Brookings: Experts - Stephen Hess

Andrew Glass & Andrew Alexander: The Future of Journalism

Stephen Hess — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 15:13:00 -0400

This is the tenth (and final) post in a series of blogs offering video snippets from Stephen Hess’ numerous interviews with the prominent journalists featured in Whatever Happened to the Washington Reporters, 1978-2012.

The closing of the Washington bureau of the Cox Newspapers in 2009 was one of the sad events in the period covered by the book. The bureau chiefs had been Andrew Glass (1977-1997) and then Andrew Alexander. The two veteran journalists were first interviewed in 1978, and returned in 2008 to answer questions from George Washington University students. “Would you guys have any advice for maybe young journalists entering the field?”

Whatever Happened to the Washington Reporters is Hess’ latest book, in which he set out to find the 450 Washington reporters he first surveyed in 1978. He tracks them in France, England, Italy, Australia, and 19 U.S. states in addition to the Washington area, locating 90 percent and interviews 283 of them, producing the first comprehensive study of career patterns in American journalism.

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Andrew Glass & Andrew Alexander: The Future of Journalism

These are wise responses. There always will be journalism and there always will be journalists. Moreover, as I know they would agree, and was so often repeated by the journalists interviewed for this book, doing journalism is fun! In how many jobs do workers talk about having fun? Fun is what you do after work.

“It’s been a blast,” concluded Judlyne Lilly. “Such a blast.”

For James Canan, “If there is such a thing as reincarnation, I hope I come back in my present form. I mean professionally, not necessarily physically! I’d do it all over again. I just love journalism….So there you are.”

Edward Behr was 87 years old when we asked him if he was satisfied with his career. “Yes, I am. Yes. I didn’t get to be rich or famous, but other than that it was OK.”

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Andrew Glass & Andrew Alexander: The Future of Journalism

Authors

Stephen Hess

Bernard Kalb: From NBC to the State Department

Stephen Hess — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 14:43:00 -0400

In the ninth of a series of blogs offering video snippets from Stephen Hess’ numerous interviews with the prominent journalists featured in Whatever Happened to the Washington Reporters, 1978-2012, Bernard Kalb recounts leaving NBC in 1984 to become the State Department spokesman and then his abrupt resignation after only two years on the job.

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Bernie Kalb would return to journalism as a founding anchor and a panelist on the weekly CNN program "Reliable Sources."

Unlike Kalb’s experience, most of the journalists who subsequently worked for the federal government spoke well of their new employers. Russell Dawson had been covering waste management for a specialized publication when he went to work for the Environmental Protection Agency: “The EPA job was terrific. Working for the administration was challenging. I had a role in every major announcement that was made from 1985 to 1989—Radon, asbestos in schools, reauthorization of the major environmental laws.” Becky Bailey, a radio reporter, got a job as a congressional press secretary. “I loved my time on the Hill, found it fascinating.”

While some might have to confront “disinformation,” or more likely government hype, others would come to agree with NBC correspondent Carl Stern, who had covered the Justice Department for 26 years when he left to become spokesman for the attorney general in 1993. “Every reporter should have to spend a minimum amount of time in government,” he said. “You begin to realize that the things you were so certain of when you were a reporter, you didn’t understand a tenth of what was going on…. It was only when I went inside the department that I realized how little I knew when I was writing these things, simply because of their complexity.”

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Bernard Kalb: From Reporting to Working Inside the U.S. State Dept.

Authors

Stephen Hess

Hedrick Smith: Leaving the New York Times

Stephen Hess — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 13:14:00 -0400

In the eighth of a series of blogs offering video snippets from Stephen Hess’ numerous interviews with the prominent journalists featured in Whatever Happened to the Washington Reporters, 1978-2012, Hedrick Smith had one of the dream careers that the New York Times can offer its top-tier correspondents, including crisscrossing the South during the civil rights explosions of the early 1960s, a tour in Vietnam, reporting from Cairo and Moscow, and being the Washington bureau chief. Here he tells of his decision to leave the Times.

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Rick Smith went on to become an Emmy Award-winning producer/correspondent for the PBS show Frontline. The Times Washington bureau in 1978 had thirty slots for reporters. Of our seventeen interviews, seven remained with the New York Times until retirement and ten went on to other places, including Rick Burt, who became a diplomat, serving as U.S. ambassador to Germany and then chief negotiator in strategic arms reduction talks; Steve Roberts, the Shapiro Professor of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University; Marty Tolchin, a congressional specialist, who founded The Hill newspaper in 1994; Tony Marro, eventually the editor of Newsday; and environmental correspondent Phil Shabecoff, who started Greenwire, an online publication.

There was, however, one member of the 1978 bureau, diplomatic correspondent Bernie Gwertzman, who made an immense impact on the future of the company. When in his sixties he became intrigued by the possibilities of computers in newspapering and was the force behind creating NYTimes.com.

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Hedrick Smith: Resigning from the New York Times

Authors

Stephen Hess

Barry Sussman: Stories from Watergate

Stephen Hess — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 12:12:00 -0400

In the seventh of a series of blogs offering video snippets from Stephen Hess’ numerous interviews with the prominent journalists featured in Whatever Happened to the Washington Reporters, 1978-2012, Barry Sussman talks about being the city news editor at the Washington Post in 1972. Today he looks back on the phone call that connected the Watergate break-in to people in the White House, and led to the downfall of a president.

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For some, as it came to Barry Sussman, there is the possibility of being part of a once-in-a-lifetime event, one that will go down in history. Editor Sussman was detached to direct the Watergate coverage that led to the Post’s being awarded the Pulitzer Prize for public service in 1973.

Ike Pappas, reporting for CBS, was in Dallas in 1963: “I entered the basement of the Dallas police headquarters…and I didn’t know where I was going to stand to try to report this story of the departure of Oswald, so I found a little spot by the fender of the chase car of the armored truck and I squeezed in, and I didn’t realize it, but I was squeezing in right in front of Jack Ruby…and I saw this man jump in front of me with a black coat on, fedora hat, and suddenly there was a bang and a flash on Oswald’s sweater and a moan and he goes down, and here’s ‘My God what has happened now?’ The things that cross your mind as a reporter: ‘Could this possibly be the assassin of the United States president now being killed?’ Put that in words. And I just said what I saw.”

Still, as James Adams, of Reuters, who covered the “Black Hawk Down” story in Somalia and had been in the Pentagon media pool assigned to the Gulf War, observes of careers in journalism: “No matter what you do, no matter how exciting it is overall, it’s not all exciting…In fact, a lot of it is not exciting at all.”

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Barry Sussman: Stories from Watergate

Authors

Stephen Hess

China as Seen from American Party Platforms

Stephen Hess — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 10:00:00 -0400

In this rare moment when two great powers are in the midst of leadership succession, each seeks clues as to the other’s future intent. Strangely there is one obvious place to look that Beijing may have overlooked: The party platforms that were approved at the Republican and Democratic national conventions this summer.

Not surprising, perhaps. As John Boehner, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, recently asked reporters, “Have you ever met anyone who read the party platform? I’ve never met anyone.” He was probably joking. But could we be sure? Platforms are instruments of ridicule, as filled with bombast as the balloons that are swept from the convention floor.

Yet are they really so deserving of their bad reputation? “At least four studies have compared platform promises and the subsequent actions of presidents, each study spanning a minimum of seven presidencies,” I wrote in The Little Book of Campaign Etiquette (Brookings, 2000). “All reach the same conclusion. Presidents prefer to keep their word if only because it’s when they don’t that they get in trouble.” One of these studies concluded, “Only a tenth of the promises are completely ignored.”

The platforms are written by committees composed of two civic leaders from each state, who hold public hearings, and spend many hours in debate. Twice I have been involved in this process, and twice I emerged believing this was more than the window-dressing assessment that platforms are given in the media.

In 1960 as a young aide to President Eisenhower I was assigned to be the White House liaison to the platform committee; in 1976 I was the Republican platform’s editor-in-chief. In both cases I learned painfully how removed Washington could be from the party’s Main Street roots and how national leaders can lose sight of where their party is coming from.

The platform drafters are engaged in a collective bargaining process over the composition of the party. Its purpose is to tell voters what a party wants to do—if the party had full control and no strings attached. These conditions never exist, of course. Still, the documents they produce should be sufficient to tell attentive voters whether they fit better as a Republican or a Democrat.

If one candidate is the president, the drafters take their guidance from the White House, and the platform “points with pride.” It would be powerfully strange for a president’s platform to paint a picture in which the future does not look like an extension of the present. If the candidate is of the other party, the platform “views with alarm.” Nevertheless, for onlookers, whether interest groups, journalists, or countries, the platform points in the direction that the candidate’s party wishes him to travel if elected.

When comparing the two parties’ 2012 platforms, note the stark contrast in the language chosen by the Republicans and Democrats to describe their feelings about the People’s Republic of China. The question to consider is how much this reflects policy difference, or is this primarily a measure of Republican animosity—less important, but not unimportant?

Read the full piece at China-US Focus »

Authors

Stephen Hess

Publication: China-US Focus

Image Source: © POOL New / Reuters

Kitty Kelley: Becoming an Independent Writer

Stephen Hess — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 16:00:00 -0400

In the sixth of a series of blogs offering video snippets from Stephen Hess’ numerous interviews with the prominent journalists featured in Whatever Happened to the Washington Reporters, 1978-2012, Kitty Kelley, whose biographies of celebrities like Oprah, the British Royal Family and Elizabeth Taylor became best sellers, talks about her decision to leave journalism and become an author.

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Kitty Kelley’s success came in crafting investigative biographies of high profile subjects: Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Nancy Reagan, the Bush family.

Break free of journalism’s dailiness, of irritating editors, of doing irrelevant stories! The dream of becoming an independent writer! When Lynne Olson left journalism, she was 32 and had been a Moscow correspondent for AP and White House correspondent for the Baltimore Sun. "I remember when I was a really young journalist reading that David Halberstam had quit the New York Times to write books and [I] thought ‘How could he do that! He’s got the best job in the world as a reporter for the New York Times.’ Well, ten years later I knew why he had left the New York Times to do it, and that’s something I really wanted to do too." Four of Olson’s five critically acclaimed books—all on history—have dealt in some way with London during World War II.

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Kitty Kelley: Becoming an Independent Writer

Authors

Stephen Hess

Linda Greenhouse: Difficulties in Journalism for Women

Stephen Hess — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 15:06:00 -0400

In the fifth of a series of blogs offering video snippets from Stephen Hess’ numerous interviews with the prominent journalists featured in Whatever Happened to the Washington Reporters, 1978-2012, Linda Greenhouse, whose coverage of the Supreme Court won the Pulitzer Prize, remembers how she couldn’t get a job on a newspaper after she graduated from college in 1968.

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Linda Greenhouse got a job! Leading to a fabled career on the New York Times. But Linda Greenhouse’s tortured job hunting in 1968 was nothing unusual for a woman wanting to be a reporter. Judy Woodruff, who graduated from Duke in that year, also recalls, “My spring break I went to Atlanta. I interviewed with all three affiliated news directors. Two of them barely gave me the time of day. The third, the ABC affiliate’s news director—this was a station that was doing one newscast on the weekend—he said, ‘I could use a gopher, a newsroom secretary. You can answer the phone and pick up some of my mail.’ I worked for them for a year and a half. The last six months they hired me to do the 11:00 Sunday night weather. It was like a Cinderella story. During the week I would come in and be the secretary in the newsroom, and then on Sunday night I would come in at 6:00, and for five hours I would pore over the weather wires, and then I learned how to do the weather reports.”

Ultimately women journalists forced change by suing their employers for gender discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Boylan v. New York Times was settled in 1978: The Times admitted doing no wrong but promised to do better. In another landmark suit, the Associated Press was sued in 1978; five years later, its female employees were awarded more than $800,000 in back pay.

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Linda Greenhouse: Difficulties in Journalism for Women

Authors

Stephen Hess

Steven Roberts: On A Legacy of Writers

Stephen Hess — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 12:00:00 -0400

In the fourth of a series of blogs offering video snippets from Stephen Hess’ numerous interviews with the prominent journalists featured in Whatever Happened to the Washington Reporters, 1978-2012, Steven Roberts, who went from the Harvard Crimson to the New York Times, tells of the influence his family had on his becoming a journalist, starting in the sixth grade.

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Steven Roberts: Coming from a Family of Writers

It’s hardly news that some journalists go into the family business. So too do bakers and coal miners. But the Roberts Family is approaching dynasty status. Steve and his wife Cokie, of National Public Radio and ABC, write a nationally syndicated newspaper column, and their daughter Rebecca Roberts is a host of POTUS ‘O8 on XM Radio.

Among the other journalists in the Hess book, Joe Albright’s senior thesis in college was a study of his grandfather, who founded the New York Daily News, and brothers Knight and Todd Kiplinger followed their father into the publishing company that had been founded by his father. When asked if going into journalism had always been his goal, Jack Fuller, editor of the Chicago Tribune, replied, “Yeah, oh yeah. My father was a newspaper man and so the fact is I had grown up with it.” This doesn’t’ guarantee that journalism is the right choice. Susan Fogg Braaten reflects, “I went into journalism partly because my father was a reporter…In retrospect, I probably was not temperamentally suited to being a reporter in any of the ways I am absolutely suited to being a teacher.”

Indeed, more journalists credit a teacher than a parent for their journalism career, as does Rich Jaroslovsky (Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News): “When I was 12 years old, I signed up for a journalism class at my junior high school. My God, this is fun!”

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Steven Roberts: Coming from a Family of Writers

Authors

Stephen Hess

Nina Totenberg: Journalists as Witnesses to History

Stephen Hess — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 12:17:00 -0400

In the third of a series of blogs offering video snippets from Stephen Hess’ numerous interviews with the prominent journalists featured in Whatever Happened to the Washington Reporters, 1978-2012. Nina Totenberg, National Public Radio's award-winning legal affairs correspondent, talks about how the 1960 presidential election drew her into a journalism career because she said, “I realized I could be a witness to history.”

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Nina Totenberg’s career has been notable for groundbreaking scoops, one of which led a Supreme Court nominee to withdraw his name in 1986. Yet most reporters agree with Totenberg that to be a journalist is to be a “witness,” watching “interesting stuff going on,” rather than a “participant.” As Robert Rankin, a government and political editor at the McClatchy bureau, put it, “I had a seat at the table where Washington’s business was done for most of the last quarter of a century, and it’s been fascinating.”

Only one journalist in our study decided to, as Totenberg puts it, be a "participant” in elective politics: Kathy Patterson, who came to Washington as a reporter for the Kansas City Star and was later voted onto the Washington City Council.

The one person who said “I went into journalism to save the world” didn’t stay long. Still, there were well-meant references to journalism as a “calling,” and most claimed a social utility for what they were doing. “It was hard, demanding work, but it was useful work,” thought Dale Nelson of the AP. “When things go right you feel that you are contributing to something that is worth doing,” said NBC’s Bob Abernethy, “and that’s a good feeling.”

Each Tuesday, we will be releasing a new conversation and blog post by Stephen Hess. Last week, Fox's Brit Hume explained how he became a journalist. Click here for an entire schedule and to hear more about the project.

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Nina Totenberg: Journalists as Witnesses to History

Authors

Stephen Hess

Brit Hume: The First Day in the Newsroom

Stephen Hess — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 12:00:00 -0400

In the first of a series of blogs offering video snippets from Stephen Hess’ numerous interviews with the prominent journalists featured in Whatever Happened to the Washington Reporters, 1978-2012, Brit Hume, the founding anchor of Special Report on the Fox News Channel, talks about the unexpected turn in 1965 that propelled him into journalism as a cub reporter on the Hartford Times.

Whatever Happened to the Washington Reporters, 1978-2012 is Hess’ latest book, in which he set out to find the 450 Washington reporters he first surveyed in 1978. He tracks them in France, England, Italy, Australia, and 19 U.S. states in addition to the Washington area, locating 90 percent and interviews 283 of them, producing the first comprehensive study of career patterns in American journalism.

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The reporters who came to Washington after World War II, the so-called “Greatest Generation,” tended to spend their entire careers working for one news organization. But Brit Hume was at the beginning of a new generation whose careers spanned employers. As in Hume’s case, this was especially true in TV after the arrival of cable news programming in 1981 suddenly increased job options.

As a correspondent at ABC Hume had covered Capitol Hill for 11 years and the White House for 8 years. Yet as he explained in an interview with me, leaving ABC was “the easiest decision I ever made….If you don’t want to leave Washington, you can kind of work your way through the available beats and then you’ve done them all and then where do you go?....ABC News had nothing to offer me….and along comes Fox News. [Rupert Murdoch launched Fox News in 1996, with Roger Ailes as the CEO.]"

In late 1997 [Ailes] said to Hume, "‘I want to do a political show at six every night.… I want to put it on the air in March.’ We were just getting started around January—we didn’t have a studio, we didn’t have a director, we didn’t have squat….The Monica Lewinsky scandal broke. My wife Kim—who was a veteran producer from ABC who was hired by Fox ahead of me…and she was the bureau chief—walked up to me and said, ‘This is the time to start your show, right now.’ I called Roger Ailes. He said, ‘We’ll start it tonight.’…and we put the show on the air. It was called Special Report, which was a dumb name…and still is a dumb name….Well, it’s been a bigger rating success than we ever imagined.”

Each Tuesday, we will be releasing a new conversation and blog post by Stephen Hess. Click here for an entire schedule and to hear more about the project.

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Brit Hume: At Home in the Newsroom

Authors

Stephen Hess

A Retrospect of Journalism: What Happened to the Washington Reporters?

Stephen Hess — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 10:00:00 -0400

In his latest book, Whatever Happened to the Washington Reporters, 1978-2012, Stephen Hess set out to find the 450 Washington reporters he first surveyed in 1978. He tracks them in France, England, Italy, Australia, and 19 U.S. states in addition to the Washington area, locating 90 percent and interviews 283 of them, producing the first comprehensive study of career patterns in American journalism.

This blog series offers video snippets from Hess’ numerous interviews with these journalists and features Hess’ recollections, which offer context and anecdotes to their stories. Each Tuesday, we will be releasing a new conversation and blog post.

Here, Hess explains his project in greater detail and why he is hopeful for journalism’s future:

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Follow along for a new blog post about a different journalist each week:

August 7
Brit Hume: The First Day in the Newsroom

August 14
Nina Totenberg: Journalists as Witnesses of History

August 21
Steven V. Roberts: Coming from a Family of Writers

August 28
Linda Greenhouse: Breaking into Journalism as a Woman

September 11
Kitty Kelley: Becoming an Independent Writer

September 18
Barry Sussman: Stories from Watergate

September 25
Hedrick Smith: Resigning from the New York Times to Film Documentaries

October 2
Bernard Kalb: From Covering the U.S. State Department, to Working Inside It

October 9
Andrew Glass & Andrew Alexander: The Future of Journalism

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Stephen Hess: On Journalism’s Recent Past

Authors

Stephen Hess

Whatever Happened to the Washington Reporters, 1978-2012

Stephen Hess — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Brookings Institution Press 2012 216pp.

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Stephen Hess: On Journalism’s Recent Past

Whatever Happened to the Washington Reporters, 1978–2012, is the first book to comprehensively examine career patterns in American journalism.

In 1978 Brookings Senior Fellow Stephen Hess surveyed 450 journalists who were covering national government for U.S. commercial news organizations. His study became the award-winning The Washington Reporters (Brookings, 1981), the first volume in his Newswork series. Now, a generation later, Hess and his team from Brookings and the George Washington University have tracked down 90 percent of the original group, interviewing 283, some as far afield as France, England, Italy, and Australia.

What happened to the reporters within their organizations? Did they change jobs? Move from reporter to editor or producer? Jump from one type of medium to another—from print to TV? Did they remain in Washington or go somewhere else? Which ones left journalism? Why? Where did they go?

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Stephen Hess: On Journalism’s Recent Past

A few of them have become quite famous, including television correspondents Ted Koppel, Sam Donaldson, Brit Hume, Carole Simpson, Judy Woodruff, and Marvin Kalb; some have become editors or publishers of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, Miami Herald, or Baltimore Sun; some have had substantial careers outside of journalism. Most, however, did not become household names.

The book is designed as a series of self-contained essays, each concentrating on one characteristic, such as age, gender, or place of employment, including newspapers, television networks, wire services, and niche publications. The reporters speak for themselves. When all of these lively portraits are analyzed—one by one—the results are surprisingly different from what journalists and sociologists in 1978 had predicted.

Learn more about our blog series featuring video snippets of Hess' interviews with journalists over the years »

Praise for other books in the Newswork series:

International News and Foreign Correspondents

“It is not much in vogue to speak of things like the public trust, but thankfully Stephen Hess is old fashioned. He reminds us in this valuable and provocative book that journalism is a public trust, providing the basic information on which citizens in a democracy vote, or tune out.”—Ken Auletta, The New Yorker

“Regardless of one’s view of American news media, one cannot help but be influenced by the information Stephen Hess puts forth in International News and Foreign Correspondents. After reading this book, it is not likely one will scan the newspaper or watch television news in the same way again.”—International Affairs Review

“Readers of all backgrounds will find this a provocative text.”—The Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics

Live from Capitol Hill

“Hess is a treasure—a Washington insider with a sharp sense of the important, the interesting, and the mythological. This book is essential reading for Hill practitioners, journalists, and scholars of Congress and the media.”—Steven S. Smith, Washington University

The Washington Reporters

“A meticulously researched piece of anthropology that represents the first major look at the men and women who cover the government since Leo C. Rosten’s classic 1937 book.”—Newsweek

Brookings: Experts - Stephen Hess

Andrew Glass & Andrew Alexander: The Future of Journalism

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Bernard Kalb: From NBC to the State Department

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Hedrick Smith: Leaving the New York Times

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Barry Sussman: Stories from Watergate

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China as Seen from American Party Platforms

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Kitty Kelley: Becoming an Independent Writer

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Linda Greenhouse: Difficulties in Journalism for Women

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Steven Roberts: On A Legacy of Writers

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Nina Totenberg: Journalists as Witnesses to History

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Brit Hume: The First Day in the Newsroom

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A Retrospect of Journalism: What Happened to the Washington Reporters?

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Whatever Happened to the Washington Reporters, 1978-2012

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stephen Hess

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