Reporter
My September 11
What Dan Rather saw, and what he was thinking, on the day that changed everything.
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In particular, I love to do work that's important, that's about something more than yourself. I spent a long time on the police beat at 61 Riesner Street in Houston. After one hundred Saturday nights, you begin to question how important your work is. But when you have a story on the scale of a great hurricane or civil rights, and you get to perform a public service, that's journalism at its best.
This was journalism at its best, but it was different from anything we've seen before. The Kennedy assassination comes closest as an analogy, but unlike today, when nearly everyone has at least one TV, not everyone had one back then. And even for people who had one, there were at most three places to turn for news. More likely there were two. ABC News was not fully formed, so really it was just CBS and NBC. Also, everyone is on the air today for virtually 24 hours. During the Kennedy assassination, stations went off the air at eleven or eleven-thirty at night, and the coverage didn't go all day and all night. That's an immense difference. The way newsrooms operate is different too. Back then cigarettes were burned into the rug and there was the faint smell of whiskey; you were in the valley of broken dreams.
One way in which then and now are more or less the same is that despite the many channels covering the news on September 11, we ignored what everyone else was doing. Only this story would have me saying that I did not once think about the competition. Generally you do: "What are 'the biscuits' doing?" (That's how we refer to NBC around here—as "the biscuits." I won't say why, and I won't tell you how we refer to ABC, except to say that it's a Disney character.) I did tell myself, however, that when all this is over, I hope it's said that we were the most accurate and that we were good at our jobs. Every reporter's prayer, or at least this reporter's prayer, is: "Lord, if you can see your way clear, give me the big story. And by the way, if you do, please let me be at or near my best on it." A version of that I did think about.
Very much on my mind through all this, though, was the idea that this isn't about me. Being on television is like breathing NASA-grade rocket fuel for the ego. You have to be careful not to make yourself the center of anything. I have no regrets about getting emotional on the David Letterman show—I'm a human being, an American, and the leader, along with my wife, of a family—but this has not been nearly as hard for me as it has been for the firemen and the rescue workers digging up body parts.
WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? I think we need almost all of our resources devoted to this story, and I've argued that we need more. I've pointed out how wars are won—with firepower and staying power. Well, with respect to journalism, our firepower is people in the field who think smart, think quick, think creatively. That's easy, relatively speaking. Staying power is increasingly difficult on any story because there's a widespread theory in journalism that the public's attention span is shorter now, particularly that of young people. I don't agree with that, which runs the risk of getting me marked as yesterday's man.
Television has difficulty with depth. It can take you right to ground zero—it has a great sense of immediacy—but we constantly have to strive to give such pictures and such stories as much depth as we can. This is not a failure of information; it's a failure of imagination. Here at CBS we have experienced people. Our first line of correspondents are without question the most experienced in broadcast journalism. We need to leverage that experience. That's what real leadership is about.
The problem is not with our corporate ownership, by the way. I don't carry water for anyone, but let me tell you, we've gotten everything we've asked for on this one—total support. I'd give our corporate parents an A+. An example: There was a time, when we were on all day, with no commercials and no advertising revenue, that people began to say, "We need to get back to something approaching normalcy." Eventually we did, but we were the last to go back to regular programming.
But I also know that we operate in a world of harsh reality, part of which is that the price and quantity of broadcast advertising was down before September 11. With the economy taking a massive hit, part of our harsh reality is how long is it going to be before we don't get everything we want? We're now past the first days of absolute crisis, and already we're careful what we ask for. Personally, I'd like to have something on the air every night for an hour in prime time reporting on the war. Right now we're on only three nights a week [60 Minutes on Sunday, 60 Minutes II on Wednesday, and 48 Hours on Friday]. Yes, we're all about stockholder value, but having a strong news division with a reputation for integrity is great for stockholder value. Performing a public service is great for stockholder value.
WHEN ARI FLEISCHER, THE PRESIDENT'S SPOKESMAN, said a few weeks after the attack that Americans have to watch what they say in these difficult times, it was a mistake. I think Ari overall has done a great job under pressure, but he never should have said that. I haven't talked to him about it directly, but I'm convinced he knows it was a mistake; that's why they edited it out of the official White House transcript. I won't say it's minor when the spokesman for the president says something like that—it resonates and reverberates, and I hope it isn't repeated—but I'd like to give him the benefit of the doubt.
The line dividing what's appropriate for a journalist or any of us to say moves from time to time. I'm not sure I could defend this in a post-graduate seminar, but in the first stages of this national emergency, I was willing and in some ways am still willing to give more of a pass to the official government spokesmen than one would otherwise do. As time goes on, we're still in a national emergency, and we stretch out for the long haul—but it's more important than ever that you stand up, look them in the eye, and ask the toughest question you can think of. That's my definition of patriotism in these circumstances. It can get uncomfortable. You have to face the furnace and take the heat. Nobody does it with perfection, but you keep telling yourself, "This is what I have to do." I'm aware of what went on in Texas City and other towns and cities when journalists wrote stories or editorials critical of the president and got hate mail or were officially reprimanded. I'm here to argue that that's not in the American tradition. We're all taught a saying no later than the seventh grade: "I disagree with what you say, but I defend to the death your right to say it."
That's the larger point to be taken from all this. Those of us in journalism have to remind ourselves that part of patriotism is continuing to ask the tough questions. I've never subscribed to the idea that journalists should be cynical, but they should be skeptical. There's a great and important difference between cynicism and skepticism. As they say, "You trust your mother, but you cut the cards."
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