Q & A
Weighing Anchor
As the start of his final year, Tom Brokaw takes stock and looks ahead.
At the end of the 2004 presidential campaign, Tom Brokaw will retire as anchor and managing editor of NBC Nightly News, marking the first shift in a broadcast evening news anchor job in twenty years. Brokaw, sixty-three, covered his first presidential campaign in 1968. NBC Nightly News, the top-rated evening newscast for the last seven years, attracts ten million viewers a night, outranking ABC World News Tonight and The CBS Evening News. But all three programs today must compete for attention among a cacophony of increasingly partisan voices on cable, the Internet, and radio. Brokaw talked with Jane Hall about campaign ’04, the future of TV news, conservative attacks on “liberal” media, the war in Iraq, and his plans for the future.
What are you aiming to do in your political coverage this time?
It’s early yet — but I think people want to get well beyond Washingtonspeak, beyond all the fine-print arguments to the larger issues of values and character and integrity and the big picture. I think there’s a whole body of American voters out there who feel like they’ve been shut out of the process in some fashion. That’s one of the things that I’m going to be keenly aware of this time.
The mainstream media initially missed the strength of Howard Dean’s campaign. Was that because Dean was succeeding through the Internet — or because Dean’s message was so strongly antiwar, and the conventional wisdom at the time was that such a message was suicide?
I think it was a combination of those things. I also don’t think that you can discount the tepid response of Dean’s opposition to his early gains — it gave him running room in a way that not even Dean could have anticipated. But this speaks to what’s going on out there — which is that Dean is generating a new constituency of voters in the Democratic Party, and reaching them through the Internet. We’re always a beat behind on that technology.
NBC is the only major broadcast network that has a cable-news outlet. How do you see MSNBC and NBC working together in Campaign 2004?
Well, I hope we’ll be greater than the sum of our parts. Politics works really well for us.
Tell me how.
We’ll be able to give two hours, for example, to the Democratic candidates’ debates in Iowa and then in South Carolina in January. They’ll air live on MSNBC and then be repeated there in prime time. And then NBC News programming will be able to take great chunks out of those debates for NBC News programs such as Nightly News, and the Today Show.
But the debates won’t be aired in prime time on the NBC network.
These debates will not be, but you know what? Cable penetrates 70 percent of American audiences now. People who want to find these debates can find these debates — it’s not that we’ve put a wall around them.
This is where the world is today — there’s a wealth of political news out there today, and people have many more choices.
What about the argument that these debates should be on broadcast because broadcast reaches most people?
You know what? When it gets down to the two candidates [the Democratic and Republican presidential nominees], it is on broadcast. But in these preliminary debates — the election is a year away — we’re not even in spring training here yet.
When you’ve got Carol Mosley Braun and Al Sharpton and other candidates who are down there in the single-digit range, who are necessarily going to be involved in these debates, you’re not going to get anybody to watch them on the network. I could put these primary debates on the Internet and have more viewers than I would if I put them on NBC, the over-the-air network.
But cable — which gets into a fantastic percentage of American homes — is there for the people who want to watch the primary debates. This is not state-run television. And the idea that there’s not a wealth of political information — on the broadcast evening news programs, the NewsHour on PBS, the Sunday shows, the weekend Today and Good Morning, America shows, all-news cable, CSPAN, the Internet — is just folly.
The Media Research Center, the conservative media watchdog group, has been getting a lot of attention for its reports alleging liberal bias in the media. They’ve been severely critical of Peter Jennings’s and ABC World News Tonight's reporting before the war in Iraq — and their reports get a lot of pickup on the Internet, through e-mails and on cable talk shows.
Look, I’ve been dealing with this myself since the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement, when reporters were accused of having a liberal bias.
The fact of the matter is, if I don’t establish a bond with the NBC News audience that is based on my credibility and my integrity, then I go out of business. We’ve been doing this for a long time. NBC Nightly News still has the largest single audience of any media outlet, print and electronic, in the news business. The simple test is that if people thought I had a bias, they wouldn’t watch me.
What is the impact, do you think, of a steady drumbeat of such criticism? Does it not have an impact on the network?
It is a little wearying, but you’ve got to rise above it and take it case by case. Most of the cases are pretty flimsily made. I’m glad that Peter, Dan, and I have been doing this long enough that we’re confident in our own abilities to withstand that. I understand the Rush Limbaughs of the world. I have less trouble with that. That’s who he is and what he does — and he’s very skillful at it. Rush has a strong point of view — and that’s fine. What I get tired of is Brent Bozell [president of the Media Research Center] trying to make these fine legal points everywhere every day. A lot of it just doesn’t hold up. So much of it is that bias — like beauty — is in the eye of the beholder.
So it hasn’t impacted the way you cover stories?
No, it hasn’t. We work very hard at trying to determine what the facts are on a weekly basis — and that’s a full-time job. I don’t have time to engage in some kind of a conspiracy.
You and Tim Russert had Rush Limbaugh on as an analyst in the midterm elections in 2002. Was that in any way an attempt to speak to the criticism from conservatives?
Rush Limbaugh is a powerful force in this country — and a smart guy. I watched him — he was invited to address the freshman class in Congress in 1994 when Newt Gingrich took hold of Congress. You know, Rush has gone to a different level.
Your conservative critics would probably say that you decided you needed some more conservatives on the air.
Well, they may say that. But I thought that we asked Limbaugh some difficult questions about the deficit and other policies, and it’s worth hearing what he has to say about the election returns. If I were out there with a team of supersleuths, I could find, I suppose, a reason from day to day to find liberal bias one day and a conservative bias the next day on some given story.
So you don’t see a liberal bias in the mainstream media?
No. Speaking generally, people who are drawn to journalism are interested in what happens from the ground up less than they are from the top down. And they see that part of their role — which I think is appropriate — is to represent the views of those who are underrepresented in the social context or the political context and to make sure that they’re not overlooked and that their wrongs get the bright light of journalistic sunshine. And therefore, because of the nature of what we cover, people may think that we’re biased. But the fact is, that’s part of the obligation of journalism.
Many of my students do not share my reverence for watching the broadcast evening newscasts. They get their news from a lot of different sources, including the Internet. Does it trouble you that we don’t seem to be growing the next generation of viewers for broadcast news?
I’m thrilled that they have so many choices — and I think we in broadcast news have to earn our place in that spectrum of choices. Think of how happy you would have been in college, as a political junkie, as I would have been, with something like the Internet. I could’ve gotten home from class in the afternoon — or when I slept in and didn’t go to class — and not have had to wait till 6:30 at night to find out what was going on.
What we have to do is put this in a coherent form for them at the end of the day, and on the big events, give them the kind of context that they deserve. And, also, be responsive to the issues that are of interest to them — and put before them issues they may not have had time to think about but are going to have profound effects on their lives.
Are you trying to talk to them about subjects other than capital-gains taxes?
Yes. I think they are paying a lot more attention to news now, by the way, in part because of national-security issues. A lot of young people have friends or family in the military today. The other big issue is the so-called entitlements and how they’re going to have to pay for them. There are other issues for them like housing — and how about the cost of education in America? How about what they’re going to do about getting any kind of job stability? These are some of the ideas we’ll be paying attention to.
Some TV critics are talking about your departure from Nightly News as if it’s the removal of one of the figures from Mt. Rushmore. Do you view this as some giant generational shift?
Well, I am leaving next year. So it’s left to another generation to figure this out. What I think is that every generation really develops its own set of sources for information based on the constant evolution of technology.
You know, when I was fifteen years old, and Chet Huntley and David Brinkley came on the air, it was a revelation. It was a fifteen-minute newscast. But there in South Dakota, we got this astonishing window on the world every night at 6:45. Now, if I lived in Yankton, I could dial up the BBC and Jim Lehrer and get the three networks and get Fox and MSNBC and CNN. I could go to the Internet and read The New York Times. Our obligation at the network is where do we fit into that and how can we best capitalize on that to make sure that our piece of that remains important to those young people. There has been some research, by the way, that shows that, as people are coming up into their parenting ages, they gravitate back to the evening news.
That’s good to hear — some of the trends in terms of sheer audience size are not encouraging. I grew up that way.
Yes, but you grew up without cell phones. You grew up without Gatorade. You grew up . . .
I grew up watching the broadcast evening news.
It’s not that these kids don’t have access to plenty of information about what’s going on — they do.
Does that put more of a burden for context in your stories?
Yes, but that’s been true for some time. We’re not doing the wire service of the air. By the time people get to us, they know what’s happened that day.
Let me ask you about Fox News.
Don’t overstate Fox News — I mean, they’re enormously successful, but it’s still the most successful niche, is what it is
The spectrum now has spread out so much. But the broadcast networks still have the biggest chunk of that spectrum. When you get into the cable niches, Fox has the biggest cable niche. But it’s still much smaller than the least of the network niches.
What I think is that Fox has done a very smart job of carving out their place.
How would you describe that place?
Well, it’s a lively, right-of-center opinionated all-news channel.
I think Fox would say that they had an attitude about the war that was, We are going to war.
It’s the tabloid approach . . . You know, I’m not going to get into this — I don’t have time to get into this — I worry about what NBC is doing.
So you’re not going to get into a critique of Fox News.
No.
In terms of the coverage of the war in Iraq, NBC was rated the most balanced among the three broadcast networks and Fox by the Center for Media and Public Affairs, a media watch group that analyzed a month of prime-time coverage during the war. Is that a compliment? How do you think we’re going to look back on this? I went back and looked at your interview with George W. Bush.
Well, it’s really easy to look back and say I should’ve asked Bush about this. But what I was asking him about was what was going on at the time. The fact is, Bill Clinton thought there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. So did Hans Blix, because he told the U.N. Security Council that there were all these nerve agents that hadn’t been accounted for yet. That interview reflected what we knew at the time. If I were to do that interview again today, I’d have a different set of questions for him.
Well, I wasn’t criticizing your interview. I just wonder how do we deal with this question of objectivity in journalism if we don’t necessarily have all the facts?
Well, that’s always been the case. We didn’t have the full facts in Vietnam. That’s the place of journalism — to keep turning over the rocks, keep pounding on the doors.
When the history of the coverage of the war in Iraq is written, do you think we’re going to look back and say, Maybe we should’ve had more independent reporting?
Well, honestly, if you go back and look at it, it was pretty damn good. We reported as best as we knew about what was going on.
You mean in the walkup to the war?
Yes. And in the U.N. coverage — in which the French and the Germans had a full say on the American networks. We raised a lot of the questions that were being raised by a lot of people. But the fact is that Congress voted overwhelmingly to approve the war — and we had to reflect that. And no one knew for a fact what was going on on the ground — and the intelligence that we were able to learn on our own turned out not to be true, a lot of it. But we had no way of knowing that at the time.
The Bush Administration . . .
They play hardball.
How?
They play hardball like every administration does. They push their position very hard.
Do you agree that there’s been a turn now in coverage of Iraq, and we’re not getting the “other side” of the story — the positive side?
No, that’s just not true. I went to Iraq in July, a hundred days into the war. And what I said then holds up — I said it’s a checkerboard. You know, this square is a disaster, that square seems to be working pretty well; that one’s pretty fragile. And that’s what we’ve been reflecting. We’ve had stories on about the free press and about voting and about the Iraqi police being trained by outsiders. We’ve had stories about American families who’ve been in exile and went back there and were thrilled with what was going on.
What are you going to do when you step down from anchoring NBC Nightly News? Are you going to run for office?
No. God no [laughs]. I’m not equipped to run for office. I’m honestly trying to decide. It will be some extension of what I’ve done most of my life. I’ll do some television, I’ll do probably some more writing. I’m a journalist. That’s what I’ve always been.
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