All Blog Posts from Public Eye

In the current issue of the New Yorker, Seymour Hersh has an explosive profile of Army Major General Antonio M. Taguba, who was responsible for the investigation into the affairs of Abu Ghraib. While it’s usually wise to read Hersh’s work with a skepticism meter up higher than usual, as his stories frequently rely in part on unnamed sources, his piece on Taguba is entirely on-the-record with the now-retired soldier. The article goes chapter-and-verse into what Taguba says everyone knew, when they knew it, and how much obfuscation he believes surrounded the scandal.

Digging deeper into the story, I found that Chris Wallace of Fox News accomplished a journalistic coup when he interviewed Army General David Petraeus on yesterday’s “Fox News Sunday” for what Wallace billed as “his first appearance ever on a Sunday talk show.”

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Since 1999, Rand Morrison has been executive producer of “Sunday Morning,” and before then, worked on almost every other CBS News broadcast in a host of different behind-the-scenes roles – he was the executive producer of CBS News Productions, senior broadcast producer for “Public Eye with Bryant Gumbel” and “48 Hours” as well as a senior producer for “Eye to Eye with Connie Chung.” Before then, he was a producer for the weekend editions of the “Evening News” and a broadcast producer for the “Morning News.” He began at CBS News in 1982 as a writer for “Nightwatch,” the network’s former overnight news broadcast. Got a question for Rand? Submit it via e-mail or in comments.

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Each week we invite someone from outside PE to weigh in with their thoughts about CBS News and the media at large. This week, we asked Stephen Warley, a digital media strategist at 602 Communications and contributor to the blog LostRemote. He's also the author two more blogs, Broadcast Web Ideas and Digital Video Jobs. In the past, he has also contributed to various CBS broadcasts including "Sunday Morning" and "The Early Show." Below, Stephen suggests that "Sunday Morning" become its own production company or a separate division at CBS News. As always, the opinions expressed and factual assertions made in “Outside Voices” are those of the author, not ours, and we seek a wide variety of voices. Here's Stephen:

Growing up I always remember my father regularly tuning in to watch “his buddy” Charles Kuralt on CBS “Sunday Morning.” It was a special ritual for him, particularly as someone who doesn’t watch much television.

Twenty years later, the show that provided my father with such solace gave me my start in media. I was “paid” to go to journalism school, learning from the best storytellers in broadcasting.

After just two years, I left “Sunday Morning” because I felt there was no future for me in broadcasting as it was known. Most people thought I was crazy for leaving. What I have come to understand about the future of media is what people like my father understood all along: “Sunday Morning” wasn’t a show, but rather an experience, a feeling. Going forward, successful media companies will be organized around a specific niche or the communities they serve, not a platform like broadcasting or even the Web.

This got me thinking: what if “Sunday Morning” was turned into its own company or even just a separate division of CBS News? Seriously. It serves a timeless “niche,” the celebration of the human spirit and our need to create beautiful things. Its brand could easily extend across multiple platforms -- and talk about the possibilities for community-generated content! Here’s my pitch for “Sunday Morning,” Inc. ...

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In January, CBS "Sunday Morning" aired a report by contributor David Pogue that discussed a data-recovery service called DriveSavers as part of a report on what to do when you lose information stored on your computer. Pogue also did the story for National Public Radio and the New York Times. What Pogue failed to mention in his "Sunday Morning" segment, as San Francisco Weekly's Matt Smith pointed out last week, was that Drivesavers repaired Pogue's personal computer for free. (The company normally charges $2,000 or more.)

A DriveSavers rep said Pogue's fee had been waived as a "professional courtesy," not as a de facto payment for good publicity. "In my view, that's a pretty significant violation of journalism's ethical conventions, ones I would have expected to have been in force at the gold standards of American print, television, and radio journalism," wrote Smith. "How is a reader, or viewer, or listener, to know a journalist's analysis is on the up and up if a writer receives expensive goodies from a story subject?"

On Sunday, seemingly in response to Smith's inquiry, Charles Osgood apologized on "Sunday Morning." Here's his statement in full:

In January, we aired a report by contributor David Pogue about your computer hard drive and what to do when all is lost – when you fear that novel you've been working on for years is lost forever. David did the same story for the New York Times back in September and in it he wrote that one of the companies reviewed in his on-line column had performed hard drive repairs on his computer on a complimentary basis, which is to say he got the repairs for free. In our "Sunday Morning" version of the story, however, he failed to mention that as he should have, and furthermore, CBS News standards bar any of us from accepting free goods or services. To make a long story short, David apologizes, and so do we.

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"Sunday Morning" was kind enough to invite me to explain our mission in a commentary. Having watched the program for years, it was a real thrill to have the chance to contribute. It's not quite as soothing as five minutes with the Swallows of Capistrano, but hopefully it alerted a few folks to our mission. In case you missed it, here's what aired this morning. Hope you enjoy.

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One of the most frequent lamentations about the news is that most of it is negative. There isn’t enough reporting on good news from Iraq. Like a disease, the airwaves become regularly infected with a juicy celebrity murder story … or a frightening story about the threat of disease and infection.



Yet, it looks as though news outlets are looking to find some good news these days.



NBC “Nightly News” recently began a series (that may become a permanent part of the broadcast) called "Making A Difference" which "highlights positive stories, such as an optometrist who delivers glasses to Third World countries, or actress Maria Friedman battling breast cancer while continuing to star on Broadway" as USA Today’s Peter Johnson described it. He added that “media outlets have traditionally aired or published such fare periodically, usually after gripes from viewers or readers that the news is all negative.”



Indeed, in a recent Daily Nightly entry, John Reiss, the executive producer of the broadcast said as much -- that the newscast gets a “large chunk” of e-mail from viewers “who simply ask, ‘Why don't you air more good news?’”

“‘Making a Difference’ didn't happen by accident,” wrote Reiss. “It happened because we saw a need, and we saw that need because we heard you. Senior Producer Sharon Hoffman pitched some story ideas about individuals who were changing people's lives for the better. The more the staff talked about the stories, the more we realized we had something special: legitimate good news stories, stories that were not about planes landing safely, but were about people who were, yes, making a difference.”

NBC isn’t the only outlet spreading the good news.

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Conventional wisdom among television advertisers has always been that the 18-49-year-old demographic is the ideal target audience. Younger viewers are assumed to be more impressionable to ads, more imprudent with their spending and more likely to get hooked on a product if they are exposed to it at a young age. But “CBS Sunday Morning” attempted to parse that wisdom this week, suggesting that this model might actually quite out of touch. And, apparently, the folks at “Sunday Morning” weren’t the only ones who wondered about the reliability of that school of thought. If you didn’t catch the segment, check out the story here.

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“CBS News Sunday Morning” on Sept. 4 featured a commentary by “Sunday Morning” contributor Nancy Giles, an actress and comedian, who discussed the federal response to the Katrina disaster, in which she included comments such as:

“If the majority of the hardest hit victims of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans were white people, they would not have gone for days without food and water, forcing many to steal for mere survival.”

We received this e-mail from viewer Rod D. regarding the segment:

“Your network having Nancy Giles as a commentator is a true joke. What are her credentials for giving her biased views? Has your network learned nothing from Rathergate? Until you wake up, people will keep tuning you out.”

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