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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It's notable that the latest development to push the Virginia Tech story forward is a debate over whether or not media outlets should have aired the video and pictures that last moved it forward.

All three newscasts led last night with a note about the growing controversy over the media's choice to run materials from Seung-hui Cho's self-glorifying manifesto. On the "Evening News," anchor Katie Couric opened the show by saying this: "A lot of reaction today to that video message from the Virginia Tech shooter – angry reaction aimed at news outlets, including this one, for airing portions of it. CBS News plans to use this video only on a limited basis, and only when we feel it's necessary to tell the story."

The vast majority of the emails I've received have condemned CBS and other media outlets for showing the video, and today brings a fresh round of stories on criticism of media outlets for doing so. One typical missive in the Public Eye inbox begins like this: "Airing Cho's video was inappropriate, unnecessary and malevolent. Sometimes network news staffs need to think less with their wallets and more with their heads."

One aspect of the debate that's been largely lost in all this is the fact that we're not seeing a large portion of the materials Cho sent to NBC News. As Jack Shafer noted in Slate, "Cho mailed NBC News about two dozen QuickTime videos, of which the network has aired only a handful." The network has also held back some of Cho's photos and writings. Shafer characterizes this decision as "odd restraint," stopping just short of calling on NBC to release the whole shebang. "If you're interested in knowing why Cho did what he did, you want to see the videos and photos and read from the transcripts," wrote Shafer. "If you're not interested, you should feel free to avert your eyes."

Another side of this debate that's gone missing – and I say this with nothing but respect and sadness for the Virginia Tech victims and their loved ones – is a sense of perspective. In the neighborhood of 200 people were killed in a single day this week in Iraq, a fact that has been treated as little more than a footnote in the flood of Virginia Tech coverage.

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Just a heads up: Assuming the team can make it down there, Katie Couric will anchor the "Evening News" from Blacksburg, Virginia tonight in order to cover the horrifying campus shooting at Virginia Tech.

I really, really didn’t want to write about Don Imus today. As anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock will tell you, the story has been covered, rehashed, and analyzed to death over the past week. (By the way, when was the last time a phrase – that would be “nappy headed hos,” of course – went from invisible to ubiquitous so quickly? Suddenly "show me the money" doesn't seem all that bad.)

This is the Evening News Report, however, and last week the “Evening News” was consistently focused on Imus – well, except for that detour down to Raleigh for the Duke story. The then-growing scandal was covered extensively on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday of the week, every new development treated as significant news.

It’s easy to say that the story was over-covered, and not just on CBS News. But it’s not like there wasn’t a lot going on here: Three words uttered by a radio host may be relatively insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but the firestorm they set off – and what they revealed about our culture – are not.

Most of the coverage of the story on the “Evening News” stuck to the basics concerning the latest developments in the case. That’s understandable: This is a show that airs every day, in a relatively short time period, and there isn’t a lot of time to explore cultural issues that aren't easy to get a handle on. Sometimes just getting the facts out clearly is enough.

But with all the airtime the Imus story ate up, it would have been great to see issues like the following addressed: Why did these particular words cause such a firestorm, when Imus has said plenty of offensive things in the past? What does the scandal say about the state of race relations, the ritual of public apology, and the predilections of the media in this country? Are there double standards at play in what is permissible for different members of society, and are they or aren't they fair?

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Here's a rundown of some of the stories that ran on the "Evening News" this week. See if you can tell what they have in common:






Monday: Love At First Flight For Swan And Boat

Tuesday: Coyote Visits Chicago Sandwich Shop (This was not a package.)

Wednesday: Bunny Boom Bothers California Town (And a coyote update.)

Thursday: The Mating Game, Panda Style

Friday: The National Dog Agility Championships (This one will air tonight.)

Figure it out? I'm guessing you did, but just in case: Every day, the "Evening News" gave us not-terribly-pressing news about (mostly) cute animals. (Sorry, coyote.) These stories all came at or near the end of the show, in the period of time reserved for the soft features that have come to dominate the back end of the nightly newscasts.

As I've said before, I don't think the "Evening News" has a responsibility to stuff its newscast with as much hard news as possible. We can get the news in a lot of places these days, and today's "Evening News" has every reason to experiment.

A willingness to shake free from the traditional nightly newscast formula can be a good thing, in fact – witness last week's cavalcade of cancer stories. The preponderance of animal stories this week, however, seems to fit with Neil Steinberg's argument that we are now seeing "the YouTube-ization of news."

That would be a movement towards news that favors arresting images over traditional stories; Steinberg warns that "we [could] wake up one day and Katie Couric is leading the 'CBS Evening News' with a video of a cat being set on fire."

We're not there yet, of course; the animals this week didn't come until the end of the show, and, thankfully, none were on fire. But the animal stories showcased do seem to have gotten on air at large part because they came with cute, arresting pictures.

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This week, the "Evening News" has been dominated by stories about cancer. There have been pieces about prostate cancer, pancreatic cancer, and how cancer spreads; also cancer research, the financial cost of cancer, and cancer prevention. And that's not even all of them: On Tuesday's show, to give you an idea, 17 minutes of the 22 minute broadcast was devoted to cancer stories.

There was a news hook for the cancer focus: Both White House spokesman Tony Snow and Elizabeth Edwards, wife of presidential hopeful John Edwards, announced renewed fights with the disease last week. But the coverage still went far beyond what would traditionally be considered commensurate to the news developments.

Whether you think that's a positive or negative depends on what you expect from the "Evening News." If you expect the show to fill the classic role of a nightly newscast – to provide viewers with well-rounded coverage of the most important stories of the day – than the cancer focus might have seemed excessive.

Those of us who feel that the role of the nightly newscasts has evolved, however, see things a little differently. Thanks to technological advances like the Internet and the rise of cable news networks, news today is everywhere – some of us even see headlines in the elevator on the way to work. Nightly newscasts no longer need to function, as they once did, as many people's primary source for news.

That means the nightly newscasts are somewhat less relevant than they were when Walter Cronkite was behind the anchor desk. But it has also freed up the "Evening News" and its competitors to experiment with the format.

Of course, that's not always a good thing – many a media critic bemoaned the "freeSpeech" segment that CBS tried when Katie Couric came on board as anchor, for example. But it can be a good thing, and I think that was the case this week. By focusing so heavily on cancer, the "Evening News" was able to educate viewers about the subject in a way that would have been impossible had producers felt the need to shove as much news into the broadcast as possible. And since we can get our news in a lot of different places these days, the decision to devote so much of the show to cancer strikes me as an admirable one.

I want to start this EN Report with some kudos: Last week's "War Stories" series, in which CBS correspondents told behind-the-scenes stories from the front lines, was great stuff. It introduced a degree of transparency into Iraq coverage and served as an appropriately reflective moment in a week that marked a crucial anniversary in the war. You can watch one installment by clicking on the video box.

Last week also brought us the story of Knut the polar bear cub. You can see that one by clicking on the second video box. Richard Schlesinger reported the story, which was ostensibly an exploration of the "controversy" drummed up by calls for the exceedingly cute Knut to be killed.

The argument for killing Knut was this: The cub was abandoned by his mother. If that had happened in the wild, he would have died. And the Berlin Zoo has an obligation to let nature take its course.

The only thing is the "Knut controversy" was never much of a controversy at all: The Berlin Zoo was never going to kill the cub. Germans are going nuts for the bear, and the comments, by a small number of dissenters, didn't have any real chance of gaining traction. "We never thought to put him to death or let him die," Berlin Zoo veterinarian Dr. Andreas Ochs told Schlesinger in the piece. A zoo spokesman called the notion they would kill the bear "complete nonsense."

The "Evening News" certainly had its reasons for showing Knut: The cub is so over-the-top cute that it's hard to take one's eyes off of him. Instead of trying to tie the footage of the bear to the non-controversy, however, the program might simply have let us know it was giving us our end-of-show cute animal fix and left it at that.

I should point out that it wasn't just the "Evening News" that played the story this way: Last Monday's edition of the widely-read German newspaper Bild splashed the headline "Will Sweet Knut Be Killed by Injection?" on the front page, and many other media outlets followed suit.