Announcer A:
Today and every day the American people must make decisions on which their whole survival may depend. To make sound decisions the people must be informed. For this they depend on the nation's free press. How well is the nation's press doing its essential job? The people have a right to know the truth. They have a responsibility to ask. The right to question. The Press and the People.
As Moderator from Harvard University, the winner of the Peabody Award for television and radio journalism and the Lauterbach Award for outstanding contributions in the field of civil liberties, Mr. Louis Lyons.
Lyons:
Our guests are two of the most perceptive commentators on radio and television.
Announcer A:
One guest is a veteran of twenty years with CBS, a war correspondent on three continents, winner of a dozen awards, and chief of CBS
Washington Bureau – Mr. Eric Sevareid.
Announcer B:
Mr. Sevareid says, and I quote: "The bigger our information media, the less courage and freedom of expression they allow. Bigness means weakness."
Announcer A:
Our other guest was also a distinguished war correspondent, recipient of many journalism awards, a
Washington correspondent for sixteen years, now with NBC – Mr. Martin Agronsky.
Announcer B:
Mr. Agronsky says, quote: "The special story, the report in depth, becomes more and more difficult to keep on the air because of the tremendous rising costs of TV production."
Lyons:
Our guests then are a very special breed of radio and television journalist. They are the broadcasting counterpart of our nationally syndicated columnists, our Lippmanns, our Alsops, our Childs's. They don't just read news headlines in front of a camera, they do their own reporting. They form their own news judgments. The role then of an Agronsky or a Sevareid is to get to the core of the big news and give us their digest of its meaning. Mr. Agronsky, we've heard you quoted as saying that the special news report that goes into news in depth is disappearing from television because of the very high cost. Won't you explain?
Agronsky:
Mr. Lyons, it really doesn't need an elaborate explanation. It means exactly what I said. It costs so much for anyone to take an hour, let us say, of television time on a network basis that only the greatest corporations can afford it. And the greatest corporations, faced with that kind of cost, are inclined to compare the costs that they put out for a news program to the costs that they would put out for an entertainment program – for a shoot-'em-up western.
And finding that the ratings and, in their opinion, the audience is infinitely smaller for the news program, they don't care to spend their money that way. Therefore, considering that a major network costs so much for any large corporation to sponsor a new special, the inclination is more and more not to do it and to spend that kind of money for what they regard as something that would get them a larger audience. And fundamentally, that's what I meant by that observation.
Lyons:
Thank you, let's get back to that. And first, Mr. Sevareid, you say that the larger a news medium, the less chance there is in it for courage and freedom of expression. Won't you discuss that a minute?
Sevareid:
Yes, Mr. Lyons, I think it's axiomatic. I think that courage of controversy, courage of innovation in the realm of ideas goes in inverse ratio to size of the establishment. And that's very simple. I think it's because, first, that the investment in any given item that is produced – whether it is a TV program or a Hollywood movie or a big mass magazine, any individual issue – is so such an enormous investment, that they must find a great denominator in terms of audience, whether it is the lowest common denominator or not. The risk is too great. This is not true of the small capitalized media, like the stage or book publishing or small magazines.
Lyons:
That is, the bigger the stake, the less you can afford to hazard the loss of a customer.
Sevareid:
On the whole, though of course, I must say for bigness that you can do things in terms of extensiveness. The scope of it is enormous. Small corporations could not possibly do some of the tremendous shows around the world that the great networks can do. This is, it's not all loss; I don't mean that.
Lyons:
Well Mr. Agronsky, what Mr. Sevareid has just said makes me wonder whether cost is the only reason that the networks with their sponsors don't go into some of these special programs. To what extent is it because of this concern about controversy that sponsors prefer westerns to information?
Agronsky:
Well, I think to a considerable extent. I accept Mr. Sevareid's observations completely in that area. I think both of us have had any number of experiences personally which tend to substantiate what he has said. I can cite one to you if you like.
Agronsky:
I was doing a program last year, an interview program, a half-hour interview program son NBC and I did an interview with the Reverend Martin Luther King down in Montgomery, Alabama. And as a demonstration of the kind of pressures that networks face, which is rather difficult for them to withstand, when I did the show in Montgomery, Alabama, local segregationists permitted it to go to the network but disconnected the cable that led to the local transmission. So it was cut off in Montgomery.
If you get into a segregation story, for example, the network must reckon not only with sponsors – and there I would expand Mr. Sevareid's observation – he must also reckon with regional susceptibilities. He must reckon with the sensitivity of local stations on the network who are unwilling to participate in controversial issues that directly affect their area, their district.
Sevareid:
Martin, I was going to take slight issue with you on the first thing you said – about these...
Agronsky:
Yes, go ahead, Eric.
Sevareid:
...special news programs going, declining. I'm not quite sure they are. There is one thing, this is just intramural trade talk, Mr. Lyons, but the thing that is so costly is film. CBS has eliminated a number of special news programs because they were based on film. When you get into that realm, the laboratory costs and so on are perfectly fantastic.
But I don't think this has to always mean, and I'm sure that's one of the basic reasons why "See It Now" went off as a regular or weekly or monthly program. But CBS has now started a Sunday program after cancelling the one I used to do last year and for three years that required chiefly film, which is very expensive.
Now CBS has another show, also a half hour, that Howard Smith is doing, called "Behind the News," that doesn't use anything but stock film or some stills and interviews. It is far cheaper to do. But I'm not sure that it isn't quite as good in a sense, in terms of bringing out understanding; it might even be better. I don't think there is a rule that operates here, except the rule of the cost of film.
Agronsky:
Well, put it this way, Eric: let us say that a large corporation that had been sponsoring an hour news special at a prohibitive cost, or what we might regard as prohibitive cost, had the opportunity to spend twice as much money for an entertainment program with a Bob Hope, or what have you, on it.
I'm inclined to think that the corporation and their advertising agency would not hesitate for a moment to spend twice the amount of money. It is not that they are priced out by the initial cost of the program, they are priced out by what they regard as the value received; in other words, the audience and ratings that they can get.
Sevareid:
That's right. The total cost of network broadcasting for a sponsor – this universal cross-country thing – is so fantastic, the necessity to get the greatest mass audience, that industries that can afford this, they're not great in number and they're chiefly general consumer-item things.
Agronsky:
And they are guided entirely by the return on the investment.
Sevareid:
Well, they're businessmen.
Lyons:
We're told that, and one of you suggests it, that they feel the public is more interested in the entertainment – the who-dun-it or the western – than in good news reporting. Well now, Mr. Sevareid, do you feel they underestimate the public's interest in information?
Sevareid:
I always have thought so. I've thought so. The reading of newspapers and magazines encompasses millions and millions of people in this country, but there is an extra dimension, and an extra difficulty, when you come to television. This is partly show business. It is partly entertainment. So are newspapers, but not quite the same extent. People normally do not sit down in front of the television set in the same frame of mind in which they pick up the newspaper or magazine. That is why television commercials irritate, and newspaper commercials or advertising do not.
Lyons:
Now what about radio? I think of radio as costing less and having consequently more time, as it certainly used to, for discussion. What has happened, or has the more dramatic television squeezed it out? How is the news doing in radio?
Sevareid:
Not doing well.
Agronsky:
Well Mr. Lyons, on NBC – Eric is CBS and I'm NBC – on NBC, news is doing exceptionally well on radio.
Sevareid:
In terms of finances, you mean.
Agronsky:
Well, in terms of getting sponsors, and in terms of a very, very considerable coverage that I'm inclined to feel – and this is not just a house plug – that NBC has every right to be proud of. They do have the news-on-the-hour programs, which mean five minutes of news at every hour on the hour.
Sevareid:
Is that news, Martin, really?
Agronsky:
No, it isn't. I would agree with you on that. You haven't the time.
Lyons:
Your colleague, Mr. Murrow, has said five-minute of news is not news.
Agronsky:
All right. You haven't the time, I'll grant you. Nevertheless, you can, in the time that you are left on a five-minute program – which I shudder to say is two minutes and fifteen seconds – you can take an angle and say something, not the way you would like to, not with the freedom you have in five minutes, and certainly not with the freedom you have in fifteen minutes.
But beyond that, NBC also does a great spread of feature stuff. For example, we started a thing called "Image of Russia". Now, I suggested I'd do something with Justice Douglas on a comparison of Russian and American judicial systems, and I did a half-hour radio interview with Justice Douglas. And they're running the whole thing intact, a good solid half hour. Now, you can cover a subject, and they're giving us the time to do it. Generally they are finding that news has paid on NBC and they are widening its scope all the time.
Sevareid:
It's almost the only thing that pays on radio at all, except recorded music.
Agronsky:
That's right. That's radio, not TV.
Lyons:
Well on, on television in
Washington, Mr. Agronsky, you cover
Washington, a great complex of news of great importance to us in the national government. How much total air time on all the three television networks do we get in a day on the news from
Washington?
Agronsky:
Shockingly little, shockingly little.
Sevareid:
You get very little. I don't think that the normal daily fifteen-minute network television news programs are successful in terms of content, giving people understanding. I don't think they ever can be. You'd be better off from fifteen minutes of radio, listening to somebody really giving it to you.
Lyons:
I think the only complaint we have about television news and information is whether we get enough of it.
Agronsky:
Well, you don't. Let's be specific about it. CBS carries a fifteen-minute show and NBC carries a fifteen-minute show, and ABC carries a fifteen-minute show. Now, in that fifteen minute show, you say
Washington coverage, actually what does
Washington get? At the outside,
Washington gets two or three minutes. And the rest of it is everything. Now, I defy anyone to cover
Washington in two or three minutes.
Sevareid:
Yes, but you see television did not carry over from radio the old-time radio commentator, who was palatable because you didn't have to look at him, possibly, but you could listen to his voice, his reasonably palatable voice for as long as fifteen minutes explaining news. This has not been done on television. The closest you come to it is the documentary approach, where you do a long take-out with film and interviews and some commentary, and those are rather infrequent.
Lyons:
Well what about the editorial? We expect the newspaper not only to give us news but editorial comment. Is there any reason why we should feel that the radio station should be limited just to the facts? What is the problem of getting editorial on the air?
Agronsky:
What is the problem...?
Sevareid:
No problem at all, except the people who run stations. They can do it if they wish.
Agronsky:
Certainly they can do it.
Lyons:
Would you say that the public takes a rather different attitude, judges television by a rather different standard than the newspaper, and perhaps the government does too, that makes it more difficult to get into comment?
Agronsky:
It is. It is a different standard, because you reach a tremendous number of people, and I suppose they feel that when you consider the mass audience there are certain limitations, certain criteria that they feel forced to apply to TV that do not apply to newspapers.
Sevareid:
Well, it's the sense of television, it's the sense of television, and also radio, that it is a kind of public trust that belongs to everybody. This is partly because of the way it started with government hold on it, parceling out wave lengths. It has become a national whipping boy. Newspapers are not.
And this atmosphere, coupled with endless monitoring by Congressional committees and executive people – this relationship with government which the press does not have – all this has created a situation where it takes a fairly brave station owner to go out and editorialize as a company, though I think he should.
Lyons:
I am thinking particularly of a CBS interview with Khrushchev. You remember how much criticism arose – even the President in a press conference tended to be critical of this – and yet nobody criticized a newspaper correspondent for getting an interview with Khrushchev.
Agronsky:
Exactly. Reston went over and interviewed him and nobody would say beans about it.
Lyons:
Is it because of this potential regulation by the government?
Agronsky:
No. They give a greater weight to the influence. They feel that the audience is so tremendous that there should be limitations and restrictions applied to the TV medium that are not applied to the newspapers. And I think wrongly.
Sevareid:
Then a legitimate thing is legitimate so long as it is not too big.
Lyons:
Let me take up another aspect of that. We've all heard of equal time. We know under some conditions somebody is entitled to time to reply. Well to what extent is the correspondent, the commentator, in any way held back if he is inclined to critical comment, by feeling that this may involve his station in having to give somebody fifteen minutes tomorrow night? Does that get in the way of...?
Agronsky:
Well not really, because it would be rather ludicrous. Even a politician with a rather poor sense of perspective and a poor sense of humor would feel that he was demeaning himself if he were to say, "Well, now, Sevareid or Agronsky criticized me for five minutes. I want five minutes equal time." No, not in that sense, it wouldn't operate that way.
Lyons:
Well, Mr. Agronsky, you have handled some tough assignments, including assignment to Senator McCarthy when he was active. What would be, as you think of it, the toughest one you have handled?
Agronsky:
I would say McCarthy. McCarthy proved very expensive to me on radio, very expensive indeed. When I worked for ABC, I had a co-op program, which meant individual sponsors in different cities.
And Mr. McCarthy was not above bringing pressure to bear on the individual sponsors, wherever the opportunity presented itself. I was able in specific cases – I won't name stations or cities – to determine that in such-and-such a station a sponsor dropped me because of influence brought to bear by McCarthy supporters.
Sevareid:
In fact, I think Martin once lost about twenty-four stations from one broadcast. Is that correct?
Agronsky:
Yes, I did, but that was not McCarthy, that was MacArthur. I did a broadcast on the return of General MacArthur, when he addressed the joint Congress, and I made an observation, that I don't intend to repeat, about the General that was not in my opinion it was not in bad taste, nor in my opinion was it inaccurate.
But it did not, it demonstrated that I didn't believe in, oh, I suppose, in the elevated stature that had been given to General MacArthur. Their most incredible response. I lost about – I think it was twenty-one or twenty-two stations as a result. Not stations, sponsors.
Sevareid:
I didn't have that kind of trouble, Martin, but I did have a Senator in the Midwest – over the same kind of broadcast about the same General – take a punch at me.
Lyons:
We know that a reporter needs only his pad and pencil – indeed, he doesn't always need that – to get into all sorts of places, meetings, groups, discussions. Are there places where the television reporter is barred that the reporter can get in? Does that limit the range of news that television can cover?
Agronsky:
Physically, mechanically, it's infinitely more difficult to cover the news. One of the problems in TV – I think you'd agree, Eric – in a sense you almost have to anticipate where the news is going to break.
Sevareid:
You're talking about bringing cameras in.
Lyons:
For instance, you can't, I believe, do any television in the Congress. You can in some hearings and not in others. Am I right?
Agronsky:
That's quite right.
Lyons:
I'm wondering to what extent television reporting is limited by this feeling about the camera.
Sevareid:
Well it's limited on the House side of the
Capitol because of Speaker Rayburn. He doesn't like the clutter and the fuss of cameras, though we've reduced that a great deal. On the Senate side it is up to the individual committee.
Agronsky:
It's, it's entirely up to Rayburn. I had a rather interesting experience with him just last week as a matter of fact. Mr. Sam has always been very kind to me in terms of permitting me to do interviews with him, and we did a Congressional show last Sunday. He gave me an interview, and I wanted him to sit on the rostrum. I thought it would be rather dramatic in the empty House chamber.
And he wouldn't permit it, nor would he permit us to do it in the House cloakroom or in the reading room or any place like that. He insisted on doing it in his office. He said flatly that, were he to do it, all the precedents that he had set up in this area would be broken.
Lyons:
Well, Mr. Sevareid, what would you think of as the most important stories that have not been well or sufficiently dealt with in television – current stories?
Sevareid:
Well some of them are the same kind of stories that have not been dealt with sufficiently in the press. The China story is one. We had an immense break a few weeks ago – with some initiative of our own involved, I must say – a few weeks ago, this film that got out of China from a German photographer. And here was the first real pictorial story of the Chinese Communes. I thought it was one of the greatest documentaries that television has ever done.
Agronsky:
Well, this is a restriction applied by our government however to all news media.
Lyons:
One of your
Washington colleagues, Ed Lahey, of the Knight papers, said on our program a little while ago that inflation was the hardest story to write and the worst-covered story. Later, on another program, the Harvard economist, Dr. Galbraith, said the same thing. What do you say about that?
Sevareid:
All economic problems are hard to do with pictures.
Agronsky:
It's tremendously difficult to take a thing like that and portray it. I mean, how do you picture a deflated dollar?
Sevareid:
After all, Mr. Lyons, what are the differences in news by ear and eye...
Lyons:
That's one of the things I was coming to, yes.
Sevareid:
...television and press? You can't use statistics very well, either on radio or television, for the ear alone. You can't do that well. The press can.
Lyons:
I wanted to ask you what you think of as the chief differences between newspaper and broadcasting. Are they just competitors or do they to some extent supplement each other because of different limitations?
Agronsky:
Oh I think that we can add a quality to news coverage dimension that newspapers simply cannot. I have in mind a rather obvious example – the conventions. There is an immediacy, there is a feeling, there is a sweat, there is a confusion – there is a spirit that emerges from the floor of the convention that you can go right into. You can see the people worrying and fretting and sweating and fighting and being confused and being pushed around.
And you get that quality on to the screen that no reporter can possibly capture in writing about it. Or take the McCarthy hearings, for example. Certainly the best reporter in the world could not produce the quality of Joe's voice. He couldn't do it. No matter how well you write it, you've got to hear it, you've got to see that face, you've got to see the contempt and the scorn and the caustic way with which he dealt with witnesses. You get a feeling from watching that you can't reproduce on the printed page. This is something we can do they cannot do.
Sevareid:
There are great limitations, of course, on both. Certainly. But there's one thing, one of the great difference, to put it very briefly, in radio and TV as compared to the press. In broadcast journalism you have what I would call Page 1 – a sort of front page with a sports section and an op-ed page with a few columnists or their counterparts. You don't have Pages 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 and so on. That is, stories that are important ought to be read, heard, or told but not, not important enough.
Lyons:
You have to hit the highlights.
Sevareid:
This is one reason that discourages a radio or TV reporter from pursuing certain exclusive stories. Unless they turn out to be Page 1 quality, he really can't use them much. This is one great limitation. But what Martin is talking about – this extra dimension of feeling – is tremendously important.
I recommend to anybody the speech that Archibald MacLeish gave at Minnesota on poetry and journalism. He said that understanding without feeling is not understanding. Facts are nothing by themselves.
Agronsky:
You know, I think of the segregation story, for example, Mr. Lyons. You remember that girl in, I forget what town it was, down south, a white girl who wanted to go to the school, despite the fact that Negroes were going to go to the school, was finally talked out of it, apparently by her parents or by the officials. And I always felt, I mean it struck me as a perfect example of the thing that I have in mind. That that girl, appearing on television, the quality that was evident in the way she spoke and in the way she looked which was something that could not be captured by a reporter writing it down.
Lyons:
Mr. Sevareid, as a foreign correspondent for many years, how would you rate the performance of the newspapers in foreign coverage? Take The New York Times with a great foreign service.
Sevareid:
How would I rate them among papers?
Lyons:
How would you rate it as compared to what you would like to do as a television correspondent? I'm thinking in terms of what Mr. Agronsky said about the importance of seeing the faces and the confusion at the conventions.
Sevareid:
I don't know how you can compare these two, quite different media, Mr. Lyons. I could not exist in terms of understanding foreign news without papers like the Times. But then you ask yourself, thinking again of MacLeish's distinctions about facts and real understanding, except for this massive reporting of facts, is even the great New York Times really a great medium in that sense?
I sometimes wonder. This great divorcement of factual knowledge from human understanding of things is what MacLeish called a danger to our whole civilization. I think you see it even in that paper. There was a time when there were great literary journalists – the artist at work. You don't see much of that in the press now.
Lyons:
Well now, CBS has a great foreign correspondent corps, NBC has a great foreign correspondent corps. But to what extent do they get through to us? A minute and a half from
Paris by Schoenbrun, and two minutes somewhere else – is there any chance we can get more from these men, longer term...?
Sevareid:
I would love to see it.
Sevareid:
We were better on radio some years ago in that respect, yes.
Agronsky:
Certainly there's a better chance if the networks want to do it. That's your answer.
Lyons:
Well let me ask each of you perhaps, for one last question. If you had a chance, say, to take two months off, begin tomorrow, do some special stories, your own choice, what would you most want to do, feel the most need to do?
Agronsky:
What would I most want to do? I've had in the back of my mind and the forefront of my mind for a long, long time, two stories really. One on prospects for peace. I won't go into the way I'd like to do it, but...
Lyons:
Prospects for peace, yes.
Agronsky:
The prospects for peace. Through the mouths and ideas - people all over the world and statesmen, that's...
Lyons:
Well Mr. Severeid, if you've got a [inaudible] story you'd like to...
Sevareid:
Oh I don't know really, there are a lot of things that fascinate me I'd like to see done. I'd love to see television do a whole series on the Beat Generation, in this country, England, and a lot of places. What is all this? The philosophy, the music, the rest of it? China. There are lots of things, there's no end.
Lyons:
Well I'm sure there's no end. Thank you very much, gentlemen. Well the old newspaper cliché, that you give people what they want, has a special twist in television. Here we see the individual advertiser, the sponsor, decides whether people want news or entertainment, controversy or comics. And this has seriously complicated the problem of getting news information through what is chiefly a medium of entertainment. And as we have seen, our television journalists are concerned about this problem, and clearly it is our problem too. Well until next week at this time on The Press and the People, this is Louis Lyons.