WGBH Journal; Media Ethics: Rod MacLeish

A. Jim Thompson is. He is the head of the Newman Foundation and is one of the most gracious likeable and professional people that I happen to know. And I say this because. When you come to a colleague at Harvard University who heads the Nieman Foundation which is easily one of the most prestigious programs in the United States for the re view the mental revision the. Taking of journalists out of the normal tasks of they can rethink and get started or perhaps just enjoy wine and cheese whatever they do it is it is really heartening that when we went to Jim and to people like Jonathan Moore and head of the Kennedy fellowships at Harvard and others and said we would like to do something about the

First Amendment we would like to do it in such a way that we are not seen as another center for information or another Reporter's Committee or another council against censorship. All of these groups are in-hand inherently valuable but we feel something else should be done and that is to create an organization whose work is meaningless on the day by day level and meaningful year to year problems that come up. It's almost as if we needed an organization in our view that made sense because the problems that we would deal with don't disappear and it doesn't make any difference what the issue is in the newspaper that day. It could be the most crucial matter of censorship that anybody ever heard about and everybody could be talking about it on three different networks and in 50 different American newspapers. But it's a kind of an issue perhaps that a month later will be superseded but the issue

raised in the censorship area would still be alive regardless of that fact. And of course this is the basis for the original conception of the work at Harvard and universities or in other places and Jim was very very very much the. Kind listener. And I do say this that we here at Boston University are very grateful for the close association with the Nieman Foundation at Harvard as well as to all the other co-sponsors that have worked with us with that and before I speak further to embarrass John because he's also a very modest person. I would like to. I think he is. I would like to ask Jim Thompson to say a few words of greetings as the co-sponsor of this particular gathering. I was only given warning a few

minutes ago that I was asked to say anything so what shall I say. Well I shall start by being as gritty as you say I'm very curious I will try to be courteous to Princeton's and Dean with Klein. Mr. MacLeish was Reuben president sober. That's Banquo. Now I'm able to say that I'm able to say that because I was banned call at lunch time. There was apparently a sign set up here saying that Thompson was here but if you look closely he wasn't or he was already under the table. I am deeply moved by the introduction and I will stop talking in a minute. First of all sometimes one's tongue. Creates wisdom. You were trying to say that the name of the program for my job was prestigious and you said prestigious and that means sleight of hand and you know more about my program than I had hoped you

knew. Wondering whether it was a mistake and I will for a long time ponder that question. All I want to say is that the cushiest job in the world is to be an even curator and I wish you all well in your search for replacing me. When I am duly retired and the second question is job in the world is to co-sponsor anything with Reza Rubin and Dean with Klein because all I had to do was say yes and then I made two phone calls to two fat cats and they were very very impressed that the very nice fat cats came through was a money. I'm not identifying names but they're former as Ruben thinks I am a great man. And I have had to do nothing except yes I had to perform today on a panel. The clergy know it was on theology and theology and philosophy and in case any of you thought there were any theological or philosophical problems to be solved on

the issue of journalistic ethics we solve them today no problem. It's all it's all done. Concluding comment is that I do believe that every now and then everyone has to cross a river from time to time and whether it's. Whether it's a little one like the Rubicon or a big one like the Charles it is always a pleasure to come to this side of the river Thank you all. Well it's always a pleasure to have you on this side of the river where we have the telephones but we don't know who to call. You. I want to introduce our speaker of the evening Mr. Rod McLeish. And it is particularly interesting to me

that Rod McLeish is a multi-faceted personality. He is creative in several fields and not just in one and I think those of you who hears commentaries on CBS Radio understand the amount of information that goes into such commentaries. Eric Sevareid who has done it for many years on television really pours a world of knowledge into a few pithy moments of commentary and so does MacLeish. It is not something that very many journalists can do. Usually the two minutes that they give you three minutes is too much for most journalists they want either no assignment like that or at least some way to grapple with it and they certainly don't want to do it three or four times a week. Rob McLeish has topics that cover the Middle East Vietnam and American

politics. He is also well-versed on the subject of social change in America. Prior to joining CBS in November 1976 he was a commentator for a group w Westinghouse Broadcasting and was news director of WBEZ right here in Boston. So we welcome him home. He had previously been working in radio and television networks for UPI. He organized and head of the group the Washington news bureau then an 1059 organized the group w foreign news service and served as his chief for seven years. During that time he was elected president of the Association of American correspondents in London covering many events including the Sino-Soviet dispute the rise and fall of Khrushchev and the war in Southeast Asia. That's one side of Mr. MacLeish is multifaceted personality and the other side is the combat correspondent. During the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. And if you want to read about his

experiences read the sun stood still which is the book on that particular Middle Eastern conflict. He also wrote a book on Washington politics a city on the river in 1973 and his last novel was The Man Who Wasn't There. Published in July in June of 1976. I'm intrigued by what or Love's daughter is about that's the tentative title of his current effort when he sits down at his desk. For several years he was a columnist for The Washington Post and also a literary critic who taught in the department of literature at American University. His uncle is the poet Archibald MacLeish. His mother is the his father was the noted American painter and he came from Bryn Mawr. It's a trilogy that very hard to to be studied art and studied philosophy and Russian at the University of Chicago. He's

fluent in several languages and holds four honorary degrees. Although he did not graduate from the university last year and certainly not least is that he lives in Washington D.C. where so much that is important or nefarious happens and is the center of so much that will happen. That is a rather lengthy introduction to a very compound personality and therefore it is with the greatest possible pleasure that I introduce to you ladies and gentlemen. Mr. Rutledge. My friend Jim Thompson has just become a prestidigitator and I've just become compound. I think after such a lovely introduction I should quit while I'm still ahead. I'm delighted to be here and honored a little awed to be faced with an audience of my peers

and academic superiors in the field of communication. I feel a little as Mr. Lincoln once felt when he was addressing a political conference and he said he felt like the man who was being ridden out of town on a rail who remarked If it weren't for the honor I'd just sort of walk. This conference has been devoted principally to the problems of the First Amendment. Threats to the First Amendment and to the threats and restrictions and problems of the practice of journalism those traditional threats and restrictions have ever been with us. You know before Thomas Jefferson became president he said if I had to choose between government with no newspapers

or newspapers with no government I would not hesitate to choose the latter. But then Mr. Jefferson became president and remarked afterwards nobody can believe anything that you read in a newspaper. So in one way or another the threats and restrictions have always been with us and they've been compounded of late by the complexity of events and by the Megali of the media's own technical complexity. As evidenced by the fact that 51 years ago this year television was first demonstrated in Britain and the United States. We've had. An enormous growth in the technical facilities with which we transmit news to the public. We have now our computers you know newspaper reporters write their stories and computers

that set them up in front pages. We have television we have radio we have closed circuit television. We have an immense. And wide range of new. And improved technical devices with which to perform the function of journalism. And this very complex city of the times we live in and of the media. I do think raise certain ethical questions for us. Now ethics is one of those words which is used. More than it's defined Russo's said that it was a born intuitive sense. John Locke said that it was a power of discrimination based on experience. I tend to come down on the side of John Locke but either way we have to look at ourselves the way we

think the way we practice our profession. He said I think we do. The way we practice our profession as we consider this overall subject of threats to and restrictions on the practice of journalism. We do know. That. The law. Is ever ready around the corner to impose gag rules. The change there is that a strong atmosphere in this country for amending changing or changing the practice of the First Amendment reinterpreting the First Amendment. There are the restrictions imposed upon the practice of journalism by the people who run journalism and advertise on it. As we heard in what I thought was a very brilliant and seint speech and lunch at lunch on the fairness doctrine. But as we assess the

overall threat and the overall restrictions placed on the practice of journalism must we not think also. About ourselves. We will practice it the discriminations and the judgments that we make in the invalid's climate of the times in our own media. Has presented some problems to us and I think those problems could possibly lead on our or perhaps already have led to a restriction of the press and its function. The key lies in the way we think. First of all we we tend to think of ourselves I think as an end. Journalism is an end in itself and actually aren't we just a means. Of conveyance of information

about of the nce to the public. But our purpose for existence is to find out. About as many things as are accessible. And of significance to human life and then convey them. To the public. In the belief that this will. Better help the public to understand the functioning of government. The evolutions of the world around it and the incredible repetitive change is the hallmark of contemporary history. And first of all I think. We ought to talk about this public. Who is the public. Who are this what is this thing. To which we do this perform this conveyance function. What do we want for the public and what do we expect from the public.

Thirty five years ago Walter Lippmann wrote a book called The Phantom public in which he defined the public as a mixture of bewilderment and self-interest. That perhaps is a is a somewhat restricted definition in one of the great classics of the 20th century. Or take it you guess that's the revolt of the masses. There was a distinction made within this general body of the public trying to describe it. He said there was a minority and a self demanding minority that was dissatisfied with the status quo dissatisfied with the way things were going. The structure of society and the operation of politics or what have you. And they were the people that made history. And the other part of the public the majority of the public was satisfied with the present condition. Not interested and willing to go

along. We've seen do come I think in recent years to think of a monolithic public to envision in our own minds a monolithic public that is obsessed by events and it sees itself. As a whole rather than the infinite sum of its differing parts. And if that is true we've reduced weve dehumanised the public haven't we reduced it to a set of statistics and opinion polls and tendencies. I am a member of the public. You are a member of the public. The public is in fact composed of the coming together of an infinite number of individualities with their own hopes and dreams and yearnings desires and fears which is almost a way of saying that there isn't any public.

And what we can do with this public we as journalists. Is to make. Information available to it. For those members of it I tend to come down on our or take his definition of public. We can make information available to it hoping that a great many people will seize upon and think about the information. But counting on basically Ortega's self demanding minority people to make history that people think about change the people to try to scrutinise the premises upon which public thought takes place. Our function. We're messengers. We bring news. And we lay it at the doorstep of the pub. We lay it on the supercard at the supermarket counter of the media and we say There it is. Pick it up ignore it leave it alone. Grasp it.

Form an opinion or not. We cannot in the end completely dictate what the public will do with. What we give it what we send it what we tell it what we give it to read about. But I think we must get over the idea of a single monolithic public. We must begin to think of the public as a compendium of individuals and tendencies like ourselves. And in this process of conveying information and making it available to the public is it not true that we impose a kind of a censorship made up of our own habits and our own definitions of what's important. Journalism does tend to fall into arbitrary ways of thinking about what's important.

We look at the three nightly network newscasts and until quite recently they were all covered more or less the same and that's because a journalistic state of mind trained God knows what what common for image has said. This is important. This isn't. This is the event of the day. And this is. And so the front pages of the of the great morning newspapers tend to be tend to emphasize those same events. And there's a kind of a a lack of an abundance of curiosity and that fact it seems to me because we've set up some rather arbitrary definitions of what is important. It tends usually to fall into four categories Economics Politics Public Affairs and scandal

with the exception of a few notable deaths and ghastly auto automobile accidents. And the man who walked on the high wire between the two buildings of the World Trade Center. But we are it seems to me that's a very limited way. Or we have fallen into the habit. A limited habit of defining what's important and secondly have we not submitted ourselves to a voluntary enslavement to time and to events. In other words our enslavement to time has to do with the fact that we believe if it happened today we must get it into the paper. We must get it on the air. There's a there's there's an unseemly haste to which we will take a very complex issue and put it surface manifestation in the paper out there because it happened today. That's our

enslavement. It's a time we have an enslavement to event that how can you write about something. This is especially true of broadcast journalism. How can you write about something that has no peg in other words if you want to do a story. As a friend of mine wanted to do the other day about the changing patterns of American humor before during and after Vietnam. Because humor is a is is is an indication of what people are thinking feeling and so on. The answer comes back yeah but what's the pay. What do we hang it on. This is a voluntary enslavement to an enslavement to a vet. I think it has to happen. Before an idea a trend or a tendency can be presented to the public.

We've already a great deal of this conference about censorship but can't we say really that we ourselves are censors because of these habits of thought because of the way we approach this in a coherent mass of stuff that comes into us every morning and pick out those things which will end up on the CBS Evening News that night or the front page of The New York Times the next morning. I do exempt the weekly news magazines from this because they they seem to do more. They seem to try harder to go. To those peg less timeless events that happen to be our tendencies or ideas that happen to be very very important but have no. Real. Advice on that as the rest of us think about journalism and the censorship

of what we don't cover. We do not consider important but increasingly worries me as I watch myself and the practice of our profession in this country. In the late 20th century for example. In many ways the western world is undergoing an especially Christianity is undergoing one of the most important theological convolutions since the Council of times in the 12th century. We touched on it briefly with the death of God controversy which was not very well understood which was reported which was dropped and forgotten about. But in theology today you have an enormous interdisciplinary group of people working for mathematicians to young in psychologists to theologians to statisticians. So what is in effect happening in an overall sense

is that Nietzsche's God of face may be dying. But a new demonstrably rationally provable God. May be discovered. Now why is that important. Well it's important because for nine tenths of human history a man's mind has been preoccupied. With what he called the problem of God what we call in our philosophic relationship to the cosmos our reason for being. Our relationship to the continuum of time and so on theology touches on this. It's of great importance to people's lives. We don't write very much about that it doesn't get out of the CBS Evening News. It may get out occasionally fret fragments and aspects of it. May get out of the page 34 of the New York Times. But this is a period of exploration new ideas and new

realizations and new discoveries that climaxes untold centuries. Of human preoccupation with the very meaning of life and what lies beyond it. Take another example. Schizophrenia has been one of the scourges of our species. From almost the first moment of recorded history it is destroyed more lives not by death by disabling schizophrenia has destroyed more lives than all the wars we've ever fought. And all the plagues physical plagues we've ever had in this country right now. If the National Institute of Mental Health Statistics only believe 1 out of every hundred Americans will at some time in his life. Be touched by schizophrenia in some form or another. Which means that a

large part of the populace will be indirectly touched by it. At the moment there is a. Titanic battle going on between the psychopharmacologist studies people who deal with mental illness through drugs and the psychiatrists over the treatment of schizophrenia and psychopharmacology is winning. And not totally but by dramatic measures of reduction of schizophrenia. The ancient scourge of mankind is on the way. It's beginning to spear through the advanced use of the stars and drugs recipe and drug research and the study of what's good for any really is. We don't write about and yet what is of more graphic importance to people's lives.

We are not very specific and we are not very thorough in spotting and talking about. And writing about and making loose of. The subtle. And vast ideological changes that are going on in this society. Again I exempt Newsweek or the weekly magazines Newsweek this week as a cover story which I haven't read yet. Is America swinging to the right. Well that's a terribly important subject. It's of vital importance because ideology the way people view things the spectrum from which they see things is the storm warning of history. When Marie Antoinette said Let them eat cake. And Voltaire said there will be no peace on earth until the last king is strangled with the guts of the last great priest. Those were two ideological

statements that were clear for warnings of what was to happen in France. They were picked up and reported. The first one is cute and the second one as the non indicative wisecrack of the week of a well-known iconoclast. We don't examine ideology we don't examine its sources we don't examine its dimensions. And yet it is the storm warning of history possibly not always but possibly it's the storm warning of history and. To ignore those storm warnings not to analyze them not to write about is very lax indeed. Generally social reporting goes begging in America reporting about the inner private undramatic the endlessly evolving lives of people the way we

live the way we think about things. The way we react to things. The enormous shifts in soda shops social attitude habit. This largely goes unreported in America. With one notable exception here in Boston as far as I'm concerned Ellen Goodman is a national treasure because she is a wise and enormously literate spotter. Social trends anxieties fears worries and aspirations that go largely ignored in the rest of the breast. Social reporting identifies where we are now and what is possible in the future. The complexity of events has come into collision with the public's right to know. And there's a question I think that we who practice journalism must ask ourselves how do we

engage the public's interest so that it wants to know about things that are of great importance to all of us. We have before us the battle over the energy program and we all know. That a vast majority. Of the American people don't believe the problem the problem exists. And they're totally uninterested. In this arcane and quite gripping political battle that's going on in Washington between Carter the House and the Senate. Is it not possible. Is it not demonstrably that the failure to engage the public interest in the energy problem the failure to explain it in terms more comprehensible than those gas station lines we had one briefly here. Is perhaps a failure of political leadership but it's also a failure of

the press. We haven't found the way we haven't found the device the craft to talk to the public about energy in such a way. That we are persuasive. Or at least that we even start intelligent argument. Among various segments of the public. We have a great switch off. Going on in the United States. And the switch off must surely be laid partly to our dory to the conveyors of information in the explainers of events. To the multiple pleb public. Why is this but it seems to me that a sense of real craft is diminishing in our medium in our profession because it is craft. The use of words the use of pictures the structure of

arguments the play of events which engages the public attention and clarifies those events. There is little literary beauty if I may use such an extravagant word in journalism print journalism today. There are some marvelous writers Ellen Goodman George Will Meg Greenfield. These are people though who write for the editorial pages. What about the craft of writing for the front page. What about. The capacity by the sheer compelling power of words. To awaken engage and fascinate. The public. And thereby attract attention. Because from engagement comes involvement information knowledge and the ability to make up your mind.

On television it seems to me there's very little pictorial imagination. Night after night we watch the network news shows in the local news shows. We tend to see pictures. That we've seen so often before. There are stock footage as I'm sure I can't prove it but I'm sure. A network film libraries which are trotted out again and again to try to make a point. The pictures. Are dull. The pictures do not inspire the pictures. Do not engage and arouse the Rapture. Of that infinite multiplicity of being which is public and it doesn't have to be that way you know. There has been genuine brick beauty. In journalistic prose one thinks of that as in and steal Sam

Johnson's marvelous Rambler essays Ring Lardner Heywood Broun Westbrook Pegler Pegler. The younger of you here won't remember Pegler was a Native American fascist. He was slightly to the right of the late Genghis Khan. He was a horrible man but he wrote the most marvelous gripping carry flowing prose. And I can remember being a young man New York and leaving my office at five o'clock in the afternoon and I homed for the newsstand to buy a newspaper to read the words of a man whose every thought utterance corpus and I despised because the words were so marvelous. They carried and gauged you. They got to at least interested in the subject that Pickler was writing about.

That's missing. We talk a great deal about the public's right to know but surely we must make a distinction or an addition if you will to the principle of the public's right to know. Because there are things that the public ought to know also. And there are things the public needs to know. And sometimes it seems to me that we lose track in our pursuit of the right to know which is become canon which sometimes has more to do with journalism than it does with the public in our pursuit of the public's right to that it seems to me sometime we overlook the ought to know and the need to know. Recently there was a great A few months ago there's a great uproar in the United

States over Gary Gilmore's death by firing squad. He was the first man to be executed in the United States and x number of years. Very dramatic of that especially because he wanted to die. And there were great clamoring lawsuits and petitions to be allowed to film. And I witnessed the execution of Gary glow or the last act of a bizarre drama. It would have been grotesque. It would have been a horrifying spectacle. I don't know about the public's right to see that but ought it to have seen it. Did it need to see it. I question that. I question whether any useful purpose would have been served by the filming.

Of seeing a poor man a poor distraught man stood up and shot down by a Utah firing squad. But even more hideous and more protracted with the television pictures of the Tet Offensive in Vietnam in 1968. Because night after night for the 11 days that offensive went on into your living room in living color you saw the horrors of war and the futility of that particular monstrous war. It wasn't nice it was tasteless. But surely didn't the public need to know that in order to have brought home to it the graphic reality of what this just an abstraction was really about. And I'm sure by the time those that offensive was over and those

dreadful horrifying gory pictures stopped being seen on television. I'm sure that some kind of realization process had taken place. The war was no longer simple. It was no longer good or bad. It was no longer the traditional American going out to fight the commies wherever they appear. It assumed flesh and blood. And cries of pain and death and the picture of defeat because that's what it was really about. The public had a right to see that. It also ought to see it in the light of the public's role in ending that shameful chapter in American history. The public need to see it too. Another thing that we seem to do. Which I really think

perhaps you might agree with me that we must examine ourselves is the journalism that has no history. A peculiar form of sort of journalistic American isolationism in what's what what happens here. Is disconnected from what has happened in the past in other countries and other climes at other times I'm sorry. Now Watergate was unique in American history. We've never had a president resign. We've never seen the clouds of personal scandal corruption and misuse of power gather around an American president and when he fell under the weight of his own inequity there was a sense of absolute horror some level of perhaps

psychological perhaps because. The very medulla oblongata of American patriotism. Because it had never happened before. Well it had happened before but not in America. It was as old as Agamemnon. It was as recent as the British beheading of Charles veriest a former frocked of patricide had been practiced here but it wasn't the first time and has not the public the right and the need to know that America is not the only repository of human experience. I think. The point I'm trying to make is this. To decide to cover something is to make a moral choice and not to cover something is also a moral choice. And I would have thought

that we have a narrow. And restricted set of definitions about what we will cover. We as journalists not just our editors not just our the producers of our news programs because we can go in as practicing journalism as journalists and fight like hell for something we believe is important. And it's been my experience that if you make yourself a nuisance enough to an editor if I say OK go do it. It seems to me it's impinged upon us who practice this craft. This means to a larger and to fight for a broader definition of what we cover what is important what's news what's reality what's significant to human lives is not another chapter in man's endless search for his relationship to God important

to human lives is not the end to the scourge of schizophrenia or the diminishing of the scourge of schizophrenia. Vitally important to human lives. Is not the subtle and exquisite shift of ideology. And perhaps the weather vanes of history going out all over America. Important to our lives. I think we can agree but somehow we are. 19:10 drivers behind the wheels of 1977 roadsters we still tend too much to approach the basic question of what we're going to cover in a very very old fashioned way. And we tend to cover it and present it in a very old fashioned way. We invent new and

tricky and to be very irritating leads you always tell a little addict Oh you know before you get into the main story you know the classic modern American journalistic thing Mary Smith was 26 and she fell down a well and broke her ankle and couldn't collect insurance. Today the United States Senate addressed the self of the problem of valve insurance. You know for people who fall down wells. We. We practice we approach we think about. The selection and presentation of news as if we were still working on or editing the Boston transcript in 1910. We have a marvelous new technological power in the media. And not to utilize that technical power. Well. In conjunction with deciding the questions of what the public has a right to know what it ought to know and what it needs to. It seems to me puts us in a position of dangerous amorality

our sense is an abundant lack of curiosity. We have fallen prey to the tyranny of specialization. It's too comfortable at the morning a makeup conference to say OK Senate conference committee the Senate House conference committee is meeting on the energy bill. That's important. So we'll leave the show with that tonight because they did something on the gas laws because of their tax which notches that whole issue forward. And there are enough people in that morning meeting who say hey wait a minute why is that important. How many guys is that going to knock off barstools in Waukegan this evening. But if you tell. If you go on the air and say hey pally something which is scored as the human race since its very

inception is coming to that it might not not come off the barstools literature make a move a little and have another beer. So. In this conference as we contemplate the threat to press freedom and the restrictions placed upon the press by all the outside forces that we've been discussing from the owners of the media advertisers to economic pressure government from the law. The ever present threat to the successful practice of journalism. I think we must consider ourselves perhaps as part of the thread and certainly as instruments of the restriction. I thank you. This to me certainly has been moving in his remarks and your profound

and I hesitated to to open it to a question period without his permission but he's very gracious and said Yes of course certainly would anybody like to start. Yes Professor Lewis. Is an in-joke connected and here the lady who asked that question and I are very old friends and the answer is no I'm not going to replace Eric Sevareid neither is Bill Moyers. No. Pardon nobody. No replacement Eric when he leaves us not unless we get you back. Yes. The question is Where do we go from here.

I would have thought that it goes in from here in our own attitudes. I was talking to Professor Reuben for dinner and I'm I'm delighted to know the journalism students are taking courses and lobbying lobbying is very important. How can you cover lobbying without knowing about living. But I think somehow I don't know the full answer that questions are but I think somehow we missed in Kochi back into ourselves perhaps it lies in the education system. Perhaps it lies just in our own attitudes that infinite curiosity about things so that we are willing to absorb into our minds a wide variety of subjects even though we know very little about them. We must give rain and give vent to whatever fascinates us and to pursue it. There is a kind of structure of expertise that goes on today everybody is a

specialist in something. And to be a generalist. Is no bad thing. How do you breed a race of curious people. I don't know the answer. How do you train a race of curious people. But I think the marvelous quality which we're all born with. We all have as children of infinite curiosity about the world around us is the key somehow. Perhaps you're talking about retaining our childhood our sense of wonder. Yes and your. Games. Such as Presidential Speeches. Well the instant analysis is largely a mess because. Before a presidential speech. Say if the president speaks at 9 o'clock in the evening on national television usually there's a

briefing at the White House at 6 o'clock. Copies of the speech are handed out. And so it really isn't very instant in most cases. There's been a chance to pore over the tax to think about it to talk to people. And the president's aides will hold backgrounders in which they explain the line of reasoning that has led them to lead the president to say certain things. It depends on the degree and dimension and quality of the event. If we have the second coming of Christ in Switzerland I would not like Sunday to go on the air five minutes later he explains meaning 500 years later it would be better. But some things you know

say that the recent war in Lebanon there have been people on the ground reporters who covered that have saturated themselves and who know an enormous amount about the background person out of a who's demoted who's the causes. And if a denouement happens here some say it suddenly stops you somebody with this I would have thought. Good men and women like that are pretty well prepared to because of their extensive background to give an adult a good picture of what happens it all depends on how much you know if the war ended in Lebanon and CBS called up said we watch on the air in five minutes. I say no because I don't have the facts. I can't form an opinion and analysis without the facts. So I think it's really a question of who you got and how much he knows. But as far as the Agnew complaints about instant analysis he knew that was fraudulent.

Because a presidential speech is usually seen and explained and discussed in background. Hours before the public seated for this podium time there was a question back there first. Fight like hell is the only answer I can make and you may lose a lot. But if you keep at it. I think we can broaden and the upcoming generation of people who are going to be editors and editorial decision makers. I think we can broaden those people we can educate them and we can get away from the tyranny of time without them the news peg it at that and in these very traditional ways of

thinking you begin to see evidences of it around there are open ended essays on television there are articles in the newspapers that are tied to a particular that the accumulation of things that may have happened over three months and he's beginning that but I think he's got to be a lot of fighting for it. Just fight like hell.