Aside from that, we use our own curiosity. There may be a story that’s being covered, and we think, “I wonder how hard it was to cover the Zacarias Moussaoui story,” so we’ll start talking to some producers, maybe a couple correspondents, about the challenges that they’re facing. If we find that’s interesting, we’ll write a story about it — we’ve done some great behind-the-scenes stories like that, a day in the life of a White House correspondent was one good one that we’ve done.

So we use our own curiosity, and beyond that, when there are things that are impacting the rest of the world of journalism, we’ll delve into those, too.

BK: Hypothetical, here: What would you have done if you were around in 2004 for the 60 Minutes II story about Bush’s National Guard service? How would you have covered that, how would you have gone after that?

VV: The most often-asked question we’ve had. All I can say about that is that we would have covered it the same way that everyone else was covering it. We would have tried to talk to the people involved with that story and asked them, what about the questions that are being raised on blogs, what’s your response to those? We would have done the same thing that any other reporter would have done, under those circumstances. Whether they would have answered us, any more than they would have answered anybody else, I can’t say, because that’s up to them. The people at CBS News are under no obligation to give us anything special, that’s part of our separation that exists here. But I think they understand — at least, since I’ve been here, they understand the value of engaging in that dialogue, answering those kinds of questions. How that would have played out then, you just can’t say.

BK: Going a little broader, here: There have been a lot of stories about [public editor] Barney Calame at the Times, and I was reading a piece in the American Journalism Review that I think you were interviewed in as well, discussing kind of a backlash against transparency, at least within newsrooms. Do you sense any of that, or do you think that’s coming?

VV: One of the dangers, I think, is the tone of some of the criticism can be very personal, a little rougher than journalists are used to receiving, at least on a big scale. I think that that tends to turn some of them off from engaging in the criticism.

But I think for the most part, most journalists today, no matter what they’re doing, whether it’s a newspaper reporter or a TV network producer, I think they understand that we’re living in a new environment where transparency is just a necessity of that environment. I think the real perhaps danger in transparency is allowing that kind of thing — criticism, or fear of criticism, or anything like that — to affect the way that journalists do their job. I have not seen any evidence of that. I think that’s the danger of going maybe a little too far with transparency, but I think that everybody sort of understands that we live in this new media environment. How it’s going to look ten years from now, I think nobody really knows, but I think people understand you’ve got to be transparent to some degree.

BK: What would you do if somebody came to you and said, you get the CBS evening newscast, do with it what you want. How would you change it? Would you distribute it differently? Would you do more online stuff? Would you speed up the pace of it — how would you handle it?

VV: Boy, that’s a tough question. That’s why I’m a writer and a critic, and not an executive.

I think that within any journalism, I think the important thing is to be fair, accurate and try to get at the truth as you see it. What kind of platform you serve that on, or whatever, is, I think, secondary to the main mission of journalism, when you’re trying to tell stories, you’re trying to get the news out, and I think as long as you do those things well, as long as you get the basics covered, I think that you’re going to do just fine.

The rest of it is sort of above my pay grade. I don’t necessarily want to be in that pay grade, and frankly, we don’t spend a lot of time talking about those kinds of things on the blog, because what we’re interested in is the journalism — not the delivery systems, not the things that go around the journalism, but the actual journalism itself, and I think as long as those basics are strong, you’re going to be fine, regardless of what kind of platform you’re on.

• 1
• 2