How Has Pearl's Murder Affected War Coverage?
HOWARD KURTZ, HOST: Welcome to RELIABLE SOURCES where we turn a critical lens on the media. I'm Howard Kurtz. Later in the program, we'll check in with commentator Christine Brennan in Salt Lake City on the media madness surrounding all the controversy at the Olympics, but first, we're joined by two veteran newspaper men who have written a book which rips into the television networks. Leonard Downie is executive editor of "The Washington Post." Robert Kaiser is former managing editor now associate editor and senior correspondent for the paper. They're the authors of "The News About The News: American Journalism In Peril." Also with us this morning is Frank Sesno, former CNN Washington bureau chief, now, a CNN contributor who will be teaching and working on documentaries. We begin with the murder of Daniel Pearl, a brutal killing that has shaken just about everybody in the news business. Len Downey, will this tragedy change the way you deploy your foreign correspondents and the kind of risks that they will take?</s>LEONARD DOWNIE, "THE WASHINGTON POST": We will not change the way we deploy them. All the correspondents that we had in Afghanistan and Pakistan are continuing to work there just as they were before. But it is changing or rather sharpening our focus on coping with risks like this. So they have been instructed by our foreign editors, who are veterans of these kinds of things about ways in which they go about their business and try to keep them safer. The ways, I really don't want to talk about on television, but which we hope will keep them out of a situation like this. But it underscores that since the Cold War ended and the world is no longer divided into these two camps and there's so many ethnic conflicts going on around the world, how dangerous it's become to be a foreign correspondent.</s>KURTZ: And on that point, Bob Kaiser, you've been a correspondent in Vietnam and Moscow. Do you believe that journalists now, in the age of terrorism, are more vulnerable, more likely to be singled out because of the level of terror that exists in the world today?</s>ROBERT KAISER, "THE WASHINGTON POST": Yes, and in the era of CNN where visibility is so much higher than it used to be. Yes, I do, very much so. And I'm sure the statistics bear that out. I don't have them, but I have the strong sense that there are more people killed in the Afghanistan War than in long periods of the Vietnam War.</s>KURTZ: And the nine journalists killed in the relatively short period in Afghanistan more than the number of U.S. soldiers killed.</s>KAISER: Absolutely.</s>KURTZ: Frank Sesno, it seems to me that television currents might -- television correspondence might be even more vulnerable because they're recognizable faces.</s>FRANK SESNO, FORMER CNN WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF: That's right and it's something actually that CNN has had to cope with a number of -- with a number of its correspondents who are internationally recognized. Unfortunately, the whole dreadful experience of 9/11 has shown us that human life, civilian, journalistic, military in the eyes of many terrorists and others around the world has all become a jumble and has been devalued in the process. It's a much more dangerous business.</s>KURTZ: Well, if there were an official flag of journalism, I think it would be flying at half-mast this weekend...</s>SESNO: Absolutely, it would.</s>KURTZ: ... because of Daniel Pearl. Moving on to another subject, if you open your "New York Times" magazine last November, you would have seen a moving story about a West African boy, Youssouf Male, living as a virtual slave on a cocoa plantation. Only it turns out that the boy in the picture is not Youssouf Male. In fact, the teenager described in the story doesn't exist. He's a composite, a fictional character created by "Time's" contributing writer, Michael Finkle. The paper acknowledged the deception in an editor's note. Finkel told me he made a serious mistake, but that his other eight pieces for the "Times" are totally accurate. Magazine editor, Adam Moss, who has fired Finkel says the paper is investigated other stories as well. This is not the first time something like this has happened. "The Washington Post" went through the Janet Cook (ph) embarrassment 21 years ago. Are newspapers always going to be vulnerable to this sort of thing if a writer intends to deceive his editors?</s>DOWNIE: If a writer intends to deceive his editors, it is hard to not be vulnerable to this. We, obviously, since Janet Cook (ph) are much more careful about who we hire and how supervise stories that require a lot of trust. But in the end, you still have to trust. Just think of Bob Woodward, for instance, who is one the best reporters around and fortunately, can be trusted absolutely, but there are things that Bob does in his reporting that we're never going to know as editors and so we have to trust what he does.</s>KURTZ: Let' go on now to your book. You are very rough on the networks. What's the essence of your indictment, Bob Kaiser?</s>KAISER: Well, let me say first, the purpose of the book is not to indict or to attack, it is to help readers understand why they get what they get in the news, on TV, in the papers and so on. One of our prejudices, and it is a prejudice certainly, as old time newspaper men who have worked at "The Washington Post" together for 38 years, is that the depth and thoroughness that a good newspaper can provide in covering a story in most circumstances is not and often cannot be matched by television coverage. If you take the transcript of the "CBS Evening News" and print it on the front page of "The Washington Post," it would fill about two-thirds of one page of the newspaper.</s>KURTZ: But that's a question of time and space. Clearly, television...</s>KAISER: Of course.</s>KURTZ: ... as Frank says, you know, has time limitations. But does it really lack the depth and original reporting that these two authors seem to suggest?</s>SESNO: Well, the blunt answer is yes.</s>KURTZ: OK.</s>SESNO: Many times it does and its' for a variety of reasons. First of all, I can multi-task, to use a popular phrase, when I'm reading the newspaper. I can choose to read the entire transcript of the president's newscast. I can read the news analysis piece. I can read the out bed piece or I can read the hard news piece. I can't multi-task in television. Television can only do one thing at a time. But what television can do that newspapers can't is take you there and let you see the president as he speaks, let you hear the inflection. So it's a trade off, but the fact of the matter is how many reporters do you have on the streets in Washington?</s>DOWNIE: Oh, well over a 100 at any given day.</s>SESNO: CNN has about 15. That says it all in many ways.</s>KURTZ: OK, it's a -- it comes down to simple math. Let's take a look at one passage from the book, "The News About The News." "The decline of serious, ambitious television news over the last two decades of the 20th century cannot be called surprising. Ours have become a celebrity-besotted culture with television, the single most powerful promoter and ratifier of celebrityhood." Well, Len Downie, it seems to me that that's undeniable and at the same time, newspapers, magazines, "The Washington Post" covered O.J. and Princess Di and JFK Junior, and Lorena Bobbitt and Gary Condit, so why single out TV?</s>DOWNIE: Well, to some extent newspapers have also slipped into over coverage of celebrities. I certainly overplayed the JFK Jr. story when he died at the time. I now know in retrospect, as I look back on it. But the difference in television is that the proportions have shifted more. If you look at your average newspaper, celebrity news may be five or 10 percent of it on a day in which there's a lot of celebrity news in a newspaper. But you look at the morning television shows and you look at the evening news and you see a much higher percentage of that limited time we were just talking about earlier being devoted to celebrity news, lifestyle news, news that's not very serious.</s>KAISER: The balance changes, you know. This is the previous point. If you've got a 22-minute newscast or now, an 18-minute newscast early on the networks in the evening and you devote six- minutes to a celebrity, you've given up a third of the content. We can overkill on a celebrity story and still have an enormous amount of content. We have a 100,000 words a day in "The Washington Post."</s>SESNO: I think there's something else, too about that and that is that television -- there's a mystique, a magic of television. It brings a face, a personality, a voice, a story, into your living room, into your bedroom, into your family room and that by itself transforms the story whether it's the subject of the story or frankly, the person who's delivering the story.</s>KURTZ: But on the substance of that story and obviously personality very much a part of television, their book says that most real new is produced by newspapers, suggesting that television is perhaps just following up what's in the major newspapers. You don't believe that, do you?</s>SESNO: I think that's truer today than it used to be. I mean let's look at the major networks, the over the air networks, ABC, CBS, NBC, they all used to have very proud and established documentary units and they would go out and do white papers, what they used to call a white paper. It's tough to find somebody who would know what that is today.</s>KURTZ: Well, they would say they now have magazine shows, "48 Hours," "60 Minutes..."</s>SESNO: And "60 Minutes" and some of them are high quality things, but the general drill in most broadcast newsrooms is to start the day by going through the newspapers, to see what the newspapers have dug out. By virtue of, if you pull the major newspapers' dailies together and you stack them on a desk, you're probably talking about 500 reporters.</s>KURTZ: But to take one example, CBS has broken some stories on the Enron controversy, something all of journalism is working on. I mean I wonder if you're not giving short shrift to -- even if they have a more limited or reportorial firepower, they do reporting. It's not simply rip and read.</s>KAISER: It's -- yes, they do and we try to credit a number of cases. In the first chapter, we talk about the Houston TV station that broke the Firestone Tire story and the Salt Lake television station that helped break the Olympic scandal there. There's a lot of good reporting, but the problem is that the emphasis now, the way television news is organized, is to cover events that create pictures. You have very few beat reporters now in television. You still have them in Washington to some degree.</s>KURTZ: You have Pentagon reporters. You have White House reporters.</s>KAISER: A few, but you know, they -- how many networks are still at the Supreme Court, only one, I think, full time.</s>KURTZ: Not a picture story.</s>KAISER: Yeah, not a picture story, exactly.</s>SESNO: You also make a point that I would disagree with too. I mean in place in the book you say television doesn't break any stories. CNN doesn't break any stories. CNN breaks stories all the time, but the fact of the matter is that when CNN breaks a story it's breaking it in real time. It's breaking it in the middle of the day, which may set you up for your next editorial meeting in the afternoon to -- and it may be an increment of a story. But whether it's John McCain's skin cancer or other things, CNN and television can be out and often is out in front of the day's events.</s>KURTZ: Len Downie, a brief response to that.</s>DOWNIE: Well, it's the use of the resources that concerns me. Yes, there are good reporters in television both in terms of grabbing on to news as it happens on CNN or coming up with exclusive, original reporting on some -- other networks. But the problem is that too much of their resources are going into trivia. You mentioned the news magazines replacing the old documentaries. Most of the news -- so-called newsmagazines now are filled with crime and court stories, an entire hour devoted to some previously not very well-know crime story somewhere in Nebraska now becomes the hour on CBS. And Dan Rather, who's clearly -- is uncomfortable with these shows, I just saw him the other night narrating one of these crime stories. And he looked kind of uncomfortable doing, but there he was.</s>KURTZ: He is the host of "48 Hours" and we're going to have to leave it there. When we come back, we'll put cable news and online news under the media microscope.