But when former CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite heard the Iraqi president tell his successor, Dan Rather, that he wanted to debate the U.S. president on television, the veteran newsman figured, why not?

"The better part of diplomacy is exercising any of these openings," Cronkite said Wednesday afternoon. "I'm not surprised (Bush) turned it down with those harsh words. But what would be wrong with it? I thought it was a pretty good idea."

Cronkite is in Portland to record narration for a documentary about the Spruce Goose, the enormous wooden airplane housed at the Evergreen Aviation Museum near McMinnville. He took a few minutes Wednesday to reflect on the brewing war and the reporters trying to cover it.

When he was a working anchorman, Cronkite's words carried astonishing weight. In 1967, his observation that the Vietnam War had become "a stalemate" persuaded President Lyndon Johnson to reconsider his strategy. "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America," Johnson was quoted as saying.

Cronkite worked for decades honing a reputation for accuracy and even-handedness. Starting as a writer with news services, he covered World War II from the battlefield and reported on the Nuremberg trials before joining CBS-TV in 1950.

He became the network's main evening anchor in 1962, just a year before his marathon coverage of President John F. Kennedy's assassination redefined the medium's influence on the nation. Cronkite left an indelible mark on many of the big stories he covered in the 1960s and 1970s, and for much of that time he was called the most trusted man in America.

Retired since 1981, Cronkite continues working, hosting or narrating an array of TV documentaries and writing books about sailing, history and his own life.

The president, he said, seems determined to go to war at all costs, despite reports that he would give United Nations inspectors four more days to examine Iraq's weapons.

"He's doing that to save Tony Blair in England," Cronkite said. "But he hasn't indicated that any influence will deter him from his chosen course."

Cronkite is pleased the military plans to allow reporters to cover the war like he once did -- from the battlefield. The media blackout during the Persian Gulf War, he said, "was definitely a violation of our Constitution."

"We have a free press and free speech, and presumably the Constitution meant the government would give people the truth about the functions of their government. We don't even know who our heroes were in the Persian Gulf, because we have no history of it. Not even today. I'm still mad about it."

What about fears that the reporters will become too cozy with the soldiers they live among?

"That's ridiculous," Cronkite said. "There's an inclination to root for our boys. But that does not mean you don't talk about what's wrong with what we're doing."

Cronkite has his own views about what his successors are doing wrong and right. He prefers "serious" talk shows to the ones where people shout at each other. He wishes the networks would use their prime-time news magazines to report on serious issues, rather than the flashy crime-and-showbiz stories on which they prefer to focus. And he wishes more coverage could be like CNN's in-depth terrorism report. "It takes an hour to do it that way, or half an hour if they set their minds to it. But network management doesn't think that's entertaining." Cronkite's tone of voice made it clear that he doesn't think that is the way it should be.

Fox Locks Mark Suppelsa

Robert Feder reported in The Chicago Sun-Times on Thursday that WFLD announced that Mark Suppelsa has agreed to join the Fox-owned station as noon news anchor and general assignment reporter.

Under terms of a five-year deal, he eventually will succeed Walter Jacobson as 9 p.m. news anchor alongside Robin Robinson.

Suppelsa, 40, resigned in February after 10 years at WMAQ, where he most recently had been 4:30 and 5 p.m. news anchor and was considered heir apparent to top anchor Warner Saunders. Suppelsa had been working without a contract at the NBC-owned station since his previous agreement expired last December.

MAQ has not named a replacement for Suppelsa. But one of the candidates for the job is believed to be Kris Long, who preceded Jacobson as Robinson's co-anchor at WFLD. Long most recently worked at KNXV-TV in Phoenix.

News Van Raises Concern at Fort
Wires under KYTV vehicle result in call to bomb squad, gate closure.
By Angela Wilson
Sprinfield News-Leader

The KYTV news van had passed through the gates of Fort Leonard Wood several times.

But Tuesday, guards conducting a routine inspection of the vehicle before it entered the Army post noticed wires coming from a box underneath and called the bomb squad.

After three hours, officials determined the box was a charcoal canister for emissions control, said Jeff Benscoter, news director.

"As far as the MPs were concerned, all they saw was some wires under there and a shoe(box)-sized box -- which is never good," said Michael Warren, deputy director of public affairs for the post. "Everyone who responded to the incident did the right thing. They maintained the safety of everyone in vicinity and kept the area clear just in case there was something bad."

The main gates were closed to traffic for three hours -- the longest they've been shut in at least seven years. Traffic ground to a halt outside the gate; Waynesville school buses had to be rerouted to one of three other entrances open to traffic, Warren said.

A reporter and photographer from KYTV arrived at the post at 1:45 p.m. for a visit about chemical weapons training. They got out of the vehicle -- all cell phones and camera equipment had to be left behind -- while guards searched it. The box was discovered with a tool that uses a mirror to view beneath vehicles.

Officials at KYTV called cell phone and radio companies trying to figure out what the box was, Benscoter said.

Eventually, post officials tapped a man from the local Pontiac dealership, who brought blueprints of the vehicle to determine what the item was. "This was not an anti-news thing or anything else," Benscoter said. "They were concerned and in this heightened state of alert, I can't blame them."

KHOU Investigation Into Police Lab Helps Free Wrongly imprisoned Man
-staff, KHOU-TV

KHOU-TV's ongoing investigation into errors at the Houston Police Department DNA lab (that first started in November 2002) has directly led to a man getting his freedom back.

At the end of January 2003, the station's investigative team (Anna Werner, David Raziq, Chris Henao) reported on the Josiah Sutton case: A teenage boy accused of raping a Houston woman in the backseat of her car. The county prosecutor based his case against Sutton on a questionable visual identification made by the victim and the police lab's DNA test results. Those results claimed that Sutton's DNA had been found in samples from the victim's rape kit.

As a result, a jury sentenced the 17-year-old to 25 years in prison.

But 4 years later, when KHOU examined the lab's DNA test work, they found what one forensic scientist called "a mess". DNA evidence expert Dr. William Thompson told the team: "As I look over the test results...I think, this---is ridiculous!" Thompson even found that there were signs that the tests were totally contaminated and malfunctioning, something he says the lab should have known. And when KHOU presented Thompson's findings to some of Sutton's former jurors, they were mortified. They added that had they known about the errors in the lab's work, they never would have found him guilty. "Now I feel like I've committed a crime," said the jury foreman.

As a result of those broadcasts, the Houston Police Department volunteered to have and pay for a retest of the DNA evidence in the Sutton case. The results?: On Monday March 10 it was announced that Sutton's DNA was NOT found in any of the evidence from the rape. News of the test results spread fast and was covered not just by KHOU, but by the CBS Evening News, and even the New York Times.

A day later the same Judge who had presided over Sutton's first trial held a hearing and announced that Josiah Sutton would be freed on his own recognizance. Within hours, Sutton left the county jail where he was greeted by more than 20 family members and a host of reporters. "God moves mountains" he said.

Next up? Sutton's attorney Bob Wicoff says that he plans to ask the Texas Governor for a pardon for his client. As for Sutton's freedom, Wicoff said he was "ecstatic" but added: "Unfortunately the system would not have gotten him this result. He got this result because Channel 11 (KHOU) got involved."

Economists Inc.'s "Critique" of the Recent Study on Media Ownership:
A Response By the Project for Excellence in Journalism

On March 13, a consulting firm hired by the NBC, CBS, Telemundo and Fox TV networks to help them lobby for deregulation of media ownership rules released a "critique" trying to discredit a recent Project for Excellence in Journalism study on local TV new and ownership.

The Project wants to offer a prompt response to correct numerous assertions and misimpressions in that critique.

The Project, to begin, stands behind the integrity of its report "Does Ownership Matter in Local Television News: A Five-Year Study of Ownership and Quality," and believes that its extensive evaluation of quality in local television news is both relevant and of value to the ongoing public discourse regarding FCC regulation of station ownership.

The network funded "critique," produced by a consulting firm Economists Inc., condemns the study for being something it makes no attempt to be. To that end, it sets up a series of false thresholds that it says the study then fails to meet.

"The PEJ study offers no formal or informal theory of why or how ownership should affect news quality," Economists Inc. writes. "?Thus, the results reported do not stand as a test of the hypothesis that ownership "causes" any particular change in news quality."

Economists Inc. misses the point. This is one of the prime strengths, not weaknesses, of the PEJ report. Unlike the networks that hired Economists Inc., PEJ has no theory of cause and effect that it is trying to "prove" with its research and no financial stake in the outcome. It is not lobbying the government. It has no vision of what FCC regulations should look like.

To the contrary, the point of PEJ's five-year research project, designed and executed in conjunction with Princeton Survey Research Associates, was to identify patterns and trends in news quality. Rather than trying to establish the causality of any theory, the Project has presented findings of what local television news looks like in diverse markets across the country - covering almost a quarter of all stations nationwide.

In its ownership study, PEJ found that the arguments offered on both sides of the FCC debate are in some cases supported and in other cases not supported by the trends in quality. On its first page, the PEJ ownership study points out that, "Taken together, the findings suggest the question of media ownership is more complex than some advocates on both sides of the deregulatory debate imagine." PEJ believes more study is needed The closest the PEJ study comes to what the FCC might or might not do is this rather general observation: "The data strongly suggest regulatory changes that encourage heavy concentration of ownership in local television by a few large corporations will erode the quality of news Americans receive."

A central criticism in Economists Inc.'s critique is that the PEJ study data is "meaningless" because it did not attempt to test its findings against standard measures of statistical significance. In fact, the data collected by PSRA and reported in the PEJ study do not need to be subjected to tests of statistical significance because they are a census, not a sample, of measurements within the selected markets and time periods. All stations in selected markets were analyzed and all local news broadcasts in the selected time periods were analyzed. The number of newscasts reported in the topline then is a census of newscasts and there is no sampling error associated with measurements of these newscasts. The critics' application of tests of statistical significance to these data, to take account of sampling error, is inappropriate.

The study is a descriptive report about these stations and not an inferential report about the quality of local TV news broadcasts throughout the entire U.S. These descriptive data are useful because the stations described and analyzed serve a large segment of the public (more than 60% of all television households) and their markets are geographically and socially diverse. Thus, the data are informative even though they cannot be generalized beyond the stations included in the analysis.

The time periods were selected purposively, not randomly, and cannot be construed to be a sample of either weeks within a year, or times of day within a day. The only aspect of sampling incorporated into the study's methodology is the fact that markets were sampled. However, in this instance, sampling was used only to ensure that the markets would be geographically and socially diverse. Other than sampling markets randomly and selecting time periods purposively, all units in the population were measured and analyzed.

Economists Inc. further criticizes the PEJ study as being based on "subjective grading" that was untested. This is mistaken.

The critics fault the study for using "subjective measures," but most social science research is based on the concepts that are subjective. All data, whether "objective" or "subjective," are subject to measurement error. What is important is that PEJ and PSRA have clearly defined how they operationalized the important concepts under study, have made the details of this operationalization available to anyone who wishes to evaluate it, and have calculated appropriate measures to show that the operationalization procedures could be carried out with an extremely high degree of reliability by independent coders. Four key steps were taken in developing the criteria and grading system to make that process as transparent and objective as possible.

First, a team of TV news professionals identified the criteria in 1997 used to judge broadcasts. Second, an academic research team then developed metrics to measure those criteria and establish grading criteria. The metrics, as stated in the report, were made up of widely accepted journalistic norms. Third, PSRA coded and calculated the grades for daily broadcasts via a detailed, standardized, coding procedure. Fourth, the reliability of PSRA's procedures was routinely tested over the five years of study via intercoder studies, as was also stated in the report. Over the five years of study, daily broadcast station scores, which were then compiled to reach quality grades, were found to be reliable within +/ - 0.67 points per day.

Finally, Economists Inc. is wrong in asserting no efforts were made to examine the validity of these criteria or the grading system developed to reflect them. As reported in Year II of the five-year study, PSRA conducted four separate focus groups in two cities, Tucson and Atlanta, for the Project in order to qualitatively assess the project's norms. The focus groups demonstrated that respondents not only recognized the differences between high and low scoring newscasts in the study, but they preferred the high scoring ones to the low scoring ones and articulated as their reasons the same criteria the news professionals had identified. Subsequently, a national survey of local television news directors conducted by the Project's academic partners at Wellesley College and included in the 2001 report confirmed the same criteria as the design team for quality news broadcasts. The notion that the grading system should be considered invalid because it is too arbitrary and because it went untested is uninformed. Later in its report, Economists Inc. argues that, "The PEJ study finds an inverse relationship between its own standards for journalistic performance and viewer preferences." Again Economists Inc. is mistaken. For five years the PEJ study has found that what it defines as higher quality journalism enjoys better consumer demand than lower quality journalism. This is a main finding of the research, detailed in each year of the Local TV Study, and particularly in the 2002 report issued in November.

Economists Inc. also contends the PEJ research "does not account for other factors affecting news quality." No again. Over the course of the five years, the data compiled has been subject to multivariate regression analysis to control for various factors such as lead-in audience, market size, and day part.

Economists Inc.'s other complaints are similarly misguided, such as the idea that the report contains contradictory findings about such things as news timeslot. Economists Inc. sees contradictions as evidence of flaws in a hypothesis and therefore as problematic. Without an agenda to prove, the Project sees such contradictions as part of an accurate picture.

Finally, it is important to note that PEJ and PSRA have fully met their obligation to report the details of the methodology of this study. Explanations of the study's design and analysis have been made publicly available, so any researcher who wanted to replicate the study would be free to do so. The data themselves will also be made publicly available so future researchers can conduct their own analyses. In fact, the documentation for a public-use data file is currently being compiled by PSRA, but is not yet completed. However, PEJ has a legitimate interest in keeping these data for its sole use until it has completed its own analyses and reports on the data. PEJ and PSRA have been totally forthcoming on all explanations of the methodology and, in so doing, are fully in compliance with the codes of ethics of the appropriate social science professional associations.

The underlying issue embedded in the networks' "critique" is this: whose voices should be heard--and on what issues--in the debate over ownership of the public airwaves?

The PEJ report has become a lightning rod because it filled a void-it explored the issue of news quality, using the best nationwide data available to do so.
The networks' "critique" asserts that quality is "not connected in any obvious way with ? the Commission's policy goals in this proceeding." Taking the issue of quality off the table is the critique's final recommendation and perhaps its real purpose.

WUSA Shuffles Its Sports Department
Chris Baker
THE WASHINGTON TIMES

WUSA-TV shook up its sports department yesterday: Two anchors, Steve Davis and Frank Herzog, were shuffled to new shifts, and a third, Ken Mease, was fired.

Beginning tonight, Mr. Herzog - a fixture at the CBS affiliate for most of the last 34 years - will become its main sports anchor, delivering the scores during the weeknight newscasts. He will be WUSA's fifth sports chief since 1992 and the third in the last eight months.

Mr. Davis, the main sports anchor since September, moves to weekends, where he will replace Mr. Mease, a 17-year WUSA veteran.

"We are committed to providing excellence in sports coverage. We feel this plan best serves our viewers," said Ardyth R. Diercks, president and general manager. She declined further comment.

Turnover at WUSA's sports department has been common since the death of legendary anchor Glenn Brenner in 1992. None of his successors - Warner Wolf,
Ken Broo and Jess Atkinson - clicked with viewers.

Mr. Davis, a Baltimore sportscaster who replaced Mr. Atkinson, rankled co-workers, staffers said. At a November press conference in Hyattsville, Mr. Davis - apparently frustrated with technical difficulties at the station - walked away in a huff, moments before he was scheduled to deliver a live report, forcing the anchors in the studio to apologize to viewers.

Staffers said Mr. Davis tried to blame his producers for the foul-up, but management sided against him. "He made himself very unpopular around here," one source said.

Mr. Davis declined comment.

Mr. Herzog, the station's morning sports anchor since 2000, said Mr. Davis "was very gracious" when he spoke with him after management circulated a memo announcing the changes.

Mr. Mease took the news of his firing well, Mr. Herzog said. "He took it better than I did."

Mr. Herzog began his career as a newsroom copyboy at WUSA in 1969. In 1983, he left to become sports director at WJLA-TV (Channel 7), but returned to WUSA-TV 10 years later.

Since 1974, Mr. Herzog has called Washington Redskins games on radio.

Under the Southern Sun

Like many Americans who identify with cultural hyphenation, Italian-American Paul Paolicelli has a strong desire to explore his heritage through numerous visits to his grandparents' native southern Italy. What he discovers is much more than traces of his own family tree; it's an obliterated history, hidden by prejudice and bias. According to Paolicelli, northerners have looked down on the southerners as illiterate, unskilled laborers and considered their dialects to be inferior to the "proper" Italian spoken in the north. The region, however, contains some of Europe's oldest cities (e.g., Matera, in Basilicata, dates back more than 7,000 years) and has produced many successful Italian-Americans, including Jimmy Durante and Mario Cuomo.

Paolicelli also writes about less proud moments in the south's history, such as Ferramonti, a Calabrian concentration camp where Italian and foreign Jews were imprisoned with other "enemies of the state." "Unlike their German counterparts, the Italians... had no anti-Semitic beliefs, no taste or liking for the situation and, in fact, took steps to make the camp as tolerable as possible for all involved." Paolicelli's history is a patchwork of conversations, legends and research. His zeal for the stories he hears is evident in his enthusiastic and easy-to-read prose. The larger narrative, however, is a bit choppy. His numerous visits and lack of chronology make the book more of an account of his personal journey than a serious journalistic pursuit.

Paul Paolicelli is an award-winning television journalist and documentary producer. In his more than twenty-five years as a news reporter, producer, and executive, he has worked throughout the United States and Europe at local and national TV outlets. In addition to his current duties as director of news and programming for the Ohio News Network, he is currently at work on his second novel. He lives in Worthington, Ohio.

Order from Barnes and Noble
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Learn How To Become a More Effective Leader at RTNDA@NAB

This year at RTNDA@NAB, attendees can take part in eight interactive sessions designed to make them better newsroom leaders.

Facilitators will lead you through role-playing exercises and drills and provide case studies to take back to the newsroom. Explore these important topics: managing your boss, working with other department heads, determining your leadership style, creating a positive newsroom culture, conducting difficult conversations, learning the secrets of great coaching, interviewing and hiring the best and the brightest, and managing your time.

RTNDF's Leadership Initiative is sponsored by the McCormick Tribune Foundation and is included in the cost of registration.

How could Elizabeth Smart's father, Ed, be live on both the CBS Early Show and Good Morning America at 8am EST. Obviously one of the shows was not being truthful. It looked like GMA's interview was taped.

Also, why did the Early Show label their interview exclusive, when Ed was on every morning show.

From: Paula Kephart
paulakay7@comcast.net
RE: Media

I find your article very truthful and factual. The executive branch of our government has absolutely too much power for the people in it. The media should be asking pointedly direct questions that make them tell the public all of the underhandedness they are on most accounts probably guilty of. I would like to see the media really go after them. Thanks, Paula

From: John Corcoran
Pesky Gadabout. Los Angeles & The World
Corkczar@Aol.com
Subject: Succinctnessitude

The Chinese are banning the Rolling Stones from performing "Brown Sugar" during their performances in China because, they say, the lyrics are offensive. That answers one question plaguing those of us who could never interpret Jagger's mumbling on that particular ditty. He must have sung it in Chinese.

(The above one-paragraph letter is submitted in the interests of Michael Cunningham, who wrote ShopTalk (3/14) to note my last missive went 16 grafs).

From: Paul Huckeby
100802@operamail.com
RE: pronunciations

According to the Broadcast Board of Governors (Voice of America's source) http://ibb7.ibb.gov/pronunciations/

"QATAR
KAH-trr"

An audio clip is also available on the web page.

Perusing the IBB "methodology" section reveals:

"The sources for place name pronunciations are as follows:
1. Merriam Webster's Geographical Dictionary
2. The Columbia Gazetteer of the World
3. VOA language services
4. Embassies
5. The United Nations
6. Outside experts"

A couple months ago I watched a CSPAN broadcast of a seminar with the Sunday morning talker show producers in which one said " [Kah-TAR] -- I mean, [CUTTER] -- by the way, when did we start pronouncing it [CUTTER]?" My question for the community is:
Is this an example of Pack Journalism?
Here is a producer of one of the most influential news programs on television, and not only does she not bother to research the answer to her question, she accepts the Tribal Knowledge 'Now it's pronounced CUTTER' as Fact. A couple weeks ago a letter to ShopTalk speculated the reason the Chicago nightclub fire was not 'Breaking News' on tv until hours after it occured was due not to prejudice, but because the AP wire did not flag it as 'URGENT' until the next morning. I never heard confirmation that such was the case. In any event, I daily see numerous examples of news organizations playing Follow the Leader, but rarely have I encountered anyone willing to be The Leader. On the Qatar pronunciation issue, I'm horrified that the people providing news can't research something as simple as pronunciation, and will go with whatever current dogma dictates.

What do you think?

-- Thanks

A 60 Minutes piece last week featured at least three different pronunciations of Qatar; one of which was the Amir himself pronouncing the name in English, but I don't have it on tape to check which pronunciation he used.

A pronunciation peeve:
ELBARADEI, MOHAMED
Egypt
mow-HAH-mehd ehl bah-RAH-day

From: Burt Allan
BurtAllan@prodigy.net
RE: Larry King

Perhaps, it is only my perception and I am in a minority in taste, at least with Shoptalk letter-writers, but, most definitely not with the viewing public, I trust, but, it is my observation that I do not think I have ever seen a positive comment on Larry King in the Shoptalk "Letters" section, in the last couple of years, dating back to the time when one reporter colleague of his, during very public contract negotiations which included another network, deemed it appropriate to blast King for his interview style, journalistic integrity and the judgment of his network to keep his program on CNN.

Yeah, I disagreed completely, then and Yeah, I disagree completely now. Larry gave a delightful example of his value and skills in his show, last night, covering the breaking story on Elizabeth Smart. There is nobody in television that could have done a better job handling all those guests and in getting each guest to share themselves as they really are.

Far too many television "stars" think that they are the "star" and that they must dominate the program and dominate the guest and even say something or interrupt someone every time somebody else says something.

How many news anchors actually have interviewing skills? How many reporters can actually get cooperation when they grill someone by getting confrontational asking tough questions?

Kudos to Connie Chung for exposing Condit for being a snake with his answers and his body language, but, often you'll find a person simply walk away with no comment. It's easy to critique Dan Rather for his interview of Saddam, but, the interview, with all its shortcomings, may not have happened at all or would have been cut short by Saddam, if it got more confrontational with Rather challenging him at every comment.

The interview would have resembled Mike Wallace zooming the camera on a bad guy who refused to speak during a 60-Minutes segment and they roll tape as he tells them to shut the camera and leave. No, I am not defending the translator issue.

Great reporting, in my definition, is not just asking the tough questions of people who don't want to answer them and trying to get them to "slip" and blurt out something extraordinary for the big scoop. Great reporting, in my definition, is doing the "behind the scenes" homework to "break" news and go beyond the press release statement because they smell something. 99% of the "reporting" and "investigating" in local news, today, has been left to following up on somebody else's "tip" about some scam artist business and the troubleshooter consumer reporter going out to the location with the camera rolling and saying, "Shame on You," that is, of course, after he checks with the sales manager to see if the business buys any time with the station.

In the case of an interview, too many play it like (a) Tom Snyder, for example. People watched Tom Snyder because they liked Tom Snyder. If you like Snyder, it never mattered who the guest was. Some have said that they could have numbered the titles of John Wayne or Elvis movies and the fans would have kept coming. But, in the case of Snyder, in my opinion, he rarely made his guests comfortable and relaxed which is part of how you get them to open up. This is why Snyder only had a "cult" following, for the most part, and as talented as he was, he lacked the warmth that made folks want to welcome him into their home every night. His news anchoring didn't always bring in the numbers, through the years, because of this. He'd still make a great political interview host for MSNBC, though.

But, back to King. King has the ability to pause. King has the ability to listen. King responds to the subject's answer with his next question instead of always following a pre-determined agenda of questions to ask. He lets his guests answer the questions without cutting them off. Last night, he surrendered being the host, for a moment, inviting Walsh to talk directly with another guest. When he needed to step in, he did. He jumped on Walsh for not allowing another guest to complete his statement; the defense lawyer guest.

Larry's show is about conversation. It is about the guest and treating the guest as a guest. Larry's interview style brings the guest's guard down and it works. Larry will often get more out of his guests than all that hard-nosed macho confrontation ever does. The defense lawyer, at the end of the interview, revealed more about himself than he probably intended when he blurted out his feelings about the Iraq situation. Sure, unrelated to the topic, but, we now know what makes him tick and it was because he was relaxed in the company of the host instead of defensive. It happens often with Larry's guests. The confrontational style is all theater and it rarely works. If I had the choice to see Dan Rather do the interview with Saddam like he did or not to see him do the interview at all, I'd "rather have Rather" (no pun intended) do the interview. Don't forget that Larry the liberal has no agenda in guest selection.

He will often air both sides, equally, in the same show or in a subsequent show. What better way than to let the audience hear both sides of the story and then decide for themselves instead of a bombastic and self-righteous host or hero/ace reporter or interviewer challenging the subject, at every turn, with all the tough questions and getting us nothing more than good "theater" with a shouting match or we wind up with the subject ducking the interview invitation, entirely.

I enjoy debate and I enjoy conversation. They are two different things and both have a place and both can be newsworthy. Chris Mathews does a terrific job of exploring the issues with his guests and asking tough questions and never gets in the way by becoming a "star" that is bigger than the guest or the topic. You have to let the guest speak! Nothing the host says will expose their true self better than the guest will. My real concern, though, is how too many news programs with the ethics of not paying for a story are now hiring their own experts for analysis and we constantly see them as guests and they are obviously cooperating with their fellow paid colleague/host. How many potential guests decline an invitation to one show because they know that the host will be tough on them? On the other hand, how many guests appear with Larry King because they know he will be fair with them and treat them as a guest deserves to be treated, with dignity and respect and without passing judgment? Fact is, Larry often gets the scoop and the big guests that won't appear on other shows and we still learn something, even with his arguably tame style. Hannity, last night, called Alexander Haig, "a friend," on the Hannity/Colmes program. Is this good journalism for the host of a news program to be a pal of his guest when we are expecting the "tough" questions and answers discussing politics and war? What would that colleague/reporter that called Larry King to task, awhile back, think of this? Good reporting doesn't always happen in a press conference by a reporter with a pad asking a tough question trying to become the next Sam Donaldson.

In 2003, for better or worse, we often get more substance and more quotes from watching Larry King with his style, Chris Mathews, Tim Russert or Sean Hannity with their unique interviewing styles than from watching a presidential news conference, in some cases, and many young aspiring reporters would do themselves a good turn by learning from Dan Rather and Larry King while they're still around. One thing, by the way, that both Dan Rather and Larry King have in common and both share often when they are being interviewed is that they both started out at small radio stations doing everything. They learned how to communicate with audio before the camera ever turned them into a "star."

There is no such thing as a "television journalist or reporter" or going to school to become a "tv journalist." I worked with interns, in the past, who told me that they had no interest in radio or newspapers, but, they wanted to be a "tv journalist." You are either a reporter or a journalist or you are not. There may be a difference in telling the story with print or with audio or with audio plus video, but, it's the "content, baby!" that make you a reporter or a journalist and no college internship and a few years of getting sound bytes at a press conference and wrapping it around some file video for a 2-minute package and parroting a deliberate leak from a source that wants you to leak something and calls you because they know you can be manipulated to spit out "whatever," is my definition of top-notch reporting. That's just a stuck-up tv guy who thinks they have a lock on what good journalism really is.

Larry King has been interviewing people for 30 years or more, I guess? He is so smooth that you don't realize it or appreciate that he often gets more out of an interview than anyone else would, under the same circumstances, and he also never seems to get credit for solid ratings and go look at his lead-in; it ain't Mr. Reilly.

Finally, like so many famous people, he grew up in Brooklyn like I did and I just felt the need to stick up for a fellow guy from Brooklyn, a legendary radio/tv broadcast talent, (appreciate him or not) that was at the top of his game last night and, in the twilight of his career, he should not only be appreciated, he should be studied. He is the sum of years and years of schooling in broadcasting. He read the UPI copy, he hosted as a music jock in his first gig, he has interviewed celebrities, politicians, he's done open phones on the radio with listeners, etc. He's done just about everything in front of a microphone. He's a pro and he brings to the table something intangible that no "tv journalist" can ever hope to bring to the table without paying dues in radio and/or newspapers and note this: You can take someone, even a cosmetically deficient person, from radio or newspapers and put them on television, if they have substance, but, you rarely can do it in reverse.

From: M.D. Smith
mdsmith@hiwaay.net
RE: Reunion

March Ides: March 15 is the Ides of March. History teaches how Julius Caesar's allies got away with his assassination on the steps of the Roman senate. They blamed it on the media. (Ray)

Rejected: Iraq rejected the six point plan proposed by Britain to avoid an invasion. Evidently Saddam was most terrified of the TV broadcast demand that would have required him to be interviewed on the O'Reilly Factor. (Cybersatirist Bob Hirschfeld - http://bobsfridge.com)