Broadcast News, Part I

THE OPEN MIND
Host: Richard D. Heffner
Guest: Steve Friedman
Title: “Broadcast News” Part I
VTR: 5/28/93

I’m Richard Heffner, your host on THE OPEN MIND. And probably one of the least colorful characters in this benighted medium. On the other hand, my guest is one of the most. Indeed, just days before we record this program, returning as Executive Producer once more of NBC’s long-running Today Show, Steve Friedman was quoted in the press as saying some perfectly outrageous things to his staff. Whatever quotation marks mean these days, Friedman is reported as saying, “Anything I say can be taken out of context because I’m a colorful character”. And in an interview with Frances Lear, when he was still Executive Producer of NBC’s “Nightly News with Tom Brokaw”, Friedman was characterized as given to “going ballistic”. “He’s famous for kicking out TV sets”, someone else was quoted. How reliably quoted, of course, we don’t know. After all, these are today’s print press comments on today’s electronic press. Further, according to the print press, one trick of his is to throw a hard ball past the ear of the person he’s talking to in his office. It gets one’s attention. Well, he has our attention now, so let me ask my guest what television news can legitimately do to the audience at large to get and to hold its attention. After all, from reading Steven Friedman and Rosemary Ford’s new St. Martin’s Press novel about broadcast news entitled “Station Break”, one would think that my guest does have some real lines he would draw, but where are they and what are they?

Friedman: Well, it’s really hard to know these days, the lines keep moving in the sand. You don’t know where the line is and where it isn’t. However, I’ll say this about television…I think the people who write about it are not as smart as the people who watch it. And I think the viewers can understand the difference between “Current Affair” and the evening news. They can tell the difference between “Hard Copy” and “Prime Time Live”. So I think they, in their own mind, can distinguish them. I think a lot of us, who see success, and we’re measured by how many people watch our programs…if they see something is successful, you say, “I gotta go do that, I gotta be more like that. I gotta, I gotta look like that, I gotta feel like that”. And I think that if we do that, and blur the lines even further, we are hurting ourselves, and we are not helping the viewer. And I think that’s where we have to draw the line. We have to make distinctions between types of programs, and I think we are, in the mainstream media, trying to do that now.

Heffner: Trying to do it now…because that hasn’t been done recently?

Friedman: Well, no…well, I, I think, I think in the late eighties when you saw the explosion, if you will, of tabloid television, and all the predictors say, “you know what, we’re going to take over, we’re going to beat you…we’re going to do this, we’re going to do that”. And I think a lot of people in the mainstream television were afraid, and feared, and some moved toward that way. It turns out, and it’s very interesting that the people who buy time, even though some of these shows had high ratings…didn’t want their clients on them…those programs. So the marketplace dictated a lot. And a lot of the tabloid shows are a lot less tabloid in 93, than they were in 90 because they couldn’t sell their time. “Current Affair” is one of them. “Current Affair” has…has certainly…while not going to mainstream television, has certainly toned down what it did because it wants big sponsors.

Heffner: Yes, but you’re also the guy who’s quoted as saying, “Everyone who’s gnashing his teeth about the death of the Murrow tradition has former in front of his or her name. They’re not in the business anymore…”

Friedman: That’s correct, because they were never “in” the business…okay?

Heffner: What do you mean “Never in the business”?

Friedman: Edward R. Murrow….where did Edward R. Murrow make his money? He did “Person to Person” sitting there in front of a…probably in a studio just like this…looking at a television and saying, “Oh, let’s go into your home”. This is the great Edward R. Murrow. A lot of the people, the Fred Friendlys of the world, if you will, don’t remember that. They only remember the “good” things he did. Television has always been sale and commerce. And the people who decry what we’re doing, and say “My God, look what they’re doing, they have an audience…they’re actually using graphics, they’re putting music on…that’s terrible…my…oh, my lord what is happening”. They don’t, they don’t, they don’t look back to the days in the fifties…that they fondly remember, and say it was the same. The difference is that the “good old days”…I’m, I’m afraid to say are today. And 30 years from now I’ll come back on this show, and I’ll tell you how great we were in 1993, and “look at what these heathens are doing in the year 2020”.

Heffner: Yeah, but now wait a minute Steve. The fact is at the end of every one of our Open Minds. I say “As an old friend used to say ‘Good night and good luck’” because it’s my tribute to him. Not to “Person to Person”, because there was the bulk of Edward R. Murrow’s work, and the bulk of Edward R. Murrow’s involvement in the mission…

Friedman: That’s right.

Heffner: …as he saw it, of television news.

Friedman: All correct. I have nothing against Edward R. Murrow. Edward R. Murrow was one of my heroes when I was growing up. What I have is the CBS mentality which says “We are the house of Murrow, and everybody else is below us”.

Heffner: But there is no “House of Murrow” anymore.

Friedman: Not, not anymore, but they invoke his name, don’t they?

Heffner: Okay. Let’s, let’s take that as a given…

Friedman: Alright.

Heffner: Invoke his name….what about his name, what about his tradition…leave out “Person to Person”, do you think it’s valid today? Because this comment seemed to me, I don’t think you were just talking about Don Hewitt, I don’t think you were just talking about Dan Rather…I think you were saying that journalism has to go fairly far along the path of what the people want.

Friedman: Correct. There is no honor in going out of business. And, remember, when Murrow was around, there were basically two television sources to go to. Or two radio sources to really go to for the news. We have to compete now. And in that competition, sometimes, journalism falls victim to commerce. But it’s guys like me, who’ve done this for a long time that, like you say, have to draw the line. Lines past where you won’t go. You know, I did the “Today” show in the eighties…it’s called the “golden days” now, you know, because everything looks golden when you’re ten years away.

Heffner: No, you call it “the golden days’…I look back at the fifties…

Friedman: Right.

Heffner: …that’s the difference…

Friedman: Well, Pat Weaver calls the fifties “the golden days”, you know, when they had a monkey on the show, you know. But…the “golden days” are always ten, 15, 20, 30 years ago…

Heffner: A chimpanzee, please.

Friedman: That’s right…J. Fred, I, I apologize…I know he’s still alive. And in 1982, I could have increased the “Today” show’s ratings real easy…I could have put the 20 minute workout girls on at 7:40, and I could have put an astrologer on at 8:30, and the ratings would have gone up. But I didn’t do that. Even though I’m one of these “heathens” who, who deals with commerce. Because it wasn’t in character with the show. You have to always know what’s in character with the show you’re doing. I have nothing against the people who do “Current Affair”, you know. That’s fine, it’s a tabloid show, they do it in a tabloid way. I, I don’t think they’re below me, or terrible people. I think they’re doing something for that show. I chose not to do that. But I don’t condemn those who do. And the people who I’m talking about, the gnashers and the mashers, they believe everybody who chooses to do that, because they have to earn a living, and are doing a different kind of television…more entertainment television than journalism. They are somehow the “terrible people” of the society. And I don’t believe that.

Heffner: But, Steve, wouldn’t you concede that the more there is of that, those…those concessions made to what you can feed…the pap you can feed most people most of the time…the more there is of it, the more there will be. And the more pressure there will be upon you to accommodate yourself increasingly to that kind of shtick.

Friedman: You know…ha…you know, there’s a teeter-totter in all of what we do. And there are prices that we pay in the deals we make with the Devil, if you will. The fact of the matter is, because of Don Hewitt, and some other people, all of a sudden television news, especially in prime time, has become big profits. And because Don Hewitt makes, I read, two, three, four million dollars…in the paper…and I’m glad he, he does so well so he can help Macy’s now do their shopping channel…it’s always good to see a journalist really help Macy’s. And that deal with the Devil that you make, by getting all that money for yourself, or for your program, and being successful…you also have to understand that you have to keep those ratings high. And some people, some people lose sight of their mission. Don Hewitt hasn’t, by the way. Don Hewitt’s mission on “Sixty Minutes” has always stayed steadfast. But there are people who will, who will put the 20 minute workout girls on at 7:40 and they’ll put on the astrologist at 8:40…I again, am no saint. I’ve done a lot of things and will do a lot of things in the future, but we do draw the line. Now, if, if the marketplace is so tight that we’re squeezed out because of “A Current Affair” or a program like that…”Hard Copy”, whatever, then you’ve got a problem. But the fact of the matter is…the fact of the matter is the marketplace is making those shows tilt backwards…I’d say a bigger problem, if you really want to talk about journalism, you know, and I guess that’s what you want to talk about, that’s what we started talking about…the biggest problem now on these shows is when somebody comes in the news, they will pay the guests. That I would say is a bigger threat to mainstream television and the place where mainstream television is in this country, than us being forced to adopt tabloid style stuff.

Heffner: Why do you…why do you choose that as your major problem…as the major problem?

Friedman: Well, because people want to see the latest news, the people in the news, the hottest news, and they should not go to the highest bidder. And I think checkbook journalism, if you will, is a major, major threat out there on the horizon.

Heffner: Of course, that phrase “checkbook journalism”, that was the one that was much used when I was at CBS in the, in the sixties, in opposition to the other networks, to the other stations. So there’s nothing new about that…

Friedman: There is nothing new about it, but the sums that people are talking about…you know, if you’re, if you’re a survivor of David Koresh, and for going on a program you can get $50,000…you know, that…you know we’re, we’re not talking about the astronauts in Life magazine here…you know. We’re talking about a cult that shot Federal officials, that probably helped kill innocent children, and their payment for all that is $50,000, because they were…they were lucky enough to escape.

Heffner: So your concern is not their appearance, but their being paid to appear.

Friedman: Yes.

Heffner: Well that really doesn’t have very much to do with what you’re saying about the role they played in our society.

Friedman: No, but the problem with that is, is that if these programs start buying people to come on, the mainstream programs will have no choice eventually, but to enter the bidding.

Heffner: Yes, but you see, that’s, that’s the thing that, that interests me. The mainstream programs, you say, will have no choice but enter the bidding. You talk about a marketplace…this juxtaposition of ideas…news and information, and marketplace, you really want to tie yourself…

Friedman: Well…

Heffner: …to those…

Friedman: I don’t make the rules…

Heffner: …put together? Sure you do.

Friedman: No, no, no, no…

Heffner: Who makes the rules if not the people who run the programs?

Friedman: No, no, no. my success, and my failures in television, okay, have all been based on one level, what the ratings were. Now, it is not a one to one relationship. There are four kinds of television programs…there are good shows that get good ratings…you do that you’re a genius. There’s bad shows that get good ratings…you do that you’re a genius. Then there are good shows that don’t get good ratings…you usually get a little more time if you do one of those. And then the fourth kind…bad shows that get bad ratings…you do that, you’re no longer a guest, you’re out, you know. But any program…and any program…any program…any program, including Ed Murrow’s lives and dies eventually by whether they get viewers. And in newspapers it’s circulation…circulation. You know the interesting thing about the printed press , and I’m glad you talked about it, is…we…if we have a “Dateline GM” thing are castigated loud and wide by The New York Times, the…USA Today, the Washington Post, The LA Times all of that. And, you know, maybe we deserve to be castigated…you know, hey, you know, “that wasn’t a real smart thing to do”. But what about when Janet Cook makes up a person, and puts it in the paper? Does television spend every day on a certain page castigating the Washington Post? No. there is a double standard.

Heffner: So, let’s just put a plague on both your houses. And let me get back to the question of your, your novel where you seem, in the novel, to be…and don’t tell me you disassociate yourself from…

Friedman: No…

Heffner: …the characters…

Friedman: No, no.

Heffner: …you seem very much to be critical, shall I say, of the same judgments you’re, you’re making now, the same positive judgments about what we have to do.

Friedman: Well, it is a…

Heffner: It is a fiction.

Friedman: Yeah…(Laughter)

Heffner: Ah, come on now, Steve.

Friedman: No, no, but it is. And…

Heffner: It gives you an outlet to say the things, perhaps, you want to say, and not take responsibility for them in real life.

Friedman: Ahhh, well it is fiction (Laughter). I, I, I have to say that there is a lot, in my mind, of conflict about doing what, what I do, and being who I am and growing up as I did. And there is conflict. And the conflict basically becomes the big business mentality that television journalism, all journalism has become, and how you serve the public best in that environment. Now in the novel “Station Break”, it certainly runs amok. And, and people can say…

Heffner: You mean the big business mentality…

Friedman: Right, right…it certainly runs amok. It has not run amok as far as I’m concerned at the three…at the four major networks. Four…you know, CNN being the fourth. But I thought, I, I have to say this, that in 87 and 88, it was real close. Real close to running amok.

Heffner: And you didn’t write the novel, did you, out of the conviction that it hadn’t run amok and wasn’t going to run amok…

Friedman: No. I wrote the novel…I wrote the novel because when I was a young guy in LA, we had the Symbionese Liberation Army, the Patty Hearst case, and there was a day where they thought they had Patty Hearst in Englewood…it turned out she wasn’t there. They had a seize and they basically blew up the building. And we had a new newscaster on there…replaced Tom Snyder…named Paul Moyer…and Paul Moyer wasn’t’ doing very well, but that day he shined. And had the SLA shoot-out not happened on that day, his career…he’s still in LA doing great…his career may have never survived the first year. But that was an opportunity for him, and he took advantage of it. And then later on I saw Judy Woodruff, a little known correspondent out of Atlanta, assigned to Jimmy Carter, a little known Governor out of Georgia. He turns out to be President…she turns out to be the White House correspondent…without those two things happening, she may have never met Al Hunt, she may never had had Jeffrey, she may never have wound up on PBS, and CNN and NBC doing, doing the “Today Show”. So what I wanted to do was write a novel about the relationship between the people who do the covering and the people they cover, and you know, my favorite word is “run amok”…and in this particular case, in this work of fiction, it does run amok.

Heffner: Of course, what runs amok most of all is the pressure…

Friedman: Yes.

Heffner: …you’re referring to…the tension…

Friedman: Yes.

Heffner: …between…the marketplace and “jernalism” as you…

Friedman: “Jerrrnalism”…

Heffner: You do it so much better…

Friedman: Right.

Heffner: I just have to repeat it from…

Friedman: Right.

Heffner: …reading. And that word, as you pronounce it is used contemptuously.

Friedman: Well I think…I, I, I use “jerrnalist” contemptuously for the people who have no idea what it is we’re doing. And have no idea what kind of pressures we are working under. And live in these ivory towers and say things that are so ridiculous and so out, out, out of left field that they can never be met. And one of them is that “Jesus Christ we don’t have any documentaries on television any more, so therefore the three networks are heathens, and they’re leading the country down the…

Heffner: Yeah…

Friedman: …down the primrose path to hell”. Baloney. There’s more television news…there’s more journalism, and it’s better…it’s better today than ever. Most of it…

Heffner: Measured by what?

Friedman: …most of it because of technology….I’ll admit that. That it…even in the Vietnam period we would shoot the film on Monday, we’d take it to a place on Tuesday, we helicopter it to a place on Wednesday, then fly it back on Thursday and put it on the air on Friday, so you were seeing on Friday, Monday’s news. Okay? Now, it’s as it happens.. And people can make judgments as it’s happening on live events a lot easier than waiting 4 days for us to make the judgment for them. And…so the technology has really made it…made television news more immediate and better for the viewers. And there’s so many more outlets. You no longer have the two or three outlets that, that, that monopolized the stuff. I look at that as an opportunity for us to do other things. A lot of people view it as “gee, we don’t’ have a 90 share anymore, what are we going to do?”. But I look at it as an opportunity.

Heffner: You make it sound as though there is this intimate connection now between the world and the viewer.

Friedman: Yes.

Heffner: And Steve Friedman and his colleagues…who is it who is the intermediary? Who makes the decision as to what part of that vast, vast world is…

Friedman: It’s…

Heffner: …fed into…

Friedman: …people like…

Heffner: …20 something minutes?

Friedman: …yeah, it’s people like me. But we’re not a monolith, we don’t…i…when I do the evening news, I didn’t call up this guy Paul Friedman…no relation…an say, “Hey, what are you doing tonight…yeah, sounds good…yeah, maybe I’ll do that same thing. And how you going to play it? Yeah, okay, I’ll do it the same way”. We didn’t do that. We are individuals making these decisions. Now, you know, I have a certain responsibility, but my responsibility ends…ends…with the program I do. I’m not responsible for NBC news. I’m not responsible for the networks…I’m not responsible for anything except the program that I’m in charge of. And when I was in charge of the evening news, I was responsible for that program, and now I’m back on the “Today” show, I’m responsible for that program. I am not responsible for what else NBC News does because I don’t have any impact on that.

Heffner: But if someone were to ask you what principle feeds your, your choice of what it is you do, what governing principles…what are they?

Friedman: Ahhh…

Heffner: And I just don’t mean on, on the, on the “Today” Show…

Friedman: Hmmm…

Heffner: …I mean what is it that compels you, as a human being, in broadcasting?

Friedman: Importance and interest. It has to be…

Heffner: Can I ask you in what order?

Friedman: Well, i…you know I don’t know that I can always separate that. If it’s so important, it’s got to be interesting, or you gotta make it interesting.

Heffner: Fair enough.

Friedman: If it isn’t important, then you’ve got to manufacture interest. But i…importance and interest are the two things that concern me.

Heffner: No, now…interest. “The public interest” or the public’s interests? Which is it that you’re going to serve first?

Friedman: Well, my job, believe me, my job is not to educate the public.

Heffner: Why not?

Friedman: My job is to tell the public what’s going on, and then they make the decisions. We are a mirror on society, we do not…we do not paint the pictures.

Heffner: You pick that part of the mirror, what’s seen in the mirror to show me….you do that every day.

Friedman: Right.

Heffner: …and so when you…

Friedman: But I don’t, but i don’t do that by saying “Okay, this is going to be good for Richard, I’m going to…”

Heffner: Why not?

Friedman: I’m going to say…

Heffner: …for the public.

Friedman: I am…I’m going to say…”this is what i think is important for Richard to know”

Heffner: So there’s no larger responsibility to the public interest?

Friedman: No, but you have to be responsible in what you pick. Responsible to the people you work for, responsible for the people who watch. Now, let me tell you this, and I tell this to everybody…when I, when i start a show…I don’t produce the show for GE, which owns NBC, I don’t produce the show for Andy lack, who ‘s now my boss. I don’t produce the show for Bryant Gumble and Katie Couric, who are the anchors. I produce the show for “them”…the viewer. Because that’s my constituency. I produce the show for the viewer, but I do not preach to the viewer. I am not somebody who says, “You will watch opera because you’re supposed to watch opera”, when I know most of our viewers don’t give two cents about the opera.

Heffner: Now, you talked before about “teeter-totter”…

Friedman: Yes.

Heffner: And that’s not unrelated to what you just said. Wouldn’t the metaphor better be, that what we put ourselves in is…into is a situation in which we are continuously moving…not going up and then down…and up and then down at the same place, but that by and large we are moving away…further and further from the ideals…that’s the ideals of our founders, who, who wanted a well-informed public. We’re talking about the importance to the public of information about important items, not talking about meeting…

Friedman: Right.

Heffner: …immediate interests.

Friedman: Well, I don’t agree with that. I don’t agree with that. I think that when people see an event as it’s happening…as it’s happening…

Heffner: With…Steve Friedman as the intermediary?

Friedman: Yeah, with Steve Friedman as the intermediary. You know what I do….i put on the pictures we get. I’m not much of an intermediary you know. I, I’ll decide whether, whether Andrea Mitchell talks first, or Fred Francis talks first, but I’m not much of an intermediary you know, it really…no one believes this, you know, but it’s true. When you go in there and you have the array of things to pick from, and you say…and you press a button down and say, “Tom, go to Fred Francis”, you know…or “Katie, we’re going to Miklaszewski at the White House”. When you, when you do that, the event plays itself. I was in there when war broke out in the Persian Gulf, and the event played itself. And you are, are swept into it by doing what you consider “the story”, the “good television”, getting all the, all the stuff in there. You, you, you really don’t sit there and think, you know, “I’m going to do this, I’m going to do that”. It’s like playing baseball, it’s, it’s like being an athlete. It really is like that on a breaking event. I am not sitting back there as the intermediary…I am…I’m sitting there saying, “Let’s get this on, let’s get this on, let’s get this on”. And I think…and I think the public interest is served by a lot of that. Now, as bring up the Persian Gulf War, nothing could have been worse…nothing than the censorship this government put everybody who was trying to cover that war under. There is a…there is a topic that is, that is wide open, that most people don’t even talk about anymore. It’s forgotten. But never, never has the censorship been so tough and so un-in-the-public interest than in that war.

Heffner: You know, it’s interesting that you…again, it’s what I get from most television news people…”nobody in here but us chickens”. And after all, I’m not just sitting back there saying “I’m going to teach the public”, that’s what you say. Doggone it, Steve Friedman, when you’re in charge, and you frequently are…certainly the ideas that inform your choice are the…are different ideas from those which inform other people’s choices…you’ve got 30 seconds left….and you know what that means.

Friedman: Yes, well…look, we are workers, we are trained to do things. We have done it all, and we do it. It’s like saying a doctor doesn’t…isn’t…a doctor does an operation…what does he think about…that’s his job…he’s trained that way. What i think about in my …as a person…away from the job…is irrelevant to the job I do. Everybody’s going to…who listens to this is going to say, “Oh, that guy’s full of baloney”. But I’m telling you that’s the truth. We are more technicians than theorists, and we go in there and, and ply our trade, and our trade happens to be television.

Heffner: Mr. Technician, I appreciate your joining me today…

Friedman: (Laughter)

Heffner: But I know darn well that Steve Friedman brings Steve Friedman…his background, his ideas to what it is that he does. You come back…you said “30 years from now” to discuss where we are?

Friedman: Absolutely.

Heffner: It’s a deal. Thank you for joining me today on The Open Mind. And thanks, too, to you in the audience. I hope you’ll join us again next time. And if you care to share your thoughts about today’s program, please write to THE OPEN MIND, P.O. Box 7977, FDR Station, New York, NY 10150. For transcripts send $2.00 in check or money order. Meanwhile, as another old friend used to say, “Good night and good luck.”

Continuing production of this series has generously been made possible by grants from: The Rosalind P Walter Foundation; the M. Weiner Foundation of New Jersey; the Mediators and Richard and Gloria Manney; the Richard Lounsbery Foundation; Mr. Lawrence A Wein; and the New York Times Company Foundation.