The End of Journalsim

by Lowell Bergman

Like most journalists, I did not study journalism in school or train for it as a profession. But I did learn a lot from my own academic specialty — history, and especially the history of philosophy — that has been useful to me over the years.

One of my primary goals in journalism and the news business has been negative. I know reporters are famous for griping. I am not talking about that. I am talking about the avoidance of an assignment that, for ethical or personal reasons, I found objectionable.
As a result I have succeeded in doing what I wanted to do almost all the time. And I have succeeded in avoiding having my name attached to any story that I disagreed with or found objectionable. To maintain that condition I have plotted to kill assignments and to undermine and destroy stories so they never made air. And I have learned to listen to Nancy Reagan and “Just Say No!”

Before we engage in a discussion of what that entailed and what it means, let me say that I believe it is the prerogative of the reporter in a media institution to safeguard his or her reputation and standards when the institution is bent on going down what one knows is the wrong track.

One key to what I believe is this very important — and rare — accomplishment in the established media: Make sure I never appeared in the directory of my employer with either an extension or an office location. It was not that I was unwilling to work. Far from it. It was my intent not to work on anything that I thought was not real reporting.
In five years at ABC News and 16 more at CBS, if someone called the main number in New York and asked to be connected to me, the operator would not have had me listed. Sure, if callers knew what show I was working for they could be connected there, but then the receptionist would have to consult a non-public list, and often would simply take a message. The boss could find me. But it was not as easy as running into a regular employee in the hallway or ordering him or her into the office.

So today, after having my byline in The New York Times, and appearing on PBS and elsewhere as a “correspondent,” you cannot find my office location or extension. I do have an office and extension at the University of California at Berkeley, but I’m rarely at the office. And I never checked messages on that line.

This, then is my first lesson for the journalism students who are here. It is a lesson I learned by studying 19th century German philosophy and, especially, its great sociologists. One purpose of bureaucracy is to get you — the employee, the functionary, the citizen — to do things you don’t want to do. It is to make you a cog in its machine. And if they can’t find you, that may be more hassle than it’s worth.

(The other corollary was that with one brief, nine-month exception, I managed to work for over two decades in network television, and now The New York Times, without ever living in New York.)

And I should add, as a disclaimer, that, yes, I am the person portrayed by Al Pacino in the movie, “The Insider.” The film makes it clear I do not live in New York, though it never really says where I do live. Since that was not a condition of my participation in the film, I have to say: “Thank you, Michael Mann.”

But those of you who saw the movie should be pretty clear that I am not Al Pacino. Now that you’ve confirmed that, you can leave before we go any further.

In the invitation that I got, by the way, I noticed you’re showing the movie, “Shattered Glass,” this weekend. I saw it on the airplane coming in here, and it is very interesting because of one single fact: It is possible not only to get away with fabrication in this business, but as the case of Mr. Glass showed, to get caught in the end only because the fabrication is so transparently obvious. And other people started to wonder where his stories had come from. Similar things have happened to other people we know: Jayson Blair [of The New York Times], and Jack Kelley [of USA Today] most recently.

[LB Note: And even more recently, with the documents that CBS “60 Minutes” aired in connection with its September 2004 segment on George W. Bush’s record with the National Guard.]

But that’s not the kind of ethical issue that I’m going to talk about today or that I think is really the primary problem in the industry. People who fabricate outwardly and openly are going to get caught. And the industry is set up where there is that self-policing, where fabrication eventually comes to light. I think that there are bigger problems, bigger ethical questions that are much more difficult to deal with. They are what we talked about in “The Insider.”

That movie involves an ethical question that I myself had to confront several years ago with the story of Jeffrey Wigand. The story that initially had been suppressed came out and was broadcast on CBS. It had been reported in the press that there might be a movie either on HBO, or that director Michael Mann would make, and I would be part of it. I was asked if I would help out.

I was confronted with a very interesting question: My contract at CBS News, like the boilerplate contract of everybody else in network television news, said that I had a confidentiality agreement. I could not talk about anything that I had ever done for CBS because everything that I had ever done for CBS was the network’s property. There is in fact a fiduciary responsibility clause that required me to not do or say anything that might harm the “value” of the corporation.

We can go into a discussion, possibly later, about how I may have violated that agreement in the way in which the story or the suppression of the story came out. But even once the story had run, the question was, could I talk about it? I got into a very lengthy negotiation with CBS, which involved my leaving “60 Minutes.” The release from my contract would free me of Don Hewitt’s supervision, and would also free me to cooperate in the movie. And after six months of negotiations, one of the people in the general counsel’s office came to me and said: “Here are the documents. We’re going to release you to talk about the tobacco story to Hollywood. Our conclusion is that you deserve to make some more money, given what you went through. You’ll get some money from this. But the odds are against them ever making a movie.”

They knew the statistics: About one of every 2,000 movies that’s optioned is ever made as a Hollywood motion picture. So this woman said to me: “You know, we’ve looked over the whole thing, and this is a very complicated story with no sex or death, and only the implication of violence” (although there was a lot of death if you count the 400,000 people who die every year from tobacco-related diseases.) “Probably it will never get made.

“And after all,” she said, “you are a producer. So, we’re going to release you.”

Now what did she mean by the term, “producer?” So that you understand when you see that on the corner of the page, at the beginning of a “60 Minutes” story, it says: “produced by…” One of the jobs that you have to do as a producer of a program like “60 Minutes,” or for that matter basically every network television news magazine program, is that you have to protect your correspondent. You have to protect the on-air person who is presented as the reporter of the story. What does it mean to “protect them?” It means you’ll notice when you watch them do interviews and narrate the story and appear in the story, that they never make a mistake, they never mispronounce a word. They never admit that they don’t know something. You create the correspondent as a fictional character. That’s the underpinning of the way in which we communicate in this society. [LB note: See the CBS investigation on Dan Rather’s role in the Bush National Guard story.] It’s the method in the medium that gives most people information in this country.

They understood that that was my job and that I would never say anything to anyone — even though they released me — to talk about how the business actually works. That is an ethical compromise that everyone who works in the industry makes in order to stay in the industry. You sign a contract that obligates you to maintain that that information is a product of the ownership of the corporation. And that’s something people rarely talk about or read about. Pull any book out of the library by Dan Rather or Tom Brokaw or any of the other network celebrities, you will see them say very little, if anything, critical of the company. Nor will they ever reveal exactly how the operation works. Only Mike Wallace was generous enough in his book to give a lot of the credit for some of the stories to his producers — the people who develop the stories.

From the very beginning I knew there was going to be a very serious ethical and practical question that I would have to confront should I manage to do the story of Jeffrey Wigand and Brown & Williamson Tobacco. One of the CBS lawyers reminded me a year or so after we first talked about Jeffrey in February 1994, and then again after the story aired, that I said, “This story is going to be big trouble if it happens.” It was that “trouble” that drove me to pursue the story for the next year and a half.

I knew that other than John Delorean — you who may remember him back in the early ‘60s turning on General Motors — no fiduciary officer of a Fortune 500 company had ever talked in public without the company’s permissionabout what really went on inside. It was so rare that I thought the possibility of this guy talking, in this particular instance, was worth dealing with him despite some obvious obstacles. It was obvious, if you have seen the movie, that he had some problems -- family problems and financial problems. There were a lot of reasons why he shouldn’t have done anything. The choice to talk had to be his choice. Once he decided to tell his story, I had to conclude I had no choice other than to stay with him, as long as he told us the truth.

What happened at CBS and has now happened, or is happening, at some of the other networks is that the corporation didn’t see it that way. Or, as the president of the news division finally said to me about four weeks after the meeting with the general counsel – that’s when we were told that “the truer the story, the greater the damages” -- that the corporation would “not risk its assets on this story.”

That is the ethical dilemma that I think continues to confront people on the inside, particularly inside the broadcasting industry, because they’re only cogs in the wheel. You can’t stand up, sacrifice your job and go out on the front steps and simply denounce everybody. No one’s going to listen for more than a day, and you’re not going to have very much credibility after that. Defending yourself will result in burnout -- or worse. You become a ‘whistleblower’, a disgruntled employee. And if you have confidential sources, as I had at that moment in the Wigand case, you can’t help them. How can you help a confidential source whose name you cannot use, but who is in turn now clearly exposed to the wrath of the institution the source was about to eviscerate?

It’s a big risk. I was lucky in a number of ways. I have a wonderful wife, Sharon Tiller, who came with me this weekend and who was making a good living. Our kids were through college. We had a small mortgage. We live in Berkeley, California, and, as you now know, I had refused to move to New York. And if you live in New York you know that the media industry is so small your alternatives are very limited. If you are making a network salary as a producer, there are very few places to go to match that salary and maintain your standard of living. I don’t believe that there are more that 100 producers who are making more than low six-figure salaries doing real news for television. Most of them are based in New York and work for the networks. There are very few other places to go, and once you are ‘damaged goods’ very few places that will take you. Add to that the odds that if you can annoy one network — by going public — you injure all of the. The networks and their media mega corporation owners are simply an oligopoly. Just compare the standard contracts. Any lawyer who reviews them will tell you the contracts hold up only because the networks, the media giants, will defend them in court and exhaust the resources of anyone who challenges them. In fact most, like those used by the agents who represent most of the ‘talent’ and the producers, are simply involuntary servitude agreements.

So it’s a very restrictive atmosphere. Even before the Wigand tobacco story, I always expected that I would be fired one day. In fact Don Hewitt used to fire me regularly — he’s the “60 Minutes” executive producer who is now retiring — for just showing up! It was his warm and endearing way of letting you know who was in charge.

So that refusal to move combined with a resolve to “Just Say No,” and with full knowledge that it could mean being fired, I had some ability to feel that I could make risky decisions. It did not mean that I said “no” on a whim. It’s important, as they say in the business, to be “low maintenance.” Try to make sure that when you say it, it’s understood that way.

That’s why in the end I had no excuse other than to do what I did. I tried to “exhaust all legal means.” I had to. In the life I was in, when I came out here for instance to Lexington, Virginia, to see someone about a story, I had to believe it when I said, “You can trust me. I’m a producer with ‘60 Minutes’ and we keep our word, and this is CBS News and we’re going to stand up and we’re not going to back down.” People then start to trust us.
Now, unfortunately, no all producers or correspondents live by this rule. They know who they are. They will burn source. They will promise and not deliver. They will artfully steal a story from a powerless freelancer. But those people are the ones who put all of us at risk. It has been necessary on occasion to in fact make sure that some of those people do not work in the business….But in back to my story…
So, I had some advantages. And let me be totally open here. This had happened to me before, where I hadn’t done anything about it. The company , the boss, killed a story and abandoned a source. That experience and others had made me impose a kind of self-censorship. I knew which stories my network would deal with and which it would do everything in its power to stop. I’ll get to that in a couple of minutes.

First, however, let’s make sure we understand why that other incident, for example, is not in the movie. The screenwriter, a brilliant guy, Eric Roth, who has done “The Onion Fields” and “Forrest Gump” and other films — he and I were talking and I said, “You know, you don’t have certain things in the movie.” And he said, “No one would believe the truth about what really goes on inside the sausage-making.” The stark reality of Don Hewitt’s personality, or a slew of facts that are important when you are doing a comprehensive documentary, are not in the movie.

One thing that Michael Mann chose not to put in the movie for instance, which is critically important to a true understanding of the context of the Wigand saga, is that, Larry Tisch, who was the chairman of CBS and also the chairman of the Loew’s Corporation, which owned CBS. Now Loew’s also owned Lorillard Tobacco. Mr. Tisch’s son, James Tisch, was the president of Lorillard. There is a scene in the movie depicting tobacco executives giving sworn testimony before a congressional committee. The executives say that they believed that nicotine was not addictive, an assertion repeated often at the time. James Tisch was one of those executives.

So at the same time we were proposing that we put Wigand on the air accusing those executives of lying, there was a federal criminal investigation of them for perjury. We were presenting the public with evidence — a key witness — that the son of the owner and CEO was potentially guilty of a felony. We were obviously in dangerous territory. We were talking about doing something where someone in the tobacco industry was going to say, “Of course, they all knew they were lying.” The story from my perspective was about potential criminal conduct, which the Justice Department was investigating, on the part of the son of the owner of the company I worked for…. It’s not rocket science to conclude that this was a good way to end your career, and so it almost ended mine.

So, there was an ethical and substantive reason why this movie got made. On the ethical side the movie presents the dilemma of the ‘whistleblower’ in our society -- both inside a Fortune 500 company whose operations affect the public health, and in a media corporation – another Fortune 500 company - that helps shape public consciousness and understanding. The movie gives the viewer an insight into some critical issues in corporate America, especially the media industry: Simply, that the rules that often apply to reporters, to the workers, do not necessarily apply to the bosses or the owners.

But most important to me, the movie presents a message about how the television broadcast business works and about self-censorship, which could never be presented on broadcast television in this country either by a news division or, for that matter, by an entertainment division. That’s why I believe, you have never seen “The Insider,” with its seven Academy Award nominations, with Pacino and Russell Crowe, on broadcast TV. It has been on cable, but that is it. It seems that’s how it will always be.

Since the events around Jeffrey Wigand and the tobacco story came out, and since ABC News caved and retracted a story on tobacco that its reporters still say was true, things have only gotten worse. The major media organizations have virtually abandoned the field and the public interest responsibility that comes with broadcasting licenses. In print, with the exception of a few major newspapers and a sprinkling of others around the country, the principle that it is our calling to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” has been deemed by most executives, managers and owners as unprofitable, biased or simply unnecessary.

The exceptions prove the rule.

The “End of Journalism” as we have come to know it since the heady days of the post-Watergate era is upon us. Now, many would say, things aren’t all that bad. And I would insist again, that the exceptions prove the rule.

I am very serious when I say that many of us in this business continue to believe, even though sometimes the economics of the situation or the nature of our employers make it very difficult, that we’re really in this business to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. It is an idealistic profession in that sense, and it has tried since Watergate, and the end of the Vietnam War and what transpired before that in civil rights, to build itself into a real profession.

Unfortunately, other forces have been at work over the last 20 years, and making ethical decisions — being able to say “no’ or having resources to do what we know we should to — is increasingly difficult from the inside, particularly from inside broadcast institutions. My friends within newspapers say it’s not so bad in print, I would have to agree. But I would also point out that without the participation of electronic media print stories have limited impact.

What has already been a hard time for journalism, is going to get a lot worse before it gets better. I say that because of the contradictions that are part of our daily collective consciousness.

Before the 9/11 Commission, recently, we finally had a public official come forward and say, “I’m accountable. We screwed up. And I’m sorry.” It took all of these years for someone to finally say we failed and be honest about it.

Despite that obvious gesture, the media and the administration were mum on the subject.

Maybe we should take the fact that it happened at all as a positive signal that things will change in the future.

Now, all of that said, I’ve got to thank you for inviting me because it reminds me that my one-time colleagues at CBS were so upset particularly about the movie, that some of them, Mr. Hewitt in particular, went out of his way for a number of years to try to make sure that I never worked in the business again. I think it surprised all of them, since I knew something about his character and how he had operated, that I had already arranged alternative employment with The New York Times and with “Frontline” on PBS as well as with the university. How could I work for three different organizations? I’ll explain that in a little more detail later. One of the reasons is that I had this insecurity about working for just one company.

That fear led me to prepare myself personally and professionally for what I knew would come from my former boss at “60 Minutes.”

In June 2000, before the annual convention in New York of the Investigative Reporters and Editors, an organization I helped found, Mr. Hewitt delivered an address at a luncheon. It was primarily about me. It included the line that I should not be allowed “within 100 miles of a newsroom or 1,000 miles of a journalism school.”

If I needed further proof that journalism as we know it was closer to an end than a rebirth, for me at least, it was that event.

How could IRE do that to me? Why wasn’t I even notified when they knew it was coming? Hewitt distributed a written text the day before to the AP and others. That’s how I found out about it. Then the IRE denied me the right to a public reply? How could Don Hewitt, a senior executive at a major media organization, get up in public and try to blacklist someone who for 14 years had produced and reported for him? Someone who had brought him more than one of the awards he displays around his office?

And how could an organization that professes to promote investigative journalism permit this to happen?

The answer I got back eventually through friends and sources was that the leadership thought it would provide “controversy” and get them attention!

That’s understandable, because that same leadership included on-camera personalities who had never done any real investigative reporting, and who were put on a panel with that name. Imagine, if you will, Diane Sawyer and Stone Phillips as investigative reporters.

All of that reminds me of an old joke that Soviet journalists used to tell about a journalist going to an emergency room. He demands to see an eye/ear doctor. And the admitting nurse says: “We have an eye doctor.” And he says: “Nope, that won’t do.” Nurse: “We have an ear doctor.” He says: “No, that won’t do.” She says, “We have nose and throat doctors. He insists, “I don’t want a nose and throat doctor. I want an eye/ear doctor.” And so she finally says: “Look why do you want an eye/ear doctor? They just don’t exist.” “Because,” he says, “what I hear is not what I see.”

We live in a world where it is clear that what we hear is not what we see. “News” as a concept has been transformed. It is now so close to entertainment that the wall between them has all but dissolved, especially in broadcasting. It has made itself obvious in the coverage of everything from the last President’s sex habits to the current President’s wars.

I use that joke when I teach because I think everybody should look at what they see on television, particularly, television news, and to a certain extent, read in the media with that kind of skepticism. We don’t really have a really good way these days for people to learn how to discern the differences and make sense from them. Again, there are some exceptions. There is National Public Radio. It is starting to do in-depth, investigative reports. There is “Frontline.” But their existence does not translate into an ability to really affect policy or public opinion.

If anything, the fact that we have only one hourlong documentary series on public affairs on U.S. broadcast television proves the rule. The existence of a program that has to fight on PBS for more air time, and which even though it’s essential cannot expand, underscores and reaffirms an analysis one of my professors spent a lot of time writing about: Token tolerance allows an advanced industrial society to claim it is free, when in fact the populace rarely gets to see or learn that there are other ways to look at and change the world.

What about cable? Remember, quantity — as I also learned studying philosophy — is not quality. The volume of programming on cable television has nothing to do with its quality. Rarely does cable get involved in serious issues; rarely is serious money put into those programs. So we are, I think, in a crisis, in terms of real information that will help the citizenry figure out what to do and what decisions to make.

That is becoming the central ethical question. I’m not trying to be totally negative about this, although some people say that I seem to be always cynical about what’s going on. I think we have to start to understand why this is, and how the situation is getting out of control.

Earlier, in one of the Ethics Institute seminars, Drummond Ayers, a veteran of The New York Times, mentioned that some of his colleagues in Washington had gotten out of control because they’re allowed on television talk shows where they get bigger checks and so on. And they think that they’re all going to become celebrities like Diane Sawyer and anchor a show. In fact this is a huge problem. There is a class problem inside the journalism business. We may all be professionals, but the average journalist, I would bet, is the lowest-paid professional in America — whether he or she works for small newspapers or for cable television.

U.S. government data show that the average journalist with five years experience makes the same income as a postal worker.

It is not the glamorous industry that you might think from seeing Diane Sawyer or Tom Brokaw. Their relationship to people who work in the business is similar to that of a CEO to the average worker on the assembly line in a Fortune 500 company. If the Sawyers and Brokaws ever did have any experience (and some of them do) with the actual production of news and reporting, they have forgotten what it’s all about. They have lots of people propping them up. There is a pyramid there. Until that pyramid changes and gets democratized, until people start to be able to share, your information is going to be skewed. (I remember once at “60 Minutes,” I suggested we all pool our salaries with Mike Wallace and Don Hewitt there, they walked out of the room -- I think they thought I was nuts.) With those income disparities, the ethical problems are obvious. The perception is almost instinctual. That’s why in Mr. Hewitt’s case, it seemed that he was tone-deaf recently during the Michael Jackson controversy at CBS. It wasn’t so much that CBS was paying $5 million to Michael Jackson from the entertainment side while they were doing a promotional story about him on “60 Minutes.” He didn’t understand. I found that totally crazy, because if had had looked at the CBS news standards he would have seen it: There was an entertainment division executive in the room when they were interviewing Michael Jackson. So, just the appearance of impropriety was there. And yet, they couldn’t see it. They still don’t get it. That’s because they live in a different world with different standards. There are two standards in the news business, particularly in television: One for real reporters -- the people who do the work -- and one for the stars and the executives.

[LB note: Just look at who got fired or asked to resign at CBS News recently.]

The best example, which I mentioned in the seminar earlier today, happened to me in 1984 and stuck in my craw, but was another lesson learned. In 1984 I did a story with Mike Wallace about the recently retired head of the FBI in Las Vegas, Nevada. What he wanted to talk about was that the senior senator from Nevada, one Paul Laxalt, was in his estimation, after 35 years in the FBI, the quintessential example of a mob politician — bought and sold by organized crime. He said that on camera, and he gave examples. Now it is September 1984, during the re-election campaign of Ronald Reagan, and Paul Laxalt is the co-chairman of the re-election committee, and publicly the best friend of the president. He was also a very good source for a lot of Washington reporters because he was a designated “leaker” for the White House. So you can imagine that this was a pretty controversial story, and I won’t go into all of the in’s and out’s. It was “lawyered.” It was approved. It was advertised on air to open the broadcast season. And it never ran. Now the events that took place combine ethics, politics and economics. Ethics — because Mike Wallace was on a book tour at the time, selling his memoirs. He started talking, and people asked about the first story of the season and he talked about this one. Well, that, of course, alerted our competition. ABC News sent out a producer who is no longer working in the business , Peter Lance, who went to our source (it wasn’t difficult to figure out who it was) and promised that if he gave ABC an interview too the network would wait until “60 Minutes” had aired. ABC would present its story the next day. To do this, to gain entry, the producer hired a young man who was a close friend, sort of a protégé, of this former FBI official. They brought out the anchor from the local ABC affiliate to tell him that they were “stand-up people” and that they would stick by their word. The FBI official, Joe Yablonsky, did the interview. He didn’t tell us. He was too embarrassed. But he had been promised that they weren’t going to upstage us. The Wednesday before “air”— the show is on Sunday — we’re sitting in a room and we call up Senator Laxalt offering him a chance to reply.

We had already met with him off-the-record at his camp up near Lake Tahoe, where he told us he wasn’t involved in the mob and wasn’t going to talk about it, although he didn’t dispute any of the facts of the story.


Now, I knew he was a friend of Mike Wallace’s. Wallace was close to the Reagans. Laxalt went to the Forest Hills tennis tournament with Wallace that summer. Wallace thought it might help convince him to go on camera. It didn’t.

Mike also talked freely about our story with Nancy Reagan, with whom he was in regular contact. They were very old friends. On one occasion she called his office while I was there to ask about what we were doing about “Paul.” So, it wasn’t a surprise to Laxalt what we were doing. In any case, we called him up on Wednesday, with the idea that if he wouldn’t give us an interview for this Sunday, maybe he would want to reply the following Sunday. We offered him air time. He says, I don’t need to do that.
Why not? Answer: ABC has the same interview. And, he reports, they have offered me live air time on Friday before we were on the air. In reaction Mr. Hewitt yells into the phone, “He lied to us!” — meaning “the source.” To which Senator Laxalt replies: “He lied to you, he’s unreliable, and I’m going to sue you.” So, I call up the source, and I say: “What is this, Joe? Did you really talk to ABC?”
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At first he denies it, and then he calls back crying and says, “Yes, but they promised to hold it.” Now, the next day, we received a letter from the Senator’s lawyer saying they were going to sue us if we ran the story because obviously the guy lied to us about ABC — therefore, he’s lying to us about everything. This put the whole situation in jeopardy.

I was told that within 48 hours Hewitt either met with or talked on the phone with the late Roone Arledge, then president of ABC News, and as he reported back to me “killed [the story] on both networks.” Hewitt later asked about this confirmed the details the Village Voice!
No there was no discipline of this executive producer for meeting with the competititon and killing a story on both networks! There was silence.
The final nail in the coffin for my story came on that Friday. The senator filed a libel suit against a newspaper in Sacramento, California, which had published similar information about a year earlier. Remember, unless it’s on television it does not have impact.

That story, that impact, was squelched. The story was yanked. It was put on the shelf. We went back over the story. We fact-checked the story. Was there anything the guy was saying that we couldn’t independently corroborate? No.
Two weeks later the final decision was made not to run the story. Mr. Hewitt, the executive producer, based on his meeting with his friend and peer reassured me that ABC News would not “beat” us.

I was devastated. I thought about going out on the “courthouse steps,” if you will, and holding a press conference. I talked to all sorts of people and eventually decided against it — for all kinds of reasons, practical reasons, not ethical reasons. Still, that event stuck with me. It was a lesson. The lesson is: Don’t pick on anybody who’s as big or bigger than your employer, and don’t allow any hand-holds around — especially in television. It doesn’t matter if those “hand-holds” are untrue; it’s the appearance of weakness that will be used to kill a story that threatens the interests of your publisher or broadcaster.

I can’t say the same thing about The New York Times or other news organizations that I’ve worked for, but it’s definitely the rule for commercial television.

By the way, we had had some early warnings about that train wreck. We got a call from Pete Peterson, now president of the Council on Foreign Relations, then CEO of Avis -- a great friend of journalists -- telling us, according to Hewitt, what a wonderful man Paul Laxalt was and how we shouldn’t damage his reputation. Hewitt and Peterson are close friends today. We got phone calls from the attorney general of the United States, Ed Meese, telling CBS’ corporate leadership that while in his past campaigns Mr. Laxalt did take money from people who were on the Attorney General’s list of organized crime figures, and while they had been part of his early political life, he now was “clean.” Even the FBI got pressured to provide the Senator with a letter from Director William Webster, that the agency did not have him in its sights. Off the record I got a blow by blow of the pressure exerted by a Senator who sits on the appropriations committee with oversight over the agency’s budget. In the end those phone calls combined with other factors got the story killed, and the American public – or at least the viewership of “60 Minutes” and of ABC News -- never saw it.

The postscript: A year later Laxalt dropped the libel suit against the Sacramento newspaper. There was some coverage in both The Village Voice and The Wall Street Journal about the story not running. In The Village Voice story Mr. Hewitt confirmed talking to Mr. Arledge and getting the story killed on both networks. In words I can still remember, Hewitt told Mike Wallace, “You don’t want to do this story. Ronald Reagan’s gonna win the election. We won’t be able to go to the White House.”

I am telling you this story because it may help you to understand why, when I came up with the Jeffrey Wigand story about a Fortune 500 company, it was difficult for me to go down the same path -- to accept what my bosses decided and leave it at that.

This happened before the destruction of CBS News, which followed soon after, under Mr. Tisch and his hatchet man, Eric Ober. This happened after the networks in particular struggled for decades to create operations that were supposed to be free from influence.

For those of you old enough to remember, the news divisions that were created in the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s were supposed to stand alone as basically public service organizations that could hold their own with any newspaper. In the old days, the broadcast journalists thought it was a big deal that they were allowed to sit in the gallery of the House of Representatives because they had been second-class news people for many years. Their stature was rising and their ethical standards were developing. For example, they were no longer doing advertising. If you were around in the 1950s you saw anchor John Cameron Swayze in the news. He read the news on the air, and he used to advertise Timex watches. He used to put them underwater and demonstrate how they withstood water and vibration. This was the same guy who was delivering the news. Those days were supposedly in the past. We now had an ethical news operation that wasn’t connected to commercials and profits. Well, no longer. Now you will see, as someone mentioned earlier today, “Dateline NBC” promoting a Donald Trump program called “The Apprentice.” CBS News has done special productions promoting the people who make it through “Survivor.” To paraphrase a current CBS senior executive, what I don’t understand is that the news division is now just another production company — another part of the general corporate operation.

So, I raise all of the questions in terms of broadcasting because it is the one medium where the means of distribution is owned by you. Broadcasting is a means of communicating that can only be done if people get a public license. It was surprising to me when I sent graduate students out and I said, “Find out how much it costs for a broadcasting license. You know, the kind of license the biggest station in New York City has, the station that’s worth a billion dollars if they sold, and makes hundreds of millions of dollars a year in revenue — how much did they pay to the taxpayer for that license?” Well, if they applied when it was new — that is, if they were applying for a new bandwidth or a new frequency — the cost was $250. The license used to be reviewed every two years to see if stations were acting in the public interest. Now, thanks to deregulation, renewals are every eight years. That’s without any review. And the cost is $100. So until, I think, we as a political entity change that — until we restore the idea of a public service aspect of qualifying for a license -- we’re not going to see very much change.

Recently the FCC wanted to expand the ownership limits that apply to various media organizations, and there was a huge outpouring of public dissent. That was without anyone in Congress raising any issues, or anyone in the media really saying anything of significance. So I think people are beginning to understand that we need to take control of that if those of you in journalism school expect to get good jobs. Until that changes, we’re not going to see a very great improvement in what kinds of jobs are available and what kind of work can be done. Almost all ethical questions, I think, get suspended until that changes because the kinds of things that are going on inside of news organizations, especially for someone starting out, make it difficult for you to even have any ethical choices.

Finally, I just want to say there may be some hope. I believe that I have played a small role in developing that hope over the last few years.

As I’ve said, I went on to go to work as I do now for The New York Times, for “Frontline,” and for the University of California. One reason for me to be attached to all three is that I think you can do quality journalism for broadcast that is enhanced by a simultaneous print effort and vice versa. In that effort you can help strengthen the kind of ethical standards that give real meaning to the words news, journalism and investigative reporting.

This comes from one of the things I noticed when in 1978 I went to work for ABC News. I had to fly into New York a lot. I noticed that all of the news executives at ABC News in the morning would open up The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The L.A. Times, and The Washington Post. This is in the pre-cable, pre-Internet era, so it was a morning ritual. Some would get their Times hot off the press the night before if they could, to get a jump.

For the evening news broadcasts the race was on. They’d run around and make assignments and everybody would go out and put pictures in the print stories that led the papers. There were exceptions, but they proved the rule once again.

This led in turn to the print reporters I knew being irked because these TV guys were ripping off their stories and they weren’t getting any credit. It still happens today.

As the months in broadcasting turned into years and the years turned into two decades, I began to think that maybe you could do both -- break the story in print and television at the same time. That’s what we’re doing today -- or at least trying to do. While working at The New York Times, what about doing The New York Times story for television at the same time? What about involving young people like my students at UC-Berkeley in the early stages so that there’s an entry-level way of getting into the business of quality reporting. Maybe we can do some things that would be examples that are so successful that would help raise the level of what does appear on television -- and increase the impact of what appears in print. So that’s my current role. I assume it will take a number of years as I get older and longer in the tooth, and because I think it’s probably one of the only ways open for me to survive spiritually and professionally.

Luckily, there are media organizations like The Times and “Frontline” that are willing to put resources into that kind of in-depth reporting and to experiment with the idea of using some of the other methods of distribution — whether it’s television or the Internet -- to get that to a wider audience.

Finally, I want to thank you again for proving Mr. Hewitt wrong, and for letting me come talk with you here in the heartland of America. While my message may seem negative, please understand that its negativity is designed to try and help us, me, develop ways to provide positive pieces, stories, broadcasts to a world starved for real reporting.

Thank you.