Out of My Mind (19 page)

The number of network reporters stationed in foreign cities has been sharply reduced because reporters and bureau offices are expensive. One network that had ninety-seven reporters twenty years ago, has fifty-one now and that includes some who are more news readers than reporters. Without their own reporters, network news broadcasts borrow shamelessly from newspapers that do their own foreign reporting.

Broadcast news should be separate from entertainment and separate from business. Information for the American public is too important to dismiss as an expensive sideline to the amusement from which the money flows in.

News is vital to a democracy if citizens are going to know what they're talking about when they talk, or what the issues are when they vote. There must be ways to pay for so essential a service without resorting to the stultifying commercials we get. I always return to the same thought: Broadcast companies using the public airwaves should be forced to provide news in exchange for the privilege they have of making millions on entertainment.

News might be paid for by a foundation established for that purpose by all of us. Pooling our money to pay for a service we need is not a new idea. Our postal network wasn't organized to make money for carriers. Our judicial system isn't designed to make judges rich. Our police forces aren't paid by the cases they solve. News organizations should also be free of the need to be profitable.

A few weeks after I first appeared on
60 Minutes,
I got a call from a drug company selling aspirin. They asked if I would do a commercial for them because, they said, my voice sounded just right for someone with a headache.

This was the first time I ever realized I had a nasal, vaguely unpleasant-sounding voice. The money they offered was interesting but I told them I was a journalist and that journalists didn't do commercials.

Although I'd never dream of doing any commercial, I often make a sales pitch for journalism. I like the news business and intend to say good things about American journalism and the reporters and editors who work in it whether for broadcast or print. My desire to tell you how highly I regard reporters and editors is prompted by several negative stories that have appeared in recent years about dishonest reporting. The stories are dismaying to all of us who work in news. We know they reinforce the negative opinion many Americans have of us. We want to be loved and respected.

USA Today
announced that, after a thorough investigation by a committee under the leadership of distinguished journalist John Siegenthaler, it had determined that one of
USA Today
's star reporters, Jack Kelley, had invented many of his stories from war zones. He'd also borrowed information from other newspaper reporters and often added quotations he'd invented to make his stories livelier.

USA Today
did the wrong thing when it kept Kelley on the job long after some of its own staff members suspected he was a fraud, but did the right thing when it had the matter investigated. I don't recall offhand any other company selling a product that paid to have an investigation conducted of some aspect of its own business and then made public the details of what it did wrong. The report said Kelley's stories had often been dishonest and that the editorial staff had been lax in not finding this out sooner. Half a dozen newspapers recently have fired reporters for dishonest or unethical reporting.

While
USA Today
has never been a paragon of editorial excellence, it has capably filled the gap left by good local newspapers in towns and small cities across the country that don't pretend to cover national and international events. Many people who buy
USA Today
buy two newspapers.

Believe it or don't, but I can tell you that newspaper or television reporters, working at
USA Today
or elsewhere, are more concerned about the ethical standards of their profession than the people in any other business. I don't think car dealers, manufacturers or clothing store operators worry much about the impact of their life's work on fellow Americans. Journalists think of themselves as belonging to an exclusive club and are proud of their membership.

The fact that news has become a profitable venture for large corporations has not always been good for people in the business. The disappointing fact is that a large part of the American public reads a newspaper and watches television news more for entertainment than information. This has contributed to the profit-driven companies' tendencies to deal less seriously with the truth in favor of entertainment. The truth is often less interesting than rumor or gossip and our good newspapers are to be congratulated for their imperfect resistance to being entertainers.

I've met hundreds of news people during my sixty years in the business. In World War II, I lived in a press camp with twenty-five and met my first bad apple reporter. He wrote for a news magazine and was
ostracized by the others because he regularly put quotes in the mouths of anonymous soldiers he had not interviewed and described events he had not seen.

There's one in every crowd, but what I want to say in this commercial for journalism is this: Reporters are more honest and ethical than the people in any other line of work. It's just very difficult to get the whole truth and tell it accurately.

The American public is not so enthusiastic about either news or the people giving it to them these days. In 1988, 58 percent of the public didn't think television news reporters showed any political bias. In 2004, only 38 percent of viewers absolved them of that charge. Even fiftyeight percent isn't very good.

The use of doctored papers in a Dan Rather report to question George Bush's Air National Guard service was seriously wrong, but I hope the public gives CBS News management credit for having appointed an independent panel to look into what it did wrong and who did it.

The charge is that CBS was out to hurt the President and derail his re-election campaign. That reporters or anchormen have often made apparent their liberal political opinions is true, but it's interesting that there isn't any evidence that their liberal views had any influence on public opinion. If journalists are liberal and people are influenced by them, how do you account for President Bush's election and re-election?

Television viewers are ambivalent about those who write or tell them what the news is. They think of anchormen as special because, like authors and actors, they're celebrities. On the other hand, many people don't trust them. Dan Rather's fame exceeds his reputation.

The journalists I know—and I know a lot of them—are obsessed with being impartial in their reports and when they are not, it is a mistake in execution, not intention. That certainly is true of Rather. The
public asks too much of news. People expect news organizations to supply them with the whole truth about everything and news can't do that. For one thing, there's too much of it. The other reason is, most important news isn't interesting. News companies have an obligation, as business enterprises, to make money. To do that, they have to attract a large audience. If editors and producers judge that their audience isn't interested in an important story, they don't use it. This accounts for why Americans are so uninformed about what goes on in the rest of the world. They don't want to know so they aren't told. If that's what the NBC anchor is telling them, they'll turn to CBS. If the World Bank raises interest rates, it may be of significant, long-term importance to the economy, but people won't read about it because it's dull compared to the bathtub murder of a blonde bimbo.

The battle in the newsroom of any good news operation every day is how much to give people of what they ought to know compared to what they want to read or see.

News outlets are important whether they're trusted or not. We all deal secondhand with most of the institutions in our lives. We don't know our banker because we bank by mail or he's over behind a window where we can't get at him. We don't know the farmer who grows what we eat because we buy food at the supermarket. We buy insurance after reading a sales pitch. We don't personally know our politicians. We depend on news reports to let us know who's cheating, who's good, who's bad and whom to elect.

People expect journalists to be better at their job than readers and viewers are at theirs. They expect them not to make mistakes when reporting something, but they do. Reporters make mistakes by accident or by observing something through eyes, which, like everyone else's, are sometimes clouded. Journalists make fewer mistakes than people in most businesses because they're being watched more closely and they know it. A journalist's mistakes are out in the open, where everyone can see them.

The public doesn't appreciate how infrequently news organizations violate their own high and self-imposed journalistic standards.

Life is good, but it's a mess. Mine is, anyway.

Some days, I have so much to do I can't get anything done because I have something else I have to do first.

I've never been able to see my life as a whole and set out to do the right things in the right order by assigning degrees of importance to them. My hours, my days, my years are fragmented. I would certainly get more done if I could put my brain to work on my problems full time, but I cannot. I flit from here to there doing first one thing, then another without paying any attention to which is more important. Invariably, I start one thing, then go to a second before I've finished the first. And then I interrupt the second to start a third.

This morning, I started to read the newspaper, but the mail came so I put the newspaper down to read that. There were several bills I should have paid. I decided to write the checks to the phone company and to a store but couldn't find my checkbook.

It doesn't take much to put me off writing a check. The phone rang while I was looking and I got talking to Bob about the tennis match I saw last night at the U.S. Open. It was a terrible match, but Andy Roddick set a world's record by banging a ball at 153 mph, so I was pleased to have been in on that.

I got an ominous call from the American Express Fraud Unit while I was at my desk. They wanted to know if I had recently charged $4,000 worth of stuff to my account from several stores in Brooklyn. I had not. Clearing your account of $4,000 worth of bills you did not incur takes time.

I had a remarkably interesting week but all in small pieces. It was like a puzzle that was never put together. First, the producer of
60 Minutes
asked me to do something about the Republican National Convention, so I went to Madison Square Garden looking for an idea. After several hours, I left without ever coming up with an idea for a story.

The next morning, I sat at my typewriter and worried again about what to do for
60 Minutes.
I didn't want to go through the long process of getting past the crowd of cops surrounding Madison Square Garden again, so I read some stories about the convention. One story said New York officials thought the convention would bring $250 million into the city. Business is never any good during a political convention, so I decided to interview some store owners.

There were some things I had to do first, though. I needed a haircut before I did anything on camera, I had to take some clothes to the dry cleaners, the accountant who helps me with taxes needed some stuff I have in a box somewhere, I had a doctor's appointment because Tums gave me indigestion, I couldn't find the key to our back door, my car was 3,000 miles overdue for an oil change, and I still had to do that
60 Minutes
piece about the Republican National Convention for Sunday.

Have I made my point?

People ask me when I'm going to retire.

How about never. Would that be an acceptable answer?

I concede the possibility I might die someday, but I won't be retired when that happens unless someone retires me—over my dead body. It won't be an action I take and if I don't take it, the word isn't “retired.” The word is “fired.”

When I hear someone say they're just sticking around at their job for another two years until they can get Social Security, I feel both sorry for them and angry at them. It must be a terrible life for people who hate what they do for most of the hours of their days so much that they can't wait until they quit working.

There is nothing I could do retired that I don't do now, working. I make furniture as a hobby and enjoy that. Some weeks in the summer I
spend as many as thirty-five hours in my shop. I enjoy it but if I had the opportunity to spend eight hours a day, five days a week in my shop making furniture instead of in my office writing, I wouldn't take it. You couldn't pay me not to work.

I like home, I like my family and I like the friends I have outside the news business but the thought of spending seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day resting and without any purpose in life scares me. I'm not tired. I am never happier than when I'm working. There is no question that it is more satisfying to make money than to have it. Having it is just a comfort.

There are about 35 million Americans at or over the age of sicty-five, which is generally considered the retirement age. Of that 35 million, only about 10 percent of the women are working and 18 percent of the men. That means there are almost 25 million people who have no known reason other than having to go to the bathroom to get up in the morning.

Being one myself, I don't mind being with old people but I dislike the great concentrations of them in retirement communities. Florida is not my dream state to live in. For their own sake and the sake of the rest of the community, retirees should be mixed in, somewhere close to their relationship in percentage, with the whole community. There should be an intermingling of children, young adults getting started and working men and women in a neighborhood with the old.