An hour with Gerald Seib andb Bob Dotson

for memorial union at the university of kansas k pr presents an hour with gerald side washington bureau chief for the wall street journal i'm kay mcintyre each year the william allen white foundation honors a journalist for outstanding service the two thousand sixteen william allen white national citation was awarded to when i fall sees the moderator and managing editor of washington week and co anchor of pbs newshour eiffel was unable to attend this year's william allen white day so giving the two thousand sixteen address in her place was gerald side of the wall street journal and the winner of the william allen white national citation back into thousand five later this hour we'll also hear from last year's winner of the william allen white national citation bob doubts and he's best known for american story with bob johnson which appears on nbc's today show but first jerry side is a nineteen seventy a graduate of the university of

kansas school of journalism and mass communication as was his wife barbara rush events he writes about politics in his weekly column capital journal appears regularly on cnn and the bbc and moderated the fourth republican presidential debate in november two thousand fifteen and now gerald side it's nice to come to place for you have fond memories of old friends and i see both of them out here today and i like to fire myself and think that i'm the most important arrival in lawrence this week but i'd know that honors been locked away by josh jackson basketball coach and for those less are part of jay hauck nation it's hard to come back to campus and not talk about basketball so it started to quit basketball stories i got to know president obama little bit over last eight or nine years and we have a shared passion about basketball so when i see him we talk about that occasion like one of the occasions where barbara i always seems at the annual white house

christmas party which comes around obviously early in the basketball season so what we went through the receiving line which is where he's see the president persuaded shake their hands i took the occasion last december to tell him that he should be kicking play you this year in his considerable a racket and he replied well i think in a couple of times already and they've let me down and i said they're the real deal this year this is the one so sure enough when the president's bracket came out he picked the jane talks to win so i think that has become the obama jinx and i feel and partly responsible for twenty or apologize to you and to the president for that the second decimal story our son luke is not going ok you know he would've been more than happy to do so but he is a baseball players a college baseball player and sadly the k u coaches didn't come calling offering him as ca offering him a scholarship so he's instead playing college baseball on a smaller school in pennsylvania

and marshall college but like his brothers he grew up watching his parents crack and cans basketball like a couple of hawk so to speak and the mood was infectious in our household and luke became a giant play basketball fan himself and remained so it's all of his friends a franco marshall college know that he's a serious k fan and the both of his parents are as well as of this year as it happens one of the presidential debates was occurring on a night the water was also take a basketball a game being played so i'm in my office because of the debate in oslo stand to get an email from one of luke's teammates who wrote the players here are dying to know which are you watching the paper can you pass the ball to which are applied of course they have more than one screen i can really multitask so oh my first mission here today by far my most important mission today is to speak on behalf of my my good friend

when i fall order to honor her or more than to hear from me and that's entirely appropriate all this past winners of the way now why toward guard the tradition of this sort of jealously by giving his years citation that when the trustees of not only uphold that tradition i think that element of it quentin here today because in an unanticipated an entirely avoidable personal conflict that she wanted to be here it's yet us citizen thought she would be to pass on view on her behalf which i will do that before did that when his effort a few words about one herself she'll tell anybody who asks that she always wanted to be a journalist no she's a tv journalist and a star now she will also tell you that her first love was newspapers which seems entirely appropriate considering the man who in whose name this award in journalism school here is mainly mel white you foresee joint pbs and became an on air fixture at washington week on the newshour when were perceived national

political correspondent for nbc news before that was white house correspondent for the new york times which is what i should be with her and local a national political reporter for the washington post schulte a reporter for the baltimore evening sun and the baltimore harold american and i could say for having competed against her that she was a very good reporter and made her mark in that sphere as surely as she has on the air so with that as the backdrop here's what the what when want me to say to you all today i'm deeply honored to receive a citation named after a great man one that has been bestowed on so many great men and women in journalism whom i deeply admired at a time when journalism feels like it is under siege and shrinking the false all of us to take the mission seriously to hold it up in fact i believe that it is as important as it's ever been disturbed half of sanity through the raucous political campaigns troubling social upheaval and instantaneous conclusion well you know white one spoke of the sheer luck that

landed him in the newspaper business in my case it was luck and fortune and a fierce desire to get questions answered and to learn to write well it's good luck that brings me this honor and bad luck that makes me an a look on the war's to accept that please accept my apologies mit thanks so with your permission i will carry jr best wishes back to land along without any questions or comments because one of the things i learned is that in this election year everybody has a message to send and they want it delivered no one heard so i can imagine are all very different if you're going to pass something that did when women over italy or in writing so while i'm not it's highly qualified to speak for granted it effectively is qualified to speak about the journalism school here it what it means to so many of us to the state and indeed to the country and to the world so i propose to do this afternoon here is the talk about that on a personal

level for a bit then we want to the topic that i know everybody in the country seems to be obsessed about which is this presidential campaign and then help nurses with you on i'm very eager to hear your questions about any of this but i think about the campaign was a microphone so i'm happy to have that conversation because i am let's just say it's been a lot of strange activity on a street by play between the world of politics and journalism here but we start down this path by talking first directly to the journalism students here in the audience because it was a while ago on another tale exactly how long ago that my brother jeff and i learned that most of our worldly possessions into my nineteen sixty nine dodge challenger beautiful bronze for eighteen cubic inch v eight engine cassette tape we're fired up and ready to go and left hasan had a near lawrence to launch their careers occasion and oh my god the things we didn't know we didn't know about the hawk in the wheel being from western kansas we had no idea kansas even had

either hills or humanity we didn't allow fieldhouse was opened up to students to play pickup basketball games a night and by the way it was in those days and i didn't i think my future rock wife right here right over there in the journalism school at the sunny offices of the university or cancer but yeah we learned about all those things for over quickly but probably the biggest thing we didn't know was the most important and most ominous how do we pay for this college education as you can imagine that was the biggest question of all my case elise i at least partly answering canada made all the difference in the world i had a scholarship from the women all white school journalism specifically i had the honor privilege of receiving aid wooldridge scholarship some of you know that means for those of hugo award scholarships named after what roger wooldridge kader was a student who died early in an untimely death in nineteen seventy three after that his parents norris' and hello will bridge created a scholarship in his name and in his honor at the journalism school and i had the privilege of being

chosen as a recipient and it's not an exaggeration to say that without this help the kind a will bridges provided a bite out of the nikkei you are all i might not have met my wife i would not be of the wall street journal and i would not be speaking here today so their generosity changed my life in some ways made my life and as an added bonus by the way it happens the water just were a wonderful pop they're marvelous people and they made a point to get to know the kids that they gave scholarships to they showed up at this event every year one to meet the students who got their scholarship who were following in their son's footsteps of their charming people an example they said is a big reason the barton i have contributed to create an opportunity fund at the journalism school so fast forward from the water just did today announce where seven more security for the wall street journal and in this election year i have therefore had the honour of being part of a group of

people who have been called by a leading presidential candidate and this is a direct quote the most dishonest people on earth disgusting dishonest human beings and that of course is donald trump a few weeks ago referring to journalists and they were used to taking some abuse or by were bombed and i was thrown in prison the least this obama can fuel to put out by a few harsh words from a politician running for office but what's strange about the attack on the media is that it comes from a candidate conducting a campaign built almost entirely around free coverage provided by the same media that he so roundly and regularly attacks which just goes to illustrate what a profoundly strange campaign this is been for the party's for the candidates and for us in the press i tweeted out that we've now a few weeks ago that when there's a movie made about this campaign and there will be a movie made about this campaign that high level will beat you

couldn't have made it up so first of all nobody a sermon on the saw coming what we've witnessed the rise of donald trump and bernie sanders in particular and trust me i know this that includes both trump and bernie sanders themselves they did not think this was going to happen to them their their dogs who caught the bus i think we're seeing the consequences of years of political dysfunction and economic marginalization growing at the same time in parallel felt by both working class and working class whites in particular and young americans most acutely and that makes people willing to look for our religiously what would've been considered outrageously radical option just a few years earlier and i think both parties are to be changed permanently by this experience of this campaign regardless of how it actually turns out in the end republican party now is going to be more populist more driven by working class and business class concerns and the democratic party has moved to the left and move

beyond some of that old oakland centrist coalition but there's something else that affects not just a campaign of my profession our profession the campaign has re weaponry written some the standard rules of the game donald trump has personally changed the way candidates communicate tv ads in the millions of dollars needed to buy them which had been the coin of the realm for decades simply don't matter as much as they used to this has become a campaign in which the media and free media critic at the free media are emerging as the dominant force and as a result of this by the way i think when this campaign ends we're all going to have to ask ourselves in my profession some probing questions about how things unfolded and purified of those questions i think i'm going to have to consider number one has a way donald trump used and then used by the media really helping actually think that real serious substantive coverage of the campaign

phenomenon has actually been pretty tough and the court i cited earlier suggest he thinks so too i think america's now know a lot more about donald trump and what he does and doesn't stand for limited to six months ago and that's what he's running into some trouble now what's happening is the classic first thing that the press the us to a serious presidential candidate any serious presidential candidate and as we've seen that has consequences it's a healthy thank you mr trump has figured out something with which is that he could use cable television's voracious appetite for political content to shake the campaign conversation in the way he wanted and yes if your turns out of your major presidential candidate and a controversy i want to do and you call three cable tv station to tv news shows before breakfast the law were you on the air it didn't really matter that that once a question sir topham the answers were unsatisfactory the coverage made him the story and suck the oxygen out of the room for others it dries up ratings for the other guys on the other side of the phone line by the way at the same time which is not just the clintons and

if you succeed at making yourself a story the coverage of your story will soon extend to full life coverage of the rallies and speeches and question becomes is it right for any candidate to get that kind of unfiltered access to the media there's a chicken and egg dilemma in this which i understand did me exposure drive up trump poll numbers or did his rising poll numbers are even more free media exposure but in any case you remember interior times has written about what he calls the quote disturbing symbiosis between mr trump and the news media that's a symbiosis i think is going to have to be thought about hard do you give up ratings are you willing to give up ratings for more balanced and substantial coverage so the question when you think about it we in the media need to be in better touch with the country recover i say this and i think it's fair to say that because none of us in the media saw in the trump or sanders phenomena coming serving not the form we've

witnessed why did we not see why weren't we more in touch with economic alienation that fueled both these candidates or with the anger over trade policies that help fuel of both parties or in the case of bernie sanders that attachment millennials feel from the traditional political system or in the case of donald trump the wrong nervy struck when he talked about immigration and building a wall to stop why are we surprised at the wall street journal and nbc news are poachers that's been telling us for years but the groundwork is being laid for somebody to take advantage of some of these feelings and break out of the system the better capture the anxiety that's enveloping the country but i think any less appreciated that these two figures of all people these two figures would be the ones to crystallize so maybe we need to talk the voters more and campaign managers last third question we need to question your own assumptions were you know journalists like everybody has those are entirely comfortable with things that

don't look and feel familiar to them a common sentiment reporting is what this is just like what i saw back in fill in the year so that these things will unfold this way and that sounds wise and often it is that it can prevent you from seeing noticing when something is happening that has no precedent and that's where we are right now this is to me one of the lessons of twenty sixteen as a journalist you have to both take advantage of the experience you have any accumulated knowledge you possess and at the same time somehow be open to the world unfolding in entirely new ways this is a tough assignment but i think is essential i think in some ways we failed to carry out this year for cinema for a presidential debate serving what should be their purpose this year's debates have been entertaining and sometimes raucous and the more the raucous the more raucous the better for the ratings ad revenues are flowing into the cable news shows in particular to carry these debates have the debates done what they should to get beyond

insults and soundbites in to the substance of what's otherwise been a disturbingly substance free campaign one that's been more about attitude than actual agendas and i could tell if i own expressive this is also a tough assignment i was one of the moderators of the wall street journal fox business news debate late last year in milwaukee was the fourth time i've done and this moderating job at a presidential debate but i could see the pressure was a lot higher a lot higher this year than ever before the base runner fire debate moderators are under fire on the bridge the candidates and the audience is that came together were more prepared than ever to attack the media and in the person the moderators and as it is a miser colleagues earlier like my colleague maggie gallagher fox news has covered the course was too tough the moderates would be attacked including run a highly partisan audience that now gets to sit in the auditorium right behind you for being biased against the candidate of the questioning isn't tough enough you get accused of being beat either being in the tank for the candidates were afraid of the criticism that will come your

way so we tried hard to do a serious and substantive debate on the issues degree economic issues with actual discussion of those issues and i think we succeeded but you do that and some people think you've been or horror of horrors to borrow so i think debates continue to be highly important because they're the way many voters get most of the information they know about the candidates but i think we need to be an immediate casale reef rethinking our roles in these debates to make sure we're doing that right which leads me to question number five is the role of the media critique of the mainstream media as important as it used to be and here i think the answer is actually resoundingly us and this allows me to an on what i consider to be an upbeat note you know one of the great ironies to me of the last few weeks has been listening to people in both parties say to the mainstream media essentially this

what you do your job and stop donald trump to which i say really this coming from republicans who spent the last two or even three decades telling their followers not to believe anything the mainstream media a week they caught the lame stream media says because it's all liberalize and coming from some democrats trying to who've been busy during the obama years trying to find ways to move around and over the mainstream media i mean can anybody forget the president's interview with the youtube fruit loops lady it happen and now the same people are circling back and have discovered that the only people with a credibility too tough an objective and therefore believe all believable reporting on a tough topic rt us those in the lame stream media that's pretty rich but i think it's also a clear affirmation from people who maybe didn't think it was so or didn't want to be so that this is still true good old fashioned objective mainstream media coverage of the political process in the candidates still the best way to ensure that we have collectively what

democracy needs which is a well informed voting public that hears what it needs to know and sometimes frankly what it wishes it didn't have to hear in a very strange and a very tumultuous year i'll take that as a compliment so thank you for listening and i am more than happy to entertain questions now and again appreciate your coming means a lot to me to bar into the school and we appreciate very much thank you you've just heard jerald side washington bureau chief for the wall street journal side spoke at william allen white day april fourteenth two thousand sixteen at the university of kansas where he accepted the national citation on behalf of public television's when i fall i'm kay mcintyre you're listening to k pr presents on kansas public radio coming up a conversation with last year's winner of the william allen white national citation nbc's bob that's an but first jerry side now takes

questions from the audience the jury broke or was a sense that the cable stations did or are doing some rethinking of the broadcasting live of particularly the trump events mean that the session down in alabama we have sessions came in and that was just a nonstop in almost unprecedented and maybe even whether good or bad as they begin to talk about that you don't like and i think that i had quite an i not to spend the tv the major networks as well maybe you know a friend chuck todd and we do a poll of nbc news said a couple weeks ago you know i think this idea that if trump was b on meet the press that he just as the call in as part of the get it he should show up at the studio like everybody else and so i think there's a lot of re thinking of that you know when the eyes of people on is that fox news which is supposed to be the republican network has been tougher on this than than just about anybody else and they've drawn a line and said we're not going to go there so there's a lot of kind of jumbled up thinking in and confusion over

portions i i guess i would say nobody really thought out before and i was trying to do what trump does the least write this before and you know i think one of things candidates are doing at the same time is asking themselves course i saw how we communicate with voters in in in you know i think that hillary clinton campaign ad to stubble in the old model where you can keep the can make it down and bottled up a little bit and doing formal things and restricting access and meanwhile you know something goes wrong the world and involve trench on the phone with the morning news shows and she's not so there's a lottery thinking of the old model citizens helping a man much are the old model in which the that the term effect or when he had a successful campaign or not was with you to raise a hundred million dollars to buy attack at small the jeb bush campaign tried that and the last time i checked it didn't work so well so much and that's a healthy model either that this one may not be as well so i think there's a lot a question or coursing of both sides about how do we get here an anonymous donors all but i do think it's happening and in that part of the world in particular others affected the question is one of the

big money people in washington say well they're confused so the big money people have decided to go back to the old model and see if they can put together an effort in the kind of more traditional model of buying on tv ads to stop donald trump but i think that if you step back from this as a broader truth here that people who are divided big money are coming to realize which is at that in this system i describe in which republicans become more populist and democrats become more liberal bum the the big constituency that everybody thinks of as all powerful and that is often described as all powerful which is the business constituent warships constituency worship telethon the cold beer i think are somewhat stunned to discover that donald trump in the republican party i don't agree with him on immigration don't agree with them on free trade don't agree with them on things like the export import bank don't agree with their position on a whole lot of issues in the republican party and democrats have moved further away so these guys were

supposedly all powerful have money to buy elections look up and discover they have no champion and i think that's up at us a lot about where the country is ended touch of how badly frankly the business community is applying the political game country the popular stereotype and i think that they are scratching their heads that's a common pose scratching of heads is common thing so but it's a good question and i think they're trying to figure out how we get back in this game because of games got away from us in ways that we sent here at the congress it's now going to listen as things become a more populist movement well yeah i think that obama won chester i would also say that i think you could see this happening already in congress i mean they're going to give us a small example beyond the export import bank located switches the bank the government uses to help businesses finance exports overseas classic business program that chamber of commerce loves the people stopping that from being

rooted in the last year were democrats the republicans and small republicans who have small town main streets small business constituencies and were very distrustful and very leery of the ghosts and so you see some of these trends taking shape already so i would guess i would argue that congress is reading listening to that what form does it take exactly i don't know because there's the yeah that there's a populist movement but says that is the global climate in a western ear to the populist parties of the left wing populist parties of the right some of them are very low liberals socialists and some of more xena phobic a nationalist but their populace and you see it in country after country to country in europe to some extent you so the bay in japan so this is the thing and as i can be ignored i think the course is what form this is a take this is not going to go away and i think it has to do with the fact that people think international trade globalization and a globalized economy has left them behind and that's a common feeling in the whole western world is like and the way it's going to have to be dealt with but there's a kind of a left

wing in a more liberal agenda to deal with it and there's an ever more right wing populist agenda to do with it but i think everyone in congress is going to be looking at these things are asking themselves how to lead analyst right it won over this jury trump wins was a pretty fast four right there ok ok let's do it they'll go for what what was this country built like if trump wins a while right ms levy blast they will trump when you've you've gone way beyond that it's an easier question up that it well i don't know and they look at this event a very this is your this very humbling experience it was written you know the answer is and i think i don't know the answers arm but since us on a try i think one thing that would happen would be in this exodus your

question will that is i think congress will not matter a lot more i mean donald trump does not have an agenda he has in that is i suggested in my remarks i think a lot of the policy making would have to now happen in congress wrote at the white house the trump agendas pretty skimpy and in some ways right just wholly unrealistic so i think they would have to figure out act like adults in congress for the first time in a long time get their act together and do the country's business in a more serious way that's one thing that i think would happen i my second feeling is that how exactly to say this except to say i don't think i think donald trump takes a lot of what he says seriously in the sense that it's very malleable you know i'm going to build a wall welcome the middle of tall wall or like a small it's gonna be well you know i'm going i'm going to get out of nato well maybe i'll get an enemy that is have to pay more or they were jews were doing in itself i think and an end we restore you a while

back that said basically you understand the trump campaign read the art of the deal which is his book the book you're a veteran and i think he views and he told us this i do what i do is be as i'm doing a deal announced the deal on a portable so in a deal the start out by taking a max morse position i'm going to mandate you pay a hundred million dollars for this building my real price might be sixty five million but that's a start in the deal and that's i think a lot of what donald trump is doing so the second thing i would say is i think a lot of the trump administration would be a voyage of discovery to try to find where his bottom line really as a preacher's bottom line is in the opening position i think it's somewhere else that's just different from what it's the opposite effect of what most politicians do they tell you what the bottom line is and then figure out how where they go from there and not the other way around how he beat envisioned against world politicians have run out

let's just say they're mystified right now president referred to this a couple times i've heard secretary kerry referred to that in every meeting they have the first question i get is is donald trump really to be president and i don't think they know what to make of it i i will say that i think the people who were most concerned or just traditional allies who generally don't have to worry about how they're going to work on a position of an indian after election in of the such are now and i think that the broader reality is in a speech to a broader truth about the republican party and maybe the political system in general isn't leaving aside particular relationships with allies i think one of the things that donald trump represents is not it's not isolationist by non interventionist view of the world like we're stuck and do the same president obama so their and bernie sanders and i think it's a kind of retreat from the world that's both potentially create trump foreign policy and it may very well be keeping the people in the

country i don't think the people i think ten twelve years at warner icon of this interchange the country and he's reflecting that to some extent i think you'd see a lot less interventionist foreign policy there and then if one does a google search for the word that narcissism which is at finding the effect one sees a description of the actions of donald trump i wonder why that word narcissism has never appeared in any of the media that i ever had well i'm not sure that that's true for starters you know i just i would respond with two thoughts one would be a cover politicians for a living i think that we're mobilized a lot of images the second thing is there one word to describe the use to

describe donald trump are registered that it's a more seriously is i would go back to something i said in my remarks which is that i think there was there was a plausible case to be made no maybe three four months ago that america america people don't really understand donald trump the kind of the newly one to the head of mexico's on to build a wall and that was enough you know i don't think that's true anymore i think that there has been i think coverage of donald trump for better and for worse has been extensive enough and i think there's been enough good coverage of people know what is the holy spirit's four and so they're not they're not be fooled you know you get these emails from readers they're very interesting there they're not great summer twitter's tweak your crazy let's just be honest about that but the emails give readers were thoughtful of direction message are very interesting and often i get emails from readers who say essentially this look i don't believe everything donald trump says i know he's not right about one of things i don't really care that's not important and what's important to me is that he's a strong leader or that he's it's his attitude about things or that is to shake up things there isn't a

politician they don't they're not fooled by something they know what it is and i'm telling you it isn't it is good enough for them and it not just good enough it's what they want now is the fifty one percent of the country there's no poll now you look at that suggest that's the case but on to say i think people understand the trump phenomenon and i think they were caught they are either buying into or they're not they're not being fooled his surgery at all last question before we get to about trump presidency where your predictions for between now and the republican convention with a republican convention might look like well yes you can as we spend a lot of time in alaska we started figured out the answer the question us all think about that the road ahead citizen their primary on tuesday to win easily and whether democrats running onto case anybody cares about us is remarkably get to the stevedore new york two nights ago every questions about trump and say every question is about the truck but that's what

so others that then they're fifteen states yet to go and they're kind of a mishmash were some of the northeast were some in the west there's somewhat of trouble that well or somewhere shouldn't do so while a lot of our clothes primaries which means you can only vote if you're registered republican president of the better for ted cruz than for donald trump and that and i think all that says that he was going become an expected june seventh week of the california primary habits this is really fascinating because i've been doing this and had to admit it but i've been involved in political campaign coverage every year since nineteen eighty for the journal this is the first time the california primaries ever really matter that it's gonna matter what because that's the big prize fifty three congressional districts three delegates in each district each of them awarded by who wins the majority in that district it's it may be the difference between trump be close enough to the magic number of one thousand and seven three delegates that he cooks kebabs among them down delegates to get over the top or not be nearly close enough so i don't think we know exactly at

om if he's close he's close to the magic one hundred and seventy three delegates either side thinks that it can be hard to deny him the nomination for how that happens exactly if he's not close there's some people who think it's a tropical think the whatever the delegate count is he has when he walks into the commission cleveland is cecile you can only go down from there cruising case it can go up to trump can only go down because they lose delegates who are really trump supporters in the first place and that's a that's your classic contested convention center and most people think that's a likely scenario because i'm not quite convinced yet i you know there's many serious wooing of delegates i think they'll be close to the magic number and not there i think the question what is how close any answer that question is going to be written in california in june so that is i think is that fdr last question because of an answer that is how would you compare the populist movement the william allen white heroine at nike's nineteen hundreds with the tea party but there was a crowd today yeah that's really an interesting

question for our time and isolde well i think that i think one thing i don't think of these radically different thicker there some somewheres i think there's a i think that there's an anger that's probably higher now than it was then and i think he i think they had the populist movement we're now its time was basically a movement that said businesses have monopolies basically have it out for us we affix that i think is a little broader this is big businesses out the new national banks or out wall street is out to get us and the political system is rigged a crop in those people in and that's that and so it's a bigger pot of grievances i think but i don't think they're wildly dissimilar arm and i think that you know the way was dealt with other could do you know it was a third party obviously in those days teddy roosevelt really great one didn't quite the way it was scandalous way i think this is going to be handled which is the two parties get the message and they adapt the main parties following a lead in many cases i think they're gonna figure out what americans are angry

about come up with some answers to the question what we do about it and for a twelve years from now they'll look different as i suggested that the probably survive but i think the lesson of the roosevelt era populist slash progressive movement is parties get the message eventually and they got the majority here and i think we're at the beginning of the process not the end of the process north take your questions that's for being you've been listening to gerald five washington bureau chief for the wall street journal side spoke about william allen white day at the university of kansas april fourteenth two thousand sixteen where he accepted the national citation on behalf of public television's when i fall jerry side is a nineteen seventy a graduate of the university of kansas william allen white school of journalism and mass communication he was awarded the william allen white national citation back into thousand five in just a minute we'll hear from last year's

winner of the william allen white national citation bob dobson if you missed last week's k pr presents which featured bob dobson's remarks at william allen white day it's now archived on our website k pr that k u dot edu as is my conversation with kansas poet laureate eric mchenry he's stunned by the akp our studios last week to celebrate national poetry month find out how you can mark national poetry month and hear some of the arid weekend reads poetry archive that our website again that's k pr that kay you that edu for the rest of this hour we'll hear from bob johnson who won the william allen white national citation last year it was a homecoming of sorts for dots and not only is he a graduate of the university of kansas while he was a student he worked part time like hey i knew the flagship station of kansas public radio while he was in town he stopped by the akp our studios

to visit with news director jay shafer dotson has spent more than four decades working in broadcast news has written two books many know him best for his work on american story with bob dobson a series of feature news reports on the today show and he joins us now welcome you know you are you've received hundreds of awards for your work rather than your body's i'm old yes particularly you're writing in broadcast news from an east edward r murrow award is there anything special about getting the william allen white award from k u law school were you first began learning the girl would you admit probably the highly prized were never gotten is this particular war because it comes from home my grandfather graduated from dui nineteen ten and i came here to be a lawyer like he was because you dreaded law school and i got hooked on broadcasting so i worked here it in those days it was called k n u

and the rest is history i just kind of backed into it but it seemed like a whole lot more fun than preparing a legal brief so in a way this radio station is at least partly responsible for your tremendous success in broadcast why were not available to aig we used to follow you know track and field on saturday which we broadcast out of the station with a fifteen minute newscast which was mostly just ripped off the wire and read quickly and i got a little the first one i ever did and there was some prime minister of some small country that never heard in africa who was assassinated and i looked at his name i knew of his narrative it will pronounce it so i said i'm sorry for his name is being withheld pending notification you improvise that's right and had also on saturday nights here they had what they call portals a prayer which ended the broadcast date and he kept getting longer and longer and longer they sometime and forty five minutes and we

were only paid the ten o'clock we all had dates eternal three freight so there were it was me thank goodness guy would open fire but one of the guys it was working here that night he went ahead and shoot up the record to the amen uses now we take the importance of prayer was supposed to go forty minutes all was all he had to get out of their ell program director actually was she was listening and so she said you know i like you honey but you got we did lose as you did the people you worked with like oh my gosh when price was the unit chief announcer our edwin brown was the general manager the program director was a lady named mildred scene and get right with a degree yeah he was the music director and he brought us into the twentieth century shortly before the twenty first century by saying i'm able and transgender stuff as well as a classical music so he ended up with a jazz show that's right the jazz scene with the curry well it's been said that good broadcast journalism is the art of storytelling using words

images and sound to relay information what are some of the secrets to telling a good story or being a good storyteller i think the most important thing to remember when you tell a story is you have to hook it almost immediately to your listener or e reader and most people think well i've got to do this story it's wonderful if you don't understand the stories because yuri is not educated enough in this material is not my fault because i won a research there's a great story behind understand but what i do is i start every story i think i might tell with the assumption that nobody cares about at all including myself which forces me to focus and try to find the building blocks of the story the craft is so that i can cook the largest number of audience quickly because the story might be about a derailment in dubai but it's really interesting you hear in large because of this distance and this and then i go out and find a strong central character to help get into that story because people have a difficult time relating to topics but

at a better time relating to somebody is interesting and so a lot of times you could find the right kind of interesting character to get into the story people be already halfway through before they really don't care about the story and then they know the context because it had been brought into that by the person that they thought was intriguing and by the tiny about the other hand you tell the story of what happens when you can't find that interesting person on which you can build your story is surely that's happened only get fired at that that that is good looking and looking and eight that the right person the right well maybe not everything works all time i think i've survived for forty years at nbc because a small victories you know today i actually pull a battery in my tape recorder so it actually turned on you know things like that but i think the definition of a storyteller is someone who's curious and the best data storyteller doesn't just show or tell but that helps fewer the list or it figure out how to experience what you just saw or heard and if you're

curious what you're doing is you're walkin down the street and you're looking at people going past you and some people seem to be more of a character than others right and so you to stop the one that you see a candidate that makes the hair on the back your neck stand up simon here she is intriguing and they're a hero location where they're putting in the stinky sewer and rather than just have a soundbite from the mayor's and we're going to bookstores now in jail or in you know you've got some woman who's been living next to that sewer for the last twenty years are having to teach class next to it and she's already kind of engaging and you just start talking to her and i found that the best kind of the storytelling comes out of the non question you know professionals like you and like me will work greenwood answer questions but most people answer questions in three parts they give you the answer you think that they'd be they think you've asked them explain their answer and if you wait just a beat they feel a little awkwardness if you don't understand their answers so they go obama that's what dilma life and so you get to the heart of it but more importantly if it's just an

ordinary person like somebody wandering down the street next to solar you don't walk up to missouri hi i'm bob johnson from nbc news you might know me this is my camera uses a light summer put up a number of microphone and studies say yeah boy a stinky in that and shouldn't we have pretty stinky have lived here for thirty five years he's been staging you go to somebody sometimes just making a statement not actually asking the true question that's correct what i'm sure after all these years in the business it's hard to choose a favorite story but can you at least tell us about one of your favorite stories well i usually say my favorite story is the next one member's webinar on for forty years but i was just thinking today about a guy whose name is fred benson and i went out to do a story on a little island called block island which is off the coast of rhode island based on a little clip from them in the associated press because it was funny he was nineteen years old at the time and if you were sixteen years old and wanting to get a driver's license on block island yet a go for it and so i thought their beaches

got a funny in a park over here you know but the more we got to know about fred we found out that he was an orphan who came to block island at eight years old and never left he was taken in by a family at and on saturday nights all the farm families will have parties and i would brag on their kids and the guy who took him fred burton milligan got up and point a best all of his kids and said you keep an eye on fred benson you see what he did fred became the police chief the fire chief that have a rescue squad head of the chamber commerce they started a baseball league soccer league when he was in his fifties and they repented the island is changing from farms to tourism he figured well there we don't need hotels so i went to college he got a dream came back and talk shop and he ended up teaching all three of the major contractors who are there and i find out from the granddaughter of girton overcame that fred still lived in the same room

in their house then he moved into at age eight for eighty two years and the room is undefeated and i said and you caress in the canal where small town decides he has plenty of money so really she's at and he won the rhode island state lottery a few years back and it was five million dollars so he threw himself a birthday party invited every family on the island a common announced any kids want to go to college he would send them and he set up a bank account for that purpose we shot the story of pitchers start off to be just a funny little ha ha and were waiting for the ferry to come to take us back and friends with us and he's looking at this lighthouse and he looked at me he says i hope mr maliki knows how it turned out great story and a story that turned into something far different than what you thought it was going to really happens all time and it's because of that non question you know you just you know say hey

fred listeners are more of a story here that i know you just get to talk and and and people open up it's the same thing like if you're an adult airline flight going back to grandma's house and you're somewhat halfway interested in it i said next year in the center seat he tell you about how they stabbed her daughter in us stock was really you know that things that you would never tell anybody else until a stranger if you're halfway interested in georgia's you jump into another question you must sit next to some interesting things well let's move on to another question here though we know that the newspaper industry has been struggling network tv news is struggling to someone and we also know that young people and many other internet users don't want to pay for news these are all things we've we've learned over the last twenty five years or so what's going to happen to the future of the news business people like you and i you know grew up reading newspapers watching likely on the network where i'm

more optimistic than i've been in the last ten years and the reason for it is is this i worked for nbc for forty years and i believe at the last five i've got a job even though i'm past sixty five because of the internet i mean the today show gets about forty six million people a morning watching my american stories afterwards ago on electronic shelf and over a period of about five to six months worldwide some little stories of got twenty million views and it's not just a click on the internet they're fresh with a sitter a fifteen second commercial to watch it so what i thought would be the boogeyman until our jobs is actually get me a reason to be able to go back to the bean counters and say i know it's times as opposed to dollars but twenty million times and bad and so maybe we could have the production to do you know the kind of story that you and i would like to do as in depth so you know people who are paying paychecks at their main job now is to

make sure they have some revenue in it it harder harder to find revenue as you can just argue quality but the one thing that people still craved and they always have this context and and more social media just falls from headline the headline the headline on some blowup in five a vote at noon tomorrow is another thing happen in that there's not enough context well if you can certainly get a little bit more protection money to add that context into its people understand and you hopefully tell if an engaging way so that you have a larger audience and you'd think you could get and i think there's some hope for the future there's no doubt it's changing the meaning by the music business they used to make their money selling records but somebody buys one record one download and it gives it a hundred friends so you're going broke but meanwhile that's why the tickets to the live concerts cost two hundred dollars a seat because that's the one thing they can't you know pass around so i was talking to somebody on the room five but more the drummers

he said you know the beatles made all their money years ago on records we make it alive tonight so we consider a record just of the commercials for us soldier radio broadcasting television know that everything has to pay its own way or have to find a different history and two but i think that there's still a desire for what we do and and i think it's also wonderful if not everybody's doing it anymore because and pink things standup you look on npr that the cereal just won a pulitzer prize or peabody award for the major awards and it's basically a new stories that you have to download on a podcast but thats presented in such a way it is like a great radio serial even though they're written stories about real people is it is doled out in such a way that you know and charles dickens be proud because you wanna find out a little doll was actually get out of prison so i don't think the that desire has changed it come because the fact that not many

people are doing it if you're interested in trying to still do it you can figure out a way to do it but i do think the young generation coming on she takes a marketing courses because even if you're working for just one company in years past you got all the money you needed to do it you need to do from one entity like the today show and now you know i'd tweak my blog and i make sure the parts of my stuff gets on cnbc in some on msnbc in some on one stories kerry's if you even know about but comcast provides so eyes i parse it all out and every one of those places get me a penny or two and so then i end up getting the same protection money to be able to go to alaska for one go but right as market and you can just go and so on to do it because it's the right thing to do to do a great story you could do that thirty years ago because all these outlets have mobilized to make money they already have public airwaves so their church was news they give back a little bit but now they're in competition with every you know cap

and download in the world so they have to make money in order to make money you have to figure out a market what advice do you have for the next generation of bob thought something and what wisdom can you impart to journalists or aspiring journalists the golden age of any job is two weeks before you joined don't get depressed when i graduated from k u it was the depths of the vietnam war i sent out five hundred resumes and there are only five hundred and twenty television stations in the country at the time and i have three replies to have said no way and the third was the nbc station up on the city which is the only other job i had before i went to the network my grandmother who lived in hiawatha kansas what i call her up and she could finally see what it did for a living covered up on the network he was so convinced that i should have been a lawyer michael grabell i said well did you see that story on the today show

years well what to think long thoughts you know the trade not going to keep then you for doolin his work a day you will spare of the day and became a running joke about koran friday's instagram or a check for them again so i mean the young generation coming up that it takes people my age and even younger than me you know there was that look out over the landscape in the syrian authorities are gone and no way is that work for you and it does seem tough but on the other hand that's an opportunity for you to create a business model not just an opportunity to do that the lovely stuff you like to do on regular tv or on the internet but a way to pay for them when she figured out a dude that guy's a limit because not many other people are doing that they're just they're on satisfying themselves by just doing the status quo and that works for only so long before you get fired i was talking to young journalist today she said we don't have to

actually tell stories any more big says we treat it really as a was a lesson you tweeted she said the suspect went into the mall and bought a green sweater and i said how about this a number of letters honey the gutter and a step up from you know which was the beginning of the story in which is something that people just pass over if you wanna get paid on friday you can't tell me the country western nurses and japanese poets have been writing a twitter like for centuries and they've been writing lines stick like would jesus were a rolex on his tv show i mean these are great twitter feeds so if you want to be a professional just because the format has changed doesn't mean that you know no longer have to tell stories the beauty of it is even if you've only got a little bit of talent there is a craft to it and if you'll learn the craft you can be better in all those people who write

books never get him out of the closet bob thanks for being here with us today or congratulations on getting the william allen white the war thanks to be home again that's bob dutton visiting with k pr news director j schafer shortly after winning last year's william allen white national citation awarded annually to an outstanding journalist you can hear his acceptance speech along with last week's conversation with kansas poet laureate eric mchenry as they celebrated national poetry month it's on our website a pr that pay you that edu click the news and then to a pr presents there you'll find an archive of most previous k pr presents programs again that's k pr decade you that edu i'm kay mcintyre kbr presents is a production of kansas public radio at the university of kansas rollins oh jeez

oh geez next week on npr as we wrap up the school year at the university of kansas we mark henne is one hundred fiftieth anniversary it's a look back at our earliest days at the university of kansas and a special effect with centennial edition of tv our next week and kansas public radio