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It's Thursday, and that means it's time for the Public Eye Chat. This week's subject is CBS News National Correspondent Byron Pitts, who reported this week’s “Philadelphia: City Under Siege” investigative piece – where he took a look at the crime rate in the City of Brotherly Love.

Matthew Felling: I remember “Boys in the Hood” back in the ‘90s. I remember the debate over midnight basketball leagues – urban violence was on the front burner. Those stories have abated, so viewers likely think things have improved. What are you seeing on the streets of America?

Byron Pitts: Truth be told, in most places, street crime didn’t diminish. America’s attention just went elsewhere. In Philadelphia, for example, they’ve had a steady increase in the murder rate in the past six years – with the expectation that it’s going to go up this year. Already in Philadelphia this year, there’s been one person killed per day. This past Sunday, five people were killed.

I spent some time with the Philadelphia Police Commissioner, a guy named Sylvester Johnson. An old school cop, a cop’s cop. Been in the force for over 40 years. When I asked him ‘What happened all of a sudden to make violent crime such a pressing issue?’ He looked at me like I was crazy. He said ‘Where have you been? It didn’t just get bad yesterday or last year. It’s been bad for a growing number of years.’

In the case of Philadelphia over the past few years, their police department has gotten smaller – while others, like New York City, have gotten larger. Philadelphia has some of the laxest gun laws in the country. We found that in a number of neighborhoods in Philadelphia, it’s probably easier for a kid to get a handgun than a cell phone.

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It's Thursday, and that means it's time for the latest installment of the Public Eye Chat. This week's participant is CBS News National Correspondent Byron Pitts. You can listen to the interview below, as well as read excerpts from our conversation. (We had a little technical difficulty, alas, and the first few seconds of the interview were cut off. When things pick up, Pitts is addressing this question: "What do you think of the quality TV News today? Is it better or worse than it used to be?")

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Click here to listen to the interview.

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Brian Montopoli: Regarding the "Evening News," do you think that it has changed significantly – and if so how has it changed – since Katie Couric came on board?

Byron Pitts: I think it's changed significantly…the "Evening News" has changed and will continue to change. And I think in many ways change is good. For one, just from the historic significance of having the first woman anchor of a major network nightly newscast is huge. It's significant. I'm a parent. I have daughters. And I like the idea that my daughters can watch the nightly news and see someone of their same sex presenting the news and presenting the possibilities they may have as young women. I think it's significant in our society that positions of leadership in our country have always been primarily held by white men. And so the notion that I'm part of a network that broke that mold by having the first woman I feel great about. And I hope it's a sign of things to come, not just at CBS News but in broadcast news across the board.

Brian Montopoli: Does the show feel different to you than it did – is there a different sensibility that reflects Katie? Not necessarily the fact that she's a woman, but her personality? Or the fact that she's a woman?

Byron Pitts: I think also her age. She's younger than the anchors of yesteryear. I can't think of any particular – I only have one example. I remember early on, a few months ago, we did a story about one of the elite schools, maybe it was Harvard, doing away with its early admissions program. And I know that Katie, not as a woman, but as a parent of daughters approaching college age, that story was significant to her. I'm someone with children approaching college age. It was significant to me. I'm not sure that in the era of Bob Schieffer or Dan Rather that that story would have registered to have been a piece in the broadcast in a given night.

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Not long after Russ Mitchell was named co-anchor of “The Early Show,” he got a call from Eric Deggans, a media critic at the St. Petersburg Times. Deggans was working on a piece about diversity at CBS News, a story spurred by a spate of recent news involving African-American CBS News correspondents. First came the death of longtime “60 Minutes” correspondent Ed Bradley, who passed away on Nov. 9. Less than a month later, CBS announced that René Syler would be leaving “The Early Show,” where she has been co-anchor since October 2002. A few days after that came word that Mitchell would become the hard news anchor of “The Early Show,” starting in January.

Deggans, who is black, asked Mitchell if he felt his race had something to do with him being offered the anchor job. Mitchell, who says he has never been asked such a question,* later characterized it as “insulting.”

“You'd like to think once you hit a certain level that your credentials stand on their own,” says Mitchell. “Nobody's denying who they are. I’m proud of being a black journalist. What I have a problem with, and I think anybody would have a problem with, is someone making an assumption that the only reason you got something was because of the color of your skin.”

Deggans' piece, "When it comes to color, CBS News pales," discussed what he called "the network's ongoing struggle to develop new talent" when it comes to journalists of color. (The other news networks, he claimed, have the same problem.) After noting that Bradley and other journalists were hired in the 1970s to "answer criticisms over the lack of race and gender diversity in network news," Deggans lamented the fact that "[t]hree decades later, CBS has not found the next Ed Bradley."

“It is very difficult because as I explained to several people that I talked to for this column, I'm not trying to denigrate anybody's achievements,” says Deggans. “These are questions that I feel have to be asked.” Deggans argues that African-American journalists cannot "totally remove themselves from the notion they're a symbol."

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The increasing popularity of video-sharing sites like YouTube has indeed raised a number of questions for television networks, and for CBS News, about where to draw the line. That line, of course, is between protecting the ownership of their content and exploiting the promotional value of such content appearing on sites like YouTube.

We’ve treaded this ground before, most notably when Steve Hartman’s segment on high school basketball player Jason McElwain generated a whole lot of buzz – especially on YouTube, where video of the segment became the most viewed item on the site one week, generating more than 1 million viewers. It generated a lot of attention for the broadcast, but it also raised some copyright issues. CBS News eventually contacted YouTube and asked that the video be removed from the site, as it had been used without permission from the network. At the time, Senior Vice President and General Manager of CBSNews.com Betsy Morgan told us: "It's uncool for people to take our video without permission. It's interesting and encouraging that there's that much of an audience for our content. But this stuff should come back to the core site – otherwise it's theft."

Several months later, however, it looked like CBS’ relationship with YouTube was changing. Sean McManus, told TV Week: “You’ve got to find the fine line between the great promotion YouTube gives a network, and protecting our rights. Our inclination now is, the more exposure we get from clips like that, the better it is for CBS News and the CBS television network, so in retrospect we probably should have embraced the exposure, and embraced the attention it was bringing CBS, instead of being parochial and saying ‘let’s pull it down.’”

It appears there is another element of video-sharing sites like YouTube that poses a different kind of problem, one that arose recently with a story aired on the “Evening News” last Thursday.

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With the six month anniversary of Hurricane Katrina imminent, CBS News is ramping up its coverage of the Gulf Coast. Tonight's "Evening News" will include a story on the town of Pearlington, Mississippi, which was one of the poorest towns in the nation's poorest state even before the disaster. Now, as correspondent Byron Pitts will report, it's barely even functioning.

I spoke to Pitts about the story that he and producer Jack Renaud put together for tonight's broadcast. Specifically, I wanted to know how they found the people featured in the story.

"All you have to do is show up in a place like this and they walk over to you and tell you their story," says Pitts. "People are in such desperate need of help that they are willing to talk to anyone who might help their cause."

It's a different dynamic, he says, than in some other situations, where there are people who want to talk to you largely out of a desire to be on television. The people in Pearlington, he says, seem to have lost that impulse. But they're still happy to see the press. "When we got out of this car we saw this one guy who seemed very edgy," says Pitts. "He thought we were from FEMA. But when we said we were from CBS he broke into this big smile."

In addition to simply talking to the people they found on the street, Pitts and Renaud looked for ideas at "PearlMart," which is a clothing store/grocery store/shower area/gathering place that has been established in an old grade school gymnasium. It was there they were told about Max and Gloria Dunwoody, who made it into the report. Max has emphysema, and his wheelchair was too small for his FEMA trailer. The CBS News team felt he was a good human face for the story of Pearlington, a town that Pitts says seems to have been left to languish by the federal government.

In a sense, Pitts and Renaud were lucky to have an information clearinghouse like PearlMart available to them. According to CBS National Editor Bill Felling, reporters often rely on a "serendipitous factor" in order to find the best way to tell a story – in other words, they embark on traditional shoe leather reporting and hope that one of the people they talk to either turns out to be or leads them to an interesting subject.

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