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Television
Week In Review overhaul
By RAYMOND A. SCHROTH
About six weeks ago, a relatively
little known but much respected TV talk show with a reputation for not raising
its voice brought smoke to the ears and blood to the eyes of millions (well,
maybe thousands) of fans over the age of 55, mostly journalists and other
members of the chattering class. Not because of anything it said or
did, but because of what had been done to it.
What happened is that a couple of new executives at the Washington
PBS station WTEA fired Ken Bode, the four-year scholarly moderator of the
proudly stodgy Washington Week in Review. The new execs had
recently moved to PBS from the not-very-news-serious Sundance and Travel cable
channels.
To some, the flap signifies a crisis in the future of Public
Broadcasting and its freedom to report and interpret the news without
interference. To others, it is a signal that PBS itself -- now that a variety
of cable channels are showing documentaries and airing endless newstalk, and
now that corporate sponsors are determining what gets on the air at PBS and
polluting the screens with their 10-second promos -- has outlived its
usefulness.
For me, for several years, Washington Week in Review
has been the center of my Friday night news orgy, a more-or-less three-hour
indulgence consisting of The Newshour with Jim Lehrer,
Washington Week, the horrible McLaughlin Group when it
had that time slot, and, as the day winds down, ABCs
Nightline.
Washington Week has been good not because it was the
most entertaining or even necessarily the deepest news program, but because of
its different format -- four knowledgeable journalists and a moderator sitting
around a specially designed table with semicircles carved out to allow the
participants to lean into the action.
These journalists, unlike Lehrer and Ted Koppel, do not interview
government officials, politicians and experts -- like Henry Kissinger, Lawrence
Eagleburger, Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and William Bennett, who seem to inhabit
these shows as if they had no other life, no family, no jobs, nothing else to
do.
The Week journalists are the experts. We amateurs get
the impression of eavesdropping on the stimulating conversation of some
super-informed professionals. The show prides itself on its no-noise analysis
-- no McLaughlin- or Crossfire-inspired shouting, no blustering, predictions,
left-right posing or fake insults to roil the waters and wake up nodding
viewers.
According to Bode, the new executives at WETA were planning to
inject some of those elements into Washington Week --
surprise guests like senators (Orrin Hatch?), high school
journalists (!!!), and conservative-liberal verbal slugfests (as if
conservative and liberal are the two recognized categories into
which all opinions fit). Non-journalists, like ex-White House staffers, would
appear as panel regulars. The executives buzz words for the makeover were
edge, attitude and opinion.
The New York Times has run three pieces on the controversy;
but Howard Kurtz, the Washington Post media writer, has stayed on top of
the story both in a series of Post reports and in his excellent CNN
Saturday night/Sunday morning press review program, Reliable
Sources.
On the March 13 broadcast, Kurtz and his cohost Bernard Kalb
pushed Bode on the reasons for his ouster: Was he resisting all change? Were
ratings falling? Ratings were strong, Bode said: The program was tied for fifth
in the entire PBS national schedule.
According to some reports, Bode had made modest changes -- a new
table, live feeds from correspondents on scene, a more diverse panel. But he
was drawing the line on opinion.
Clearly, PBS, infected by the Hype Virus transmitted by the cable
mentality, was on the brink of ruining a good thing; now it has backed off for
the time being and plugged Paul Duke, who was moderator for 20 years, into
Bodes seat. As this is written we can be sure that the redesigners are
still at work, ready to install a new look and a jazzier discussion leader.
A college classroom
But frankly, the old format has struck me as a little artificial,
like a college classroom. Bode is, in fact, dean of the Medill School of
Journalism at Northwestern University. He would turn to each panelist, remind
him or her that he or she was the expert on the topic: Well, Thomas
Friedman, you are just back from the Middle East ... Or, Well,
Gorgie Anne Geyer, youve covered Latin America for many years. What can
you tell us about ...? The pro would hold forth until another panelist,
pretending to know nothing about the topic, asks a question to which he
obviously knows the answer: Well, how is the Clinton administration going
to react to that?
A lot of the talk has been straight information rather than
analysis, which could give us a new angle. Sometimes it seems to be a show for
viewers who have not read the newspapers -- not the most challenging use of all
those brains at the odd-shaped table.
On two critical news weekends, March 26-28 and Easter, I compared
Washington Week with the Newshour, CNN,
Nightline, the weekend newspapers and the Sunday morning newsmakers
shows, to see which contributed most to my understanding of our policy in
Kosovo -- which seemed to show increasing signs of not having been well thought
out. On March 12 and March 19, Washington Week gave Kosovo about 20
seconds each night; on the 26th the expert was Doyle McManus of the Los
Angeles Times, and he got 80 percent of the half hour to explain that
Kosovo is 90 percent Albanian, that Milosevic is refusing to sign the peace
treaty worked out without him at the table, that he had talked to Sandy Berger
that morning, that our tactic is to degrade the Yugoslav military,
and so on. Martha Raddatz of ABC News added that the MiGs shot down over Bosnia
may represent a grave escalation by the Serbs. The following Friday, a new
panel suggested that Milosevic had moved so swiftly and brutally to drive out a
third of Kosovos population that this operation must have been
long-planned.
Brilliant. But cumulatively, from the other sources, I was
gathering a sense of the broad situation on another level: that our whole
policy had not been thoroughly thought through; that Milosevic is a very
strange bird, determined to hold on to personal power at any cost by exploiting
Serbias nationalist nostalgia for Kosovo as the scene of its lost
14th-century battle against the Turks; that the administration has flooded the
networks with cabinet members and generals arguing for our plan but not giving
us the facts we need to make an informed judgment; that we havent had a
word on civilian casualties; that, as Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., (probably
running for president) dared to say on ABCs This Week, we
absolutely cannot afford to lose and may well have to send in ground troops to
save the situation.
Im sure Washington Week panelists knew all those
things, but the format did not give them a chance to say so. While
objectivity is an important journalistic value, an intelligent
opinion can often do more to help us think through a problem than more
so-called objective chat. After all, most of Washington
Weeks stars -- like Thomas Friedman, Steve Roberts, David Broder,
and Gloria Borger -- are opinion columnists; they specialize in telling us what
to think, and they can do so without yelling, oversimplifying and waving their
arms.
Give them a chance
In the New York Times on April 2, Friedman published his
tentative solution: Bomb and call in George Mitchell to negotiate. The next
day, Anthony Lewis spelled out a six-step plan from total destruction of
Milosevics forces to indicting him as a war criminal. Give these writers
a chance to publicly defend their proposals to journalists who can answer
back.
In no way would senators, students or selected spokespersons give
new life to the old Washington Week, but leading the informed
discussion to some closure would give (excuse the expression) an
edge to an already good show and, more important, help the public
comprehend what the Manchester Guardian has called the crisis of
our generation.
Jesuit Fr. Raymond A. Schroth is assistant dean of Fordham
College.
National Catholic Reporter, April 23,
1999
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