When Broadcast Journalists Were Credible

By Frank Absher

Years ago during the first Gulf War, staffers at a local cable company got a surprise visit one day from high-ranking military officials. It really opened some eyes, but to a media history buff, it was no big surprise.

I hearkened back to the 1930s and remembered some of what I’ve read of the trials and tribulations that were going on inside the executive suites at CBS. Chief Executive Officer Ed Klauber, who was former city editor of the New York Times, was the man who built CBS news, hired the likes of news director Paul White and Edward R. Murrow, and wrote the CBS Fairness Standards.

Klauber was a man obsessed with accuracy. He had brilliant journalists working for him but he was irritated by what he perceived as unjustified use of opinions in their reports from and about the European conflict. The tension was understandable.

His reporters and analysts had observed the crisis firsthand and they were truly concerned that the U.S. populace was not being given the full picture. Their mission, they felt, was to make the public aware of just how much of a threat the Nazi regime posed to the entire free world, and they wanted the U.S. citizenry to be open minded about the possibility of being drawn into the war. Isolationists, on the other hand, were doing everything possible to keep that from happening.

Ed Klauber decided it was time to put his standards in writing:

“What news analysts are entitled to do and should do is elucidate and illuminate the news out of common knowledge or special knowledge possessed by them or made available to them by this organization through its sources. They should point out the facts on both sides, show contradictions with the known record and so forth. They should bear in mind that in a democracy it is important that people not only should know but should understand, and it is the analysts’ function to help the listener to understand, to weigh and to judge, but not to do the judging for him.”

This was a man who was one of the first proponents of broadcast fairness, and he devoted a large portion of his career to riding herd on his staff to adhere to those standards, because he knew how important the network’s news reports were to the people of the United States.

Think about this. There was no television. Newspapers’ coverage of the war was at least one day old, usually more. But radio gave the public instant information, and the public came to rely on the radio reporters for coverage, and the analysts for their ability to use their knowledge to help interpret what was happening. As noted above, the network felt an obligation to “point out the facts on both sides.” That didn’t mean giving the enemy a soapbox, but that was done too.

What radio did not do, thanks to people like Ed Klauber (a staunch republican, I might add) was tell people what to think. Although the reporters and analysts had a lot of information at their fingertips, their job was not to judge. Their job was to inform and clarify so the public could make informed decisions.

That function of informing was the primary one, since radio had a lock on the ability to bring news into U.S. homes from overseas sites. And that’s what was brought home to me those many years later when the military officers visited the offices of Continental Cable in Belleville.

There was a war going on halfway around the world. The war had a direct effect on their lives and their jobs and they were seeking the best way to get information from the front.

Did they seek out the Pentagon? Did they grab the latest newspapers? No.

They asked the cable company to send their most dependable and trustworthy installers to Scott Air Force Base, where the military police would escort them into the command’s situation room. There the cable guys were to install outlets so the military brass – the guys who made all the military transportation decisions – could watch CNN to find out what was really happening.

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