All Blog Posts from Public Eye

It’s been one year for Katie Couric at the anchor desk of the “CBS Evening News.”

And the media isn’t hesitating at all to give her a letter grade, a progress report, some premature obits and some “stay the course”s to mark the occasion.

But nearly unanimous in all the coverage is the fact that CBS News apparently overshot its goal, choosing not only to install a new anchor and begin a new era, but also to use that occasion to redefine the entire concept of the network evening newscast – and therefore capture the younger audience.

And that it didn't work out.

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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 London Correspondent Richard Roth.

Matthew Felling: You’ve been a reporter stateside and you’ve covered a number of cities around the world. Are there any traits – personally or professionally – that differentiate foreign correspondents?

Richard Roth: The skill set is probably the same. But like calluses, our skills have developed over time in different ways. Perhaps by working overseas, some of us may have acquired a greater tolerance for ambiguity in unusual cultural situations. Anybody who is a successful foreign correspondent has gotten over the unease that accompanies total ignorance of a specific foreign language.

I remember in my early days working overseas … I don’t remember what country I was in, but I was working with a very experienced producer who – in the days before cell phones – was trying to make a phone call to New York and reverse the charges. He was trying to call New York and couldn’t get a translator, so he was shouting into the phone ‘Collect, collect, collect!’ Until finally the operator got the idea, New York paid for the call and we were able to file on the phone.

Inquisitiveness, doggedness, a certain tolerance for ambiguity and, probably in these days, more frequently the ability to sleep in very uncomfortable places are what’s required to be a good foreign correspondent that’s not as often required of a domestic correspondent.

In our particular business, the clock works for us, at least in this part of the world. In London you’re five hours ahead, and that gives you more time to work on a story. Every time I’ve moved back to the states, I’ve felt awfully rushed coming up against an evening deadline. The “Evening News” comes on at 6:30 there, but it’s not until 11:30 here.

Matthew Felling: So the time difference improves your work, you think?

Richard Roth: You get a little more time to think, a little more time to craft, a little more time to gather information – and frequently a little less time to sleep.

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DC Dispatch: Public Eye was sent to be the fly on the wall of today’s internal seminar for new CBS hires and interns about “Television Production 101.” Here’s your intrepid PE correpondent’s report from inside:

(Heck, being “The Mole” worked for Anderson Cooper …)

Bob Schieffer started off the meeting in his standard folksy manner, informing the crowd that he’s nearing his 50-year anniversary in the news business. Then he shared the story of the interview that led to his career, when he applied for work at a radio station. The man running the station pointed across the street and said “tell me what’s over there.” Schieffer observed “it’s the football field.” The interviewer responded “Yeah, but tell me what you see over there, describe it.” Apparently, given this second chance, Schieffer did well enough to earn a spot on the staff and … the rest is history.

After that, a lot of the seminar was spent deconstructing a four minute segment put together in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings. Cameramen, producers and correspondents discussed the logistical difficulties of trying to wrap their heads around the story in order to condense it to a comprehensive report. "CBS Evening News” producer Andy Triay spelled out the difference between the live cable reporting of the story and the CBS segment analyzed. “A cable reporter's job is to say here is what I can see from this vantage point, but network reporters have to say here is what happened today” when faced with putting together a taped segment tying together all the day’s developments.** Also, overlooked logistical issues were discussed, from the four-hour trip down to Blacksburg, to the difficulties of finding set-up shots and witnesses to the task of trying to identify, you know, tracking down what happened in the midst of confusion and chaos.

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Which one of these is not like the other?

Sunni-Shiite tensions hit a new level of violence due to the bombing of the Golden Dome Shiite shrine in Samarra.

Mental illness – mostly in the form of post-traumatic stress disorder – is on the rise in soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

US soldiers save 24 starving special needs orphans in Baghdad.

As you can tell from the final example, there is reporting of positive developments from Iraq – though some might say that the media doesn’t bother with them.

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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 turned to Philip Seib, a professor of journalism at Marquette University and author of the recent Beyond the Front Lines: How the News Media Cover a World Shaped by War and Broadcasts from the Blitz: How Edward R. Murrow Helped Lead America into War. Here, Seib writes that the "Evening News'" international coverage is narrow and incomplete and offers a suggestion to improve it. 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.

After watching the CBS "Evening News" recently, I’ve come away dissatisfied with international coverage that is so terse and narrow that it raises more questions than it answers. I’ll make my complaints and then offer a suggestion.

If a principal role for the news media is to provide the public with the information needed to make a democracy work, then "Evening News" -- like other U.S. network newscasts -- is not doing its job in terms of international news. Reporting about Iraq is part of this and should be addressed first, since most nights that sad country constitutes all or almost all of the outside world as seen by CBS.

Apparently no one at CBS is asking the question that occurs to me after each of these stories: What does it mean? For instance, a Dec. 13 report discussed the idea of sending a surge of U.S. troops into Baghdad, and then noted that “Iraqis wouldn’t stand for” a big build-up of the American military presence. Why not? The story didn’t say.

The following night, another story about the same topic. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), in Iraq with a congressional delegation, called for an “overwhelming troop presence,” which has been taken to mean up to 35,000 more combat soldiers. Where would they come from? More call-ups of Reserve and National Guard soldiers? Redeployment of forces from elsewhere? Would there be an effort to expand enlistments and the overall size of the U.S. military? No direct answers. Presumably someone has some thoughts about this.

Then, at the end of its story, CBS reported that a year would be needed to recruit and train just 6,000 new troops. Put these items together and you have stunning evidence about how the Iraq commitment has crippled America’s ability to respond quickly to a new crisis in North Korea or elsewhere. Something about that needed to be in the story or, better yet, in a follow-up story addressing just that topic. But there was not a word.

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