Like you and me just yelling at each other. At talking. What draws an audience is when, in fact, we disagree. When, in fact, we get nasty with one another. What Rupert Murdochs demonstrated is that there really was a hunger in america for something that was less liberal than what the networks for putting on the air. So, fox news was born. Fox news has been hugely successful. It earns somewhere between 1. 10 0. 50 billion a year. 1 and 1. 5 billion a year. The folks at nbc took a look at what fox has been doing and figure out if they could make news skewing news to the right, if we could make half of that, lets ask you to the left. And so, you have on Cable Television news that caters to people who consider themselves progressives, news to people who consider themselves conservatives, you have the afternoon radio talk shows, the evening radio talk shows which cater largely to the conservative. You have the latenight comedy show, john stewart, stephen cole there, that tend to cater more to the left. And the end result is the area that has gone more or less of fellow is serious news organizations reporting the important events of the day without any kind of political bias. We have grown up as a nation believing we are entitled to hear news that resonates to the news we already to the views we already hold. We have seen it this year. A lot of distinguished senators and Congress People leaving. Snow left the senate because she simply cannot handle the nastiness anymore. There is an awful lot of that and you cannot in a democracy. He made the point the me finish this point. You cannot in a democracy expect people to be able to reach across the aisles and make accommodations for important issues if they are terrified that in so doing, it will expose themselves to the wrath of the right or the left. Either John Stewarts humor or rosh or rush limbaughs sharp tongue. What you said not to double long ago was that the commercial success of a fox and ms nbc has become a source of nonpartisan for you. Meaning what . I mean, you and i have known for many, many years that we operated in a business. But as youre saying a few minutes ago, that businesses to make all of its money with i love lucy and whatever else was hogback in the 1960s an 1970s. They made so much money that they could afford to spend 50 million a year covering the world. That is no longer the case. And that is dangerous. My sense every now and then is that of though there are good journalists in Cable Television, the whole package of Cable Television when it is presented to the American People tends to debased about anything it touches. That does not mean that every conversation is bad. But it does mean that the package, to me, comes through as a negative. As something that makes fun of people. That is overly critical. That is not real. A program on sunday mornings, first rate television journalism. For me, he is a smart man who invites smart people on to his program and they talk about important issues in a smart way. I doubt that he has 200,000 people watching that show. It is probably a big audience if he gets that many. It is on a sunday morning which is when programs like that still survive. But youre never going to see that program in prime time. In your judgment, since Cable Television is the place for your going to get right, left, political conversation, and a cnn living in the middle so awkwardly and a trying desperately to keep its base, is it doing good things for our democracy in your view . No, of course not. Is hu doing good things . The idea of Cable Television. No. I feel, quite often, if you eliminated msnbc, fox, and cnn, it would probably improve american democracy overnight. Things would miraculously get better. People would talk to one another again rather than engage in an artificial fight which is what most Cable Television is. You take someone like rachel mat out for example. Very bright. Rachel maddow is a very smart woman and could easily in the old days, and today, i would love to see her as an anchor on one of the evening programs on network television. But the price of that would be that she would have to keep her opinions to herself. It is her opinions that trot the viewership on msnbc. Now, she is a very bright woman, as i said. But i do not want to know what she thinks about these issues. I really do not. I want to hear her in ford reporting. I want to hear her interview people with that sharp mind of hers. I do not want to know where she comes down on a particular issue. But that is seen as hopelessly oldfashioned. I was about to say. Ted. Those days are over. I just want to take a minute to remind our radio and Television Audiences that this is the kalb report. Our guest today is ted koppel. You have described the good old days of journalism as an imperfect, untidy little eaton of journalism. You then went on to say that these days, broadcast news has been outflanked and overtaken by scores of other media options. Help us understand the perceived need for these changes because they not only affect the quality of network news, by the way, do you agree with me that it is in the Twilight Zone a . It is in a twilight. But remember, twilight is usually followed by night and then don follows night. I am still hopeful. You know, it is not going to stay this way forever. I think, you know, what tends to happen in this country as you and i have observed over the last 50 or 60 years, we tend to go too far to the right, and then we correct course and passed through the middle and go too far to the left, and then we correct course again i think what is happening to broadcast journalism requires a course correction. As we come to realize that our educational system is not as good as we like to believe, that our Health Care System is not as good as we like to believe, that we are spending i mean, there are so many things that are on the brink of taking us into real disaster. Not the least of them being the possibility of cyber warfare. That is something that Television News ought to be covering big time. I am tremendously concerned by the fact that the American Public and its military and have never been as far apart as they are right now. We know nothing. We do a terrific job of calling everyone in uniform a hero. We do a terrific job of welcoming them at airports and sang thank you for your service. We know nothing about what is going on in the military. And what is more, the military and military operations are being launched on the basis of drone of attacks, cia operatives, special Operations Forces out in the field, and all of that back by a civilian employees, civilian contractors, and we know next to nothing about what is being done by any of these groups. Because the reporting is not been done . Welle, it is because we have found the American Public will not stand for a draft and the professional military was not enough to fight all over the world. We have been focused on iraq and afghanistan. We actually believe that all the troops are coming back from afghanistan. I will tell you here and now that is not going to happen. We will still have u. S. Troops in afghanistan one year from now two years from now, five years from now. Where is the press . Obviously, these are not issues that the people who run on these programs today why not . Because they do not draw an audience. What draws an audience is Charlie Sheen. What draws an audience is people yelling at each other. It is not enough to say these issues are important. If we actually i know it sounds totally idealistic, but when you and i became journalists as young men, we actually believed that we were entering, really, a special, chosen profession that meant something to a democracy. We called it a calling. A calling, exactly. Exactly. Word of honor, i never thought i was going to get rich as a journalist. You do not go into journalism to become wealthy. The changes we are talking about, you have already touched upon the affect it has on our society, on the business itself. Value systems change. I am not saying we can ever return to the good old days. That is done, but what worries me is whether we can take the value systems of old and try to see them preserved in the digital environment of today. Do you think that is possible . I not only thing that is possible. You and i need a third person here telling us what is being accomplished in the digital arena. I think there are people we are both having a senior moment. People who look at all the blog sites. I did not. There are curators today who because there are so many thousands of web sites make it a point of saying, if you really want to know what is interesting in the area of Foreign Policy or the environment or cyber warfare, we can leave you in the right direction, and the technology is there so you and i can gather material in a fashion that is infinitely superior to what we used to use. We can harvest information. With the reporting, you are getting a ton of information. These curators can provide information, but how reliable is the information . Is it based on reporting . Two key facts have to be made. There is a brilliant material out there that is being wellreported. How do you know that . I have been told. On the other hand, the implication of your question is correct. We do not know. When something comes across on the internet we have no way of knowing what the intention, what the goal is, what the bias is of the people who are putting it out there. I will tell you something i learned from one of these talks. It was on the subject of google. The speaker was making the point that he was a progressive, and he said a friend of his who was very conservative, they took their laptops, and they simply type into the Search Engine the word egypt, and they got a totally different responses. Why . Because there is a process going on. Every time we search for something on our laptop, we are not only gathering information. We are giving information about what we buy, about what we like, about what our political bias sees maybe biases may be, and you and i ought to get the same information if we tie in the same word. That is kind of scary. Somebody is making up their mind about what we want. It is not somebody. It is a series of 0s and 1s. It is a computer algorithm. The algorithm is fine, and i understand it exists, and i will salute it. Is there, but i want to know what that has to do with journalism. Who gets up in the morning and covers some Say Something . Who is going to cover a war . Who is going to cover a campaign . Without the journalists doing on is information gathering, all this stuff is below it. There are plenty of people who are going to do gathering, but the key word that is not true. There are fewer reporters covering the war in afghanistan then there has ever been. Fewer american reporters. American and others as well. I frequently will watch the bbc or of jazeera, because particularly when things are going on in the middle east i am going to learn more from people in the area. Do we know they are reporters . We know they speak arabic. We know they are reporters. Do we know they are objective is . That is a different question. Thus we do not. We have almost given up in our own country. It is still possible to pick of the New York Times, to listen to npr, to watch the news hour. The outlook is there. My old friend says, is dull. Sometimes i say, you are a little too daring. But is there. There is still Good Journalism being committed. The good journalists cannot help it if the public seems to be moving in other directions. I am making the point, and i do not know if i am wishing for this to happen, but i think it will only happen when people realize how devastating the consequences are of not having objective journalism. Do you know clark kent . Know him well. We have on occasion use the same phone booth. Clark kent is no longer the reporter for the daily planet. What does he do now . He is a blogger. Where does he change . Probably in the curators kitchen. That is an indication of how profoundly different journalism is from years ago to today. I am saying this is so much more difficult to find, and the areas you will go after are not terribly reliable, and i would like to think about the north star of journalism today. When you started, you had somebody who did extraordinary things at the network, including starting nightline. For me it was a lot of other people. Who are they in todays world . The fact is he had been the president of abc sports, and we were terrified of this guy who came in wearing his jungle suit and his bracelets he wore. He was not one of the champions of great journalism when he came on. He became that. He evolved, and he is involved because he ran up against in movable objects like helen k. Smith and frank reynolds, and people who still believe Good Journalism was important, and nobody he recognized Good Journalism and moved toward it. He recognized it. I will tell you the back story of my life. For about a year before the iran hostage crisis common they came to us and said, anytime something of major importance happens, run a story on it, 10 minutes, 15 minutes. He initially wanted a onehour news cast at the dinner hour. The affiliated stations would not go along, so he decided he was going to seize that time, and by the time we got to the iran hostage crisis, we were running out of things to say. He said to us, i do not care. Tell me the difference between a sunni and a shiite. Tell me about assad and how he came to power. He kept that program going, because he recognized there was a tremendous american appetite for this story. Had it not been for that appetite common and it wouldnt not have been born. You did not have the tonight show or the letterman show. I will tell you something that has changed enormously. When nightline began in march of 1980, you did not have the letterman show yet on cbs. They would be run some old and trauma, but among the three programs, but tonight show, the cop drama, and nightline we had 70 of homes watching television at 11 00 at night. These days they are lucky to have 25 . That is what happened because what you did not have 35 years ago was cable, satellite the internet, and all of those things have diluted the importance and the reach of the network. Maybe twilight is too soft. You still have evening newscasts. Among the three of them, i suspect we have between 15 million and 20 million viewers. It was 50 million. Cronkite alone probably have about 20 million people. That certainly is true. The responsibilities of journalism to democracy and to our society. I want you to talk about about a little bit more. I want you to explain why there is this connection between the flow of news and a vibrant society. If the american voting public is ignorant of the issue, is uninformed, how can it make Intelligent Decisions . It is bad enough the Citizens United decision of the Supreme Court has resulted in the New York Times said the amount of money spent on all the election campaigns, 6 billion. I was shocked by that. I moderated a discussion. It was fascinating, but mr. Rove made the. We spend infinitely more than that on dog food. It is absurd. Is. As much as i love op eds, if they end up being produced, people keep saying things were much worse in jeffersons farm. Yes, they were, but you only had broadsheets being distributed. You did not have everyone Walking Around with a communications device. Information is spread so quickly that if we do not have reliable, trustworthy, objective sources of information, our whole electoral structure is going to collapse under its weight. Cnns story about how the nyselisted under 3 feet of water cnnns story about how the New York Stock Exchange was under 3 feet of water, it was not true. They got a lie. I do not want to pick on cnn, but that is one of the dangers of trying to retain the best standards, some practice, some place where you can turn and say this is the right way of doing things, and this is simply wrong. Despite all the good things you have said, all of that stuff being said, i am left with an uneasy feeling. I do not know where the information is coming from. Remember years ago when we knew every cameraman who is taking pictures of some of zandt in cairo. Some event in cairo. You knew it was and of effective look. An objective look. I do not know who is taking the pictures. They may be working for some Small Network because the network does not want to bring in its own cameraman. Notice if you watch more than one newscast, notice the number of times you will see precisely the same video when it comes from overseas in large part because the networks do not have their own reporters, and they have brought it from the same source. No. 2, what is wrong with having a local reporter covering the event . A local reporter speaks the language and knows the people. Lets say the local reporter is reported from tehran and the local reporter knows if he or she makes a misstep, they are going to be arrested and thrown in jail. The american reporter may get thrown out of the country, but that is probably the worst that is going to happen. I find there is no willingness to believe objectivity in journalism is possible. I keep hearing there is no such thing as absolute objectivity, to which i say, when you go to hire a lawyer, and you ask, do you like me . If you do not like me, you are not going to be able to put your heart into this thing. When you go to a doctor, you are not asking what his or her politics are. You want that doctor to deal with you on her best professional expertise, and what do our critics want to believe . I argue there really was a time when men and women could be a professional journalist capable of objectivity. That does not mean they do not go home and rail against the darkness. That does not mean they do not have the favorites in an election. To this day, you have known my wife for many years. She does not know how i vote in an election. I do not tell her. I do not think it is appropriate. And you are st