reporter who was the anchor for those programs.

Today, there is such hostility that, on the Republican side, they don't even want to do this any longer, and they would never simply accept the guy because he was so balanced.

There's such suspicion not only from politician to politician, but politician to reporter and reporter to politician.

There is no Jim Lehrer anymore, and that is a terrible, terrible fact.

>> One good trend has taken place over these years, and that is the trend of far more involvement and far more positions of importance occupied by women in our business than was the case when you and I were in our prime.

And, again, I'd like to go back to an interview that you did many years ago with our old friend Diane Sawyer.

And Diane had a little tale to tell.

>> And you were the first female reporter/anchor at "60 Minutes."

What was it like then?

>> I knew I was in trouble when the entire group of the "60 Minutes" correspondent walked down the hall on something really important, said, "Here's what we're going to do," and ended it in the men's room.

>> Ted, you know, I remember very well, in the early 1970s, in the CBS bureau in Washington, Bill Small, who was then our bureau chief, began to invite young women into the bureau as reporters.

I mean, Lesley Stahl, for example, was one of those who came in at that time.

But that was the first time that the CBS bureau in Washington was open to any number of women journalists.

They didn't make their mark because they were not -- the door was not open to them.

And Bill Small, at CBS, was one of those who opened the door.

And Connie Chung came in and a number of women came in who then went on to wonderful careers in broadcast news.

But it took someone with a little bit of guts to open the door, because there were an awful lot of people at the very top of CBS, ABC, NBC, the entire news business that decided that we guys ought to keep the industry to ourselves.

And that's essentially what they did until they had to.

And when they did, it made the industry infinitely better.

We were covering stories then with women that we had never covered before.

That was one aspect of having women journalists as your colleagues.

>> And let me just say, it has been a very long, tedious, slow, agonizing process, and is only just beginning to reach a point that which women in our industry -- by which I mean broadcast journalism -- are holding the same positions of authority that men have held for so many different years.

So, let me talk to you about an organization that you created.

And I'm talking about the Shorenstein Center at Harvard.

And perhaps before we get into any details on that, you should remind people how and why that center was created in the first place.

>> Well, it was created for two reasons.

Walter Shorenstein was a very wealthy real-estate person who lived in San Francisco.

His daughter, Joan Shorenstein, worked at CBS in the Washington bureau.

And, in 1987, tragically, Joan died of breast cancer.

And Walter wanted to do something in her name.

And he began to talk to people like David Broder at The Washington Post, Al Hunt at The Wall Street Journal, and Tim Russert at NBC and asked, "I have $5 million here.

I want to give it to some outfit that will do something in Joan's name and something that is in her honor as a professional journalist."

And all three of them had the idea that Walter ought to give the money to Harvard, to the Kennedy School, and set up a center there and then get somebody to run it who sort of knows about journalism and knows about Harvard.

And all three of them came up with me as a name, maybe because I had spoken to Broder, I believe, and certainly to Al Hunt about my concern that journalism was beginning to slip away from me rather than me from it.

And what I meant by that was that I was feeling uncomfortable with the way certain stories were covered, with the way serious foreign news was ignored.

I wanted to do something, but I had no idea what I could do.

But, anyway, they came to Graham Allison, who was the dean of the Kennedy School, an expert on public policy.

I got a call from Graham, and he said, "Would you meet with me in Chinatown in Washington?

I'd like to talk to you."

I met him, and at the end of the conversation, he said, "Walter Shorenstein Joan -- you know her.

Would you come up to Harvard and run this?"

And that was almost the 30th anniversary of my time as a broadcast journalist with CBS and NBC.

And there was another one of those quick decisions.

I said "yes" without quite realizing what that meant in terms of income.

What it would have meant, Ted, was a 90% cut in salary.

And I thought about it not long.

I said, "The hell with it.

Let's do it."

And I said, "Yes."

And it was a wonderful decision and a wonderful opportunity to try to do something good.

And I, for the first time in my life, ran something.

I mean, as a journalist, you sort of run around the world and you do all kinds of things, but you're not in charge of anything.

You're just trying to get a story.

Up at Harvard, I was, for the first time in my life, as I said, responsible for hiring people, never, ever spending more than I had in hand, organizing programs, and dealing every day with students, with these bright, wonderful people who had aspirations for great things.

And I suddenly found myself in a position where I felt I could help them, and that was pretty fantastic.

It was a great experience.

>> Let's assume that we have a great deal of money.

We have all the money we could possibly want.

And you have all the power that you could possibly ask for.

And the only thing you're being required to do is to restore credibility to American journalism.

What do you do there?

>> There is something out there that tells me, on the basis of some experience, that if you got a lot of money, you could set up an organization designed to do good things, good journalism.

There are such outfits.

No question about that.

How do you spread the wealth, in a sense?

And I don't want to mislead anybody.

I do not have any clear answers to those.

I don't know.

And that is what is so frustrating.

>> I mean, the funny thing is, Marvin, Ted Turner, more than 40 years ago now, set up this organization, CNN.

And Ted had a lot of money and he was prepared to spend it and he did spend it.

And he was well-motivated.

He wanted to create this extraordinary news organization.

And for a while, it looked as though he might be doing that.

He had this extraordinary reach all around the world.

For a while there, CNN was recognized as a really fine global news organization.

Now, what we have today?

We still have The New York Times.

We still have The Washington Post.

We still have The Wall Street Journal.

NPR does a good job.

PBS does a good job.

But when it comes to mass-media coverage, where are we?

>> What happens, Ted, as you know, we get to focus on cable television.

You were talking about CNN.

CNN had a wonderful rise in the 1980s.

When it got into the 1990s, in 1996, Fox started.

Fox didn't start out of the blue.

There had been right-wing radio.

It had created a market.

And then Rupert Murdoch and people around him had the idea that if you play to that dissatisfied group of Americans, the Americans who hated the idea that the U.S. lost a war in Vietnam, that somehow or another, Ronald Reagan couldn't be president for life, they wanted to reach out to a certain group of Americans.

They did, and within a matter of six years, Fox Cable was drawing more of an audience than CNN and MSNBC, which had started exactly the same time as Fox.

And the answer there is that if you play to an audience that is already there with a certain point of view and money and you play to them, they are going to watch you, they're going to read you because they want justification for their own point of view.

It was an enormous success and continues to be.

And that -- And that, Ted -- just let me finish -- and that problem, in and of itself, is one of the reasons for the current downside in American journalism, because the industry has been split -- not technologically, not the way you were at ABC and I was at CBS, and we could compete.

That isn't it.

It's political.

They're taking political positions now, not being better at covering the news.

And taking political positions robs the media of its independence, of its ability to stand above the fray, look down, and cover it.

It's part of the political fray.

It's hard to escape.

>> Let me challenge you just a little bit, and I'm going to take a position I'm unaccustomed to taking, that of defending Rupert Murdoch.

When Rupert Murdoch said to you on your program -- we heard it a few minutes ago -- "They're all Democrats," he was referring to us.

He was referring to the old CBS of Marvin Kalb, the old ABC of Ted Koppel, and so on.

His perception.

that we were more inclined in a liberal direction, a little bit left of center was not totally inaccurate.

So when he came along and provided an alternative, there was a hunger for it out there.

And there continues to be.

To what degree do we bear responsibility for what he became?

>> But my sense is that the American reporter, the good American reporter -- There were good and bad through all time.

But the good American journalists in the '50s, '60s, '70s, '80s, in that period of time sought to convey honestly what he or she truly believed to be the truth about a story.

Now, if -- You covered the Vietnam War.

I was only in there once or twice.

But you were there all the time.

And you know that if you were able to convey a story about war, about violence, about an American ally that has lost his way, you're gonna get on the air.

Mike Wallace went to Vietnam in 1964, and I'll never forget this.

He wanted very much to establish his credential as a serious CBS reporter, not a nighttime radio interviewer.

And he went there and he came back and told the following story, that he did 12 pieces.

One of them was about conflict, about the war itself.

But the rest of it, what he wanted to show the American people was how the government worked, the corruption, the tribal warfare, the relationship of the Vietnamese to Laotians to Cambodians.

He wanted to give them a sense of what Southeast Asia was all about.

Of the 11 other pieces -- of the 11 -- two made air, nine were on the cutting-room floor.

>> Yeah.

>> And when he came back, he said to a group of us that, "I know now how to get on the air."

And this was with Cronkite as the anchor, and Walter was a terrific anchor.

So, how do you persuade people to watch only interesting, serious analysis?

I fear that we're beyond that, that it's not going to happen, and that we are trapped in a technological morass, tied in with money, that does not allow us to escape to loftier ambition.

>> As you look back, Marvin, on this long and distinguished career, can you pick among your many children as to which you love the most?

You are a distinguished historian, writer, teacher, organizer of a great institution, wonderful journalist, at one point, diplomat.

I suspect that, in one form or another, you loved them all, but is there anything that you can point to and say, "This has always been at the core of my soul"?

>> For me, journalism is a form of education.

For me, being a teacher is obviously a form of education.

Being a writer is a form of education.

I try very hard to understand where I am, what are the political movements around me?

I have always had a feeling that individuals are not only more interesting than mass historical currents, individuals make history.

And I'm absorbed at this time in my life with listening to books and reading books about people who are influential in history.

>> What are you gonna do next?

>> I think quite often about going back into teaching.

I think about, "Oh, there's always another book."

There is one book that I really would love to write, and that is the effort on the part of Mehmet Ali Agca, a Turkish killer who tried to knock off John Paul II.

I am positive there's a lot more to that story than we know.

And it's a story that I would love to know more about and write about.

>> Well, in point of fact, Marvin, you have been a teacher all your life.

I think I can say without fear of contradiction, you and I are not young anymore.

Is there anything that you would like to convey to the young people, however few they may be, who end up watching this broadcast?

>> I have these notes in front of me, and I'm just thinking that over these many years since I first started doing this program 28 years ago, my respect and appreciation for a free press and for American democracy have only deepened.

And I've learned that the two go hand in hand, a free press and democracy.

If you have one, you've got the other.

If you lose one, you're apt to lose the other.

And I appreciate the fact that we're in a bit of a national tailspin now.

I think that's obvious.

This precious experiment in American democracy -- it has never been rock-solid.

And George Washington would have told you that if you had asked him.

It is a fragile thing.

It's an ongoing experiment.

It's day-to-day.

It's election-to-election.

The historians who know America best are persuaded that we will somehow emerge from the current crisis.

Let us all hope that they are right, because when you look around the world, you realize America's flawed democracy is still the best game in town.

Let us honor it.

>> Marvin, what can I say?

You have had a long and extraordinary career, and it's been my great pleasure and privilege, I must say, to have been your friend and colleague over these many years.

And I thank you for the great gift of letting me be a part of this program.

Thank you.

>> Thank you, Ted, for that wonderful comment.

I appreciate it.

And thank you for helping me in so many different ways over many years.

My gratitude also to another dear friend, Mike Freedman.

He's the executive producer of "The Kalb Report."

He is the founding father of this broadcast and has been from the very beginning.

Thank you, Mike, for everything.

And my sincere thanks to all of you for tuning in over the past 28 years.

I am sincerely grateful to each and every one of you.

And that is it for now.

I'm Marvin Kalb.

And as Ed Murrow used to say many years ago, good night and good luck!

Could you imagine Bob Costas doing anything else?

>> I really believe, had I been born in an era before Marconi, before Sarnoff, I would have been a ward of the state, because I have no discernible abilities of any kind other than to yak for fun and profit.

>> Do you make a lot of money?

>> Yes, Marvin, I do.

[ Laughter ] ♪♪