All Blog Posts from Public Eye

It's Thursday, and that means it's time for the Public Eye Chat. This week's subject is CBS News producer Max McClellan. Oops. Make that Emmy-Winning producer Max McClellan.

Matthew Felling: You won your first Emmy. I feel like I should ask you if you’re going to Disney World. How's it feel?

Max McClellan: It's feels terrific - and lucky. In my case, I was lucky to be working with Lara Logan and Jeff Newton, who shot some extraordinary material in Ramadi and then let me join them to help put it together.

Matthew Felling: As a producer for Lara Logan, what does your job entail?

Max McClellan: I work with Lara to develop stories around the world for the CBS Evening News. She spends a lot of her time in Baghdad, of course, but when she's not there, she still keeps extremely busy. Aside from Iraq, we've done stories in India, Darfur, South Africa, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Israel and Syria in the last year. People often ask me if she's indefatigable. Yep.

Matthew Felling: Tell me about the story that won the award.

Max McClellan: This was a two-part series that aired on the Evening News in May 2006. Lara and her Associate Producer from 60 Minutes, Jeff Newton, spent several weeks living and working alongside US Marines in Ramadi, Iraq. At the time, Ramadi was the operational center of Al Qaeda in Iraq and one of the bloodiest frontlines in the war on terror. These Marines were involved in heavy, daily, street by street battles with the insurgents. Lara and Jeff were with them every step of the way and captured an up-close view of the war that had rarely been seen. For me, the material they shot and the interviews they did were extraordinary, not only because it gave our audience a glimpse of the intense fighting going on, but also because it showed the bravery and humanity with which these soldiers conducted themselves every day.

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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 Capitol Hill producer Allison Davis O’Keefe.

Matthew Felling: What do you do on Capitol Hill for CBS News?

Allison Davis O’Keefe: You could call me an off-air reporter. I run back and forth to various events on Capitol Hill, chasing people down and talking to people in the hallways and conducting interviews at the drop of a hat.

There’s always set things I know about, things that are scheduled -- like press conferences or hearings. Then there are things that just come up. Like yesterday, I spoke with Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN) for a piece that’s airing tonight. I get a call, saying ‘Can you do this? Here are the topics and some questions…’ and I work it into my schedule.

Matthew Felling: What has the climate been in the Larry Craig story?

Allison Davis O’Keefe: It’s been tense. Really tense. It’s been one of those stories that everyone is talking about, but you don’t want people to hear you talking about it in the hallways – since the details are very unseemly. There’s a palpable tension among Republicans that they desperately want this story to go away.

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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’ “The Early Show” Weather Anchor and Feature Reporter Dave Price.

Matthew Felling: Key West, Aspen, Outer Banks, Savannah … what’s the summer been like, aside from adjusting your watch every two days?

Dave Price: That’s the fun of doing what we get to do. We get to tour around the country and visit great places. We get to meet the people who watch the show or meet people who haven’t. It’s like being an ambassador for “The Early Show.”

Matthew Felling:When it comes to TV news, the morning shows have a different relationship with their viewers, more intimate. Do you see that?

Dave Price: It’s absolutely more intimate. When you’re doing morning TV, you’re with your audience as they’re getting ready to start their day. You’re having breakfast with the people. You have the opportunity to develop more of a relationship with them because they’re often watching for a longer period of time. We’re not doing a half-hour broadcast. We’re not only doing hard news. And we have the ability to build a long-term relationship. Every day we start our days together.

Matthew Felling: Were you a night owl in a prior life?

Dave Price: It’s funny. I grew up a night owl. Always woke up late. Never got to class on time in college. But since I’ve been doing morning news for 11 or 12 years, I’ve grown to love the morning. The earlier, the better. And to be honest with you, I’d much rather do a program that operates with a little more flexibility than a traditional evening broadcast.

Matthew Felling: You and I probably have different definitions of the word ‘morning.’ How early do you have to get up?

Dave Price: There’s no normal time, because when I’m in New York it’s one time, when I’m in Central or Mountain or Pacific it’s something else. It varies because of where we broadcast from, and it also varies due to circumstance. Am I in a blizzard somewhere on the side of a road? Am I in Cancun in the middle of a hurricane?

This week, we were in Cancun. The broadcast morning started at three in the morning. We were out in the streets, making sure our broadcast was set technically and passing along up-to-the-minute information; broadcasting through the day for CBS News television; providing news updates for local affiliates; providing radio reports for CBS network radio; doing specialized reports for CBS stations across the country in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles. Then at nightfall, I was on the radio all night with Sky News in Great Britain and CBS Up To The Minute up through the night and then the CBS Morning News until we went on the air again with “The Early Show.”

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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 White House Correspondent Bill Plante, who caused a stir at Karl Rove’s farewell press conference when he asked President Bush “If he’s so smart, why did you lose Congress?”

Matthew Felling: Interesting week. Anything surprise you?

Bill Plante: Nothing much, actually. Anytime you challenge or appear to challenge the president – and I don’t care if the president is a Republican or a Democrat – there are people who will take issue with it and tell you it’s inappropriate. And you kind of expect that. I knew that what I did on Monday was smart-assed, but I think that that’s beside the point.

Our asking questions should not be dependent on what the White House thinks the mood or the tone of an event should be. And the fact that they say ‘no questions’ or don’t allow time for questions really has nothing to do with it. They don’t have to answer, but I think we need to preserve and aggressively push our right to ask.

Matthew Felling: This week, you asked a question, it got uploaded on the web, it got broadcast everywhere. Did you see any increased polarization or partisanship in the responses you received?

Bill Plante: Yes, the response was instant because of the Internet. In this case, my question got put up on DCFishbowl and then on Drudge, so then it spread like wildfire. That’s no surprise, since there are people that monitor those sites and others everyday.

When I did this 20 years ago in the Rose Garden, I yelled a question at Ronald Reagan at the ‘Teacher of the Year’ event as he was leaving and going inside. Several of the teachers complained and said I disrupted things and that it was inappropriate. In that case, I got a few phone calls but then had to wait for the angry letters to come in. Then after that, I wrote a Washington Post Outlook piece about questioning the president. It took more than a week to play out.

But in this case, it was instantaneous, of course. But I know that’s how things happen these days.

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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 Coordinating Producer Brian Kennedy. You can read excerpts, and listen to the full interview, below.

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Click here to listen to the interview.

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Brian Montopoli: You coordinated the coverage of the bridge tragedy last week in the Twin Cities. What does that entail? What does a coordinating producer do, especially on a big story like that?

Brian Kennedy: Well, in order to take a studio into the field, there's just a lot of moving parts. Everything from power issues to communications. Telephone. Internet. Also satellite feeds. And everything needs to be backed up. And everything has to be done in a matter of hours. So from the time that the decision was made that Katie would be going to the story until we were on the air, it's pretty much a nonstop set of events that need to be coordinated.

Brian Montopoli: Can you give me an example of something you dealt with last week that was a difficult issue?

Brian Kennedy: Well, first of all, the easy thing was that before I arrived, the producers who arrived late on that evening had secured a spot. They were up all night, literally knocking on doors, finding location. That's usually the toughest part. Once you find a location, the tougher part was getting the right equipment in. Obviously, getting on a commercial plane, you can only put so much on. And a charter plane can't hold very much equipment. So we didn't travel with our normal amount of gear, which includes teleprompters, and various communications gears – headset, cameras, lights, that sort of thing.

So we were lucky enough to find a local rental house where we secured a generator which powered almost everything we did. This is a big generator, sort of rides on the back of a semi- truck. Not very portable. And finding a place to park that kind of thing, and making sure you're parked in a place where the satellite is not blocked by a building, and making sure you can see the location in the background where Katie was standing – which is actually the bridge – and making sure the sun is not glaring into the lens at the time we are on the air, which is 5:30. All those little things sort of come up throughout the day, and we just kind of pick them off one at a time and hope by the end of the day we've taken care of everything.

Brian Montopoli: I know this was taken care of before you got there, but tell me about the location. Basically, it was just some guy's apartment, right?

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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 Business Correspondent Anthony Mason. You can read excerpts, and listen to the full interview, below.

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Click here to listen to the interview.

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Brian Montopoli: You were on the floor last week during the tense period for stocks. What was the atmosphere like there?

Anthony Mason: Well, I think the real question as it started was is it just a one-day thing, or is it going to be something more serious. And obviously, it became apparent pretty quickly. The last couple of corrections the market's had were…drastic one-day downdrafts, and all of a sudden it seemed like everything was all right. And the real question this time was, is this just one bad day, or is it the beginning of quite a few bad days.

There was really worry on the floor. There was real worry that there was a significant drop, that first day, and that it didn't recover by the close. There was real trepidation. And as we now know, with good reason.

Brian Montopoli: When you're trying to characterize that for people, especially early on, do you just go by what you're feeling from the traders? Presumably, you have to look at it with a little bit of a grain of salt, because I assume panic is not uncommon on the trading floor.

Anthony Mason: I tend to go to the guys who have been there the longest, who have seen the most of these. Because they're the ones who don't use words like "panic" very easily. Because it's very easy to look at a 250 point drop or a 300 point drop and go, "oh, wow." Although these days, percentage-wise, that's not nearly as big as it was even five years ago.

But I tend to go to them first and say, "How bad is it?" It looks bad, but what's it based on? And when somebody like Art Cashin at UBS, whose been on the floor for like 40 years, tell me he thinks this was a mild heart-attack, I pay attention. That's when I go, "OK, if Art Cashin thinks it’s a mild heart attack, there's something here."

Brian Montopoli: Do you worry when you're covering it about contributing to further problems by talking about it in the media and casting it as a significant thing? Do you worry about the repercussions of your coverage?

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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 Public Eye Chat. This week's subject is CBS News Los Angeles Correspondent Sandra Hughes, who reported on this week’s story of the $660 million settlement between the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles and hundreds of alleged victims of clergy abuse.

Matthew Felling: You try to keep a cool remove from most stories as a journalist, but in a story like this … is that even possible?

Sandra Hughes: What hit me the hardest in reporting this story is the raw emotion you see in the victims in these sexual abuse cases. These are now grown men and women, many are married and have families. It doesn’t take them but just a few minutes if not a few seconds to start talking about their stories – something that happened to them 10, 20 years ago. And their emotions are still so raw, they’re right there.

Matthew Felling: Do you do anything different to convey that to the viewers?

Sandra Hughes : No, you just let them talk for themselves. As a reporter, it’s sometimes difficult to listen to these stories and not get emotional when you hear these sorts of things. But you have to sit back and let them tell their stories. One of the victims I spoke to, Steve Sanchez, his trial was supposed to start next Monday. I told him, ‘This must be so difficult for you to talk about, especially on national TV.’ And he said ‘The more I talk about it, the better I feel. It’s a release for me.’

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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 Executive Director of Information Resources Daniel DiPierro, who, among other duties, oversees the CBS News archives. He is pictured with a recording of the 1938 broadcast of "The War of the Worlds."

Brian Montopoli: Is there any crown jewel in the archives? Is there one thing that's the most exciting, interesting thing you guys have?

Daniel DiPierro: What we're finding that's extremely interesting is that in the older collections – we're going through a lot of the radio news archives – and in there we have, you know, Murrow reporting from the rooftops of London, some old FDR on his yacht…In the video collection, we have everything since CBS News has been on the air. So it's sort of the history of the 20th century.

Brian Montopoli: And this is everything? Every single "Evening News?" Every single "60 Minutes?" Everything?

Daniel DiPierro: It's everything, including the [outtakes]. This is the biggest broadcast news archive in the world – maybe second to the BBC.

Brian Montopoli: My understanding is that the archives is used for CBS broadcasts, but also people from outside request stuff, and you charge them for using the old CBS tape. What sorts of things are people interested in?

Daniel DiPierro: Depends on who the client is – there's a bunch of different requests that come. If Spike Lee is doing "Malcolm X," we would get a request for some of the original speeches, and we would also try to sell them some period time pieces. Wee get a lot of documentarians that come in here looking for material.

Brian Montopoli: Is there anything like this at ABC, NBC, CNN?

Daniel DiPierro: All the networks have looked at ways of repurposing…it's a very tricky business when you're licensing news material and you want to preserve the image. You don't want somebody picking stuff up from the network, with our anchors, and doing a documentary that's basically a spoof on the subject. And taking everything that they're saying out of context.

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It's Friday -- which is the day after Thursday -- and that means it's time for us to continue the Public Eye Chat we began yesterday (discussing Vatican media protocol, among other things) with CBS News London Correspondent Richard Roth.

Matthew Felling: As for the events of the last week, were there any surprises or difficulties that popped up in covering the bombing attempts?

Richard Roth: There’s always difficulty here in the lack of information released once the criminal process is underway. For example, when the police tell you that someone’s arrested – I’m on one of the alert systems that the Metropolitan Police have – here’s the kind of detail you get: “We’ve arrested A, B and C” is what the e-mail says. They may have ages, towns where the arrests took place. But there’ll be nothing more than that. Slowly, some of the information may filter out, but on an official level, they’re so careful and so concerned about pre-trial publicity that could influence the criminal justice process that there’s very little specific information that comes out. That’s what you see unfolding in this story. There’s going to be a lot [of media coverage] about this that I’ll bet will either be wrong in substance or wrong in small details by the time this procedure is over. That’s always a frustration.

I was only on this story on Friday, when it was very quickly developing in terms of what had actually happened. But it was essentially the same frustrations all journalists feel who want to get facts and get enough of them right in a story that’s breaking fast.

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