The Good, the Bad,
and the "Gloriously Boring"

Robert MacNeil -- called "Robin" by just about everybody -- was born in Canada, and was an aspiring actor and playwright before turning to journalism forty years ago. This October he departs The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour after twenty years of exploring -- five nights a week on the Public Broadcasting Service -- the day's major news stories. In between, MacNeil has covered (for NBC News) the fighting in the Belgian Congo, the civil war in Algeria, the construction of the Berlin Wall, the Cuban missle crisis, and the assassination of President Kennedy, among many other assignments. From 1967 to 1971, he was a reporter for the BBC's prestigious Panorama series, and then joined PBS's NPACT (the National Public Affairs Center for Television) as a senior correspondent. In the conversation that follows he takes stock.

Neil Hickey: Let's get right to the main question. You're leaving The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour in October. Why?

Robert MacNeil: It will be the twentieth anniversary of the start of the program in 1975, and there's a certain symmetry in that. I think it's just long enough to do anything. It will also be a few months shy of my sixty-fifth birthday. And I've been putting off for many years what I set out to do, which was to become a writer -- a writer of fiction, plays, novels. I came into journalism because I had to earn a living. I tried over the years to write fiction on the side but it didn't really work. And I want to get my head back.

 NH: What does that mean?

RM: If you're in journalism you must fill your head every day with the raw material of journalism -- mostly the politics of the day, the affairs of the world. The average citizen has the luxury of doing that when he chooses. And I would like to have that luxury back.

 NH: It looked to some people as though you are simply deserting the sinking ship of public broadcasting at a time when a Republican Congress is questioning whether it deserves to survive.

RM: Let me tell you the chronology of the decision. Jim decided that whenever I did leave, he wanted to do the program alone and not have a co-anchor. We concluded that it made sense for the program to devolve toward Washington -- to have it come from one city and not two. The business of switching back and forth, like the old Huntley-Brinkley show, added a certain spurious drama to the program, some showbiz, variety, pace, those things. Now that it's well-established it doesn't need that artificial prop anymore, and clearly it saves money to eliminate the duplication of facilities.

NH: Is public broadcasting a ship that's going down? Does it indeed deserve to receive taxpayer money, while many cable channels are doing similar programming on a commercial basis?

RM: I don't think it's at all certain that public television is sinking. And of course it deserves to survive. The notion that in this rich nation, with such huge cultural diversity, there can't be one corner reserved for the public interest -- that's a crazy idea. When every other country in the world that I'm aware of has reserved not only a tiny splinter of the spectrum but large chunks of it for public TV. And the notion now that Republicans, and some people like George Will, are claiming that everything public television does could be done on cable ignores the fact that many programs they praise would never have been made on cable. The NewsHour is one of them. If Ken Burns walked into any commercial network and said he wanted to make ten hours on the Civil War using black and white stills and actors reading letters, with a little bit of music in the background, he would have been laughed out of the office. As we would have been.

 I think some of the failure of public television over the last few years is that it has not continued to generate new programs that tested the boundaries the way The Civil War did, the way we did. I haven't seen arriving new things that reinforce the brand image, as something you can only see on that channel.

NH: Shouldn't there be more journalism on public TV? It's a kind of journalistically-challenged network.

 RM: It isn't the number of hours, it's the quality of programming and the aesthetic that is different. People come to public television because what they get is different. It's quieter, it's more thoughtful, it's less intrusive, abusive.

NH: Public television doesn't even have a news division as such -- no systematic coverage of hard news.

 RM: As you know from the history of public television, it was hard enough for a long time to persuade a majority of stations that we should be doing anything in the public affairs area. Many of them thought their mission should be cultural and educational and entertainment at the high end of the taste spectrum. They would say, look, commercial television is doing enough news, we don't need any more and that isn't our business and it'll only be controversial and it'll get us in trouble.

NH: But you know that public radio is a wonderful source of news and public affairs. Why isn't public television as happy a home for news?

RM: I don't know. I don't know. Partly it's economics. It's so much cheaper to do it on the radio, and to do it well, as they do. Think of starting a Morning Edition on public television. Hugely expensive. And carrying it on hour after hour in the time zones and updating it the way they do. I think a television equivalent of that would be even more expensive than our program, which is the single most expensive program on public television. Also, you can't consume a public television program while you're driving to work. You can do almost anything while listening to NPR. Some people say you can do that with our program too. Incidentally, our program as you may know is also a radio show in many cities.

NH: How has television journalism changed in the twenty years you've been doing this job? What's better and what's worse?

RM: What's better is the equipment, the technical side, much more portable. You can originate from anywhere virtually instantaneously. What's worse about it is that it has lost a lot of the seriousness and dignity that it had twenty or thirty years ago. I have tapes of the Huntley-Brinkley show from 1963 and '64. And they are models of such dignity and decorum compared with their successor product.

 There was almost no graphics. Huntley and Brinkley -- and Cronkite was doing the same -- were reading stories that would seem interminably long today, off pieces of paper, not even using TelePrompTers.

 What has been the aim of commercial television news, going back to the days when the three networks commanded the attention of ninety percent of television homes? It was to capture the largest part possible of that ninety percent. The ninety percent has now shrunk to fifty percent among the three networks, and there are many other channels offering information. So the scramble to get a chunk of that reduced percentage, a smaller piece of the pie, is more frantic.

It was always true of commercial television that it had to broadcast for the inattentive and the uninterested as well as for the attentive and the interested. A very strange proposition when you think of it. And it seems to me that it chases its own tail more and more and more. If three large, rather dignified jungle cats were competing for jungle territory thirty years ago, it's three much smaller cats now, in a much smaller sack fighting each other in a much less dignified way.

 Obviously there is an interaction between the American people and what they're given. Newspapers have become a great deal less serious than they used to be. Print newsmagazines have changed their standard diet and are chasing a kind of sociological news that is very different in content than what they regarded as news before. So, to my rather austere, I suppose, way of looking at it, the general trend has been downwards. We can report from anywhere. But we seem to report from fewer places and report more obsessively and hysterically about those things we know will capture the largest audience. I mean the attention to the O.J. Simpson trial, while perfectly understandable for Court TV and perhaps CNN -- which sees its ratings fall when it doesn't go to war -- it's just very strange to see that story dominate the nightly news of the three great television networks. Sure, cover it, and maybe come back once a week, but the coverage is obsessive.

 NH: It's been said that TV journalism's responsibility is to give people not only what they want to know but what they need to know to be decent citizens and to cast their votes sensibly.

 RM: Of course -- in that old, paternalistic, elitist way that would be so incorrect nowadays. But it seems to me that news organizations, including some newspapers and newsmagazines and television networks, are doing what politicians do. The more assiduously and the more imaginatively we court public opinion to find out what we should be doing, the more we follow that opinion. And that is true in network news, it's true in the national politics of this country.

NH: One of the big complaints about journalism lately is that there is a virus of tabloid news, both in print and in television versions, that has infected the way traditional news broadcasts and TV newsmagazines go about their business. Does that bother you?

RM: It's awfully easy to sound priggish about this. Look, there is a marketplace, and journalism has always known, at one end of the spectrum, what secret cravings we can latch onto. At the other end it's: "We know what's good for you and we'll tell you." American journalism like British journalism has always known how to exploit that range. The question is: in the frantic desire to maximize audience, is the taste range from the lower end corrupting the upper end? There have been phases, certainly in the print journalism wars, when that was largely true. If you want examples of really undignified American journalism, you've only got to go back to the twenties and thirties where there were many more newspapers in New York and they weren't above any kind of exploitation. So I don't think it's new that American journalism has found ways to follow the crowd and to find the cheaper end of the carnival sideshow with the two-headed woman and the calf that gives birth to a pop singer. That's always been there. What'interesting is that serious journalists are beginning to follow that now.

 NH: The question is whether so much of the American public has really turned so trivial in the information they choose to consume.

 RM: Or have they decided quite sensibly: Look, I'll know where to find the information I need. There's a blizzard of information out there every day. We're surrounded by it. It's like living in a hailstorm in this country all the time. And I'm sure that people rapidly become very sophisticated about what to screen out or where to get shelter from that hail and where to find what they really need to make their lives feel engaged, responsible, comfortable. And clearly that is different from during the cold war when there was a deep psychic anxiety in this country about communism, about missiles, about nuclear war.

 NH: And what did the television audience bring to television screens during those years?

RM: A very serious attention and appetite based on anxiety -- and on a fairly unified sense of what was right and a sense that the institutions of the country were serving them well. And now we have an extreme loss of faith in the institutions of the democracy. And rampant indifference to the central rite of democracies -- elections. The thing that makes democracy work is regular elections. And if, in the world's greatest democracy, increasing proportions of the population say "I don't give a damn about that," that is something really fundamentally sick with the democracy, just by definition. What I'm saying is that the television audience -- let's not blame it all on the television networks and the newsmagazines -- is now bringing something different to the screen when it watches its television news. Maybe that's partly created by television, but it's mainly created by the whole complex of what it means to be an American in the 1990s.

 NH: This hailstorm you mention is becoming more virulent with the growth of global news via satellite, on-line systems, the Internet, CD-ROMs, and so forth. We're coming into this so-called Information Age, which is raising all sorts of new and as yet unexamined issues. This storm may disorient a lot of people.

RM: Yes, but out of that hailstorm, will people still want some institution they respect or tolerate, like The New York Times or NBC Nightly News or MacNeil/Lehrer? Do they want them once a day or once a week to pull the world together for them and give them the synthesis that traditionally they relied on and trusted? Obviously some people still want that. A growing number of people, however, clearly do not want or need that. Or they may take that as a little part of their diet as they quickly bolt their cornflakes in the morning, but not as their main information diet. And for younger people, who are demographically not present as they used to be among newspaper readers, television news program watchers, newsmagazine readers, the information superhighway is making it easier and easier for them.

 NH: Another expression we've begun to hear in recent years is "a la carte news," in which a viewer or reader is, by some electronic means, provided only with the news for which he has indicated a prior interest.

 RM: Yes, automat news, cafeteria news. I think the big divide is going to come with the question: do you want Mr. New York Times Editor to pull the world together for you every day or do you want to say: "New York Times, if you want to continue to exist, you've got to allow me to select what I want from you every day, through my new electronic newspaper." Or, "please Mr. MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, I want that discussion you did with several senators the other day about what Clinton is finally going to do or should do about Bosnia. But also, I want to take another twenty minutes, and I want the background report that your reporter did eighteen months ago on the whole history of the Yugoslav degeneration. I'd like to see that again now." And whup, I'll press the button. And there it is.

 I'm not at all sure which of those alternatives the great bulk of people are going to settle on. Whether they want to be passively the recipients of a synthesis made by a respected editor in whatever medium -- because they want to share that synthesis with their neighbors. After all, readers of The New York Times or Time magazine share something. They are part of a group that defines itself by what they've all read. Or whether they all want to be much more pro-active -- ugly term that everybody's using now -- and make their own selection. I'll bet there will be large quantities of both, but it will be the puzzle of the purveyors of all this stuff to figure out in what proportions. All this needs to be puzzled out. But the fundamental question in that puzzle is: do people want to be told or do they want to find out for themselves?

NH: Let's talk about politics for a moment. The 1996 election period has already begun, with candidates trekking to New Hampshire and elsewhere. Looking back to the 1992 model, many office-seekers avoided the traditional journalistic outlets such as Meet the Press and Nightline and the evening news broadcasts in favor of talk radio shows and Larry King and others -- thereby avoiding the tough questioning of reporters on the political beat. It was a whole new way of reaching the public by stiffing the traditional press.

 RM: Any smart politician is going to use whatever media vehicles are available to him at the time, whether it's Lincoln in 1860 or Lamar Alexander or whoever in 1996. I'm not worried, because the surveys I saw said that when American voters made up their minds in the 1992 election, the vast preponderance of information on which they based their decisions was from traditional media. Now, what the alternative media may have done is attract people who were only marginally interested in the first place, and then bring them into the tent to a point where they might get interested enough to stay. Viewers of Bill Clinton playing the saxophone on Arsenio Hall may have said, "Hey, man, there's a cool guy and let's go find out a little more about him."

 NH: You're the only journalist I've met who isn't annoyed by being ignored by many office-seekers in 1992.

RM: I am not somebody who -- at the end of my career in a traditional sort of media -- is in any way anxious about politicians resorting to whatever new media they can. Personal information systems, for example, the thing that will use a slightly different bandwidth, where you'll carry a much smaller apparatus with your number on it and you'll be reachable anywhere. I mean, I don't care if politicians find a way to program that, and ring up every individual in the country while you're sailing or horseback riding or in the country, and saying, "Hi, Neil Hickey, this is Bob Dole, and I've heard that you're particularly interested in bowling on Thursday nights, and I just want you and all your fellow bowlers to know that I'm thinking of you, and I'm going to be the best president." I don't care if they use personal satellite systems that can find you in your car or anywhere else. God bless them. The observation I return to is that, in a democracy, if a majority of people don't vote, that is an unhealthy democracyecause the mandate that any politician gets is tainted.

NH: What do you make of the way the press was restricted during the Persian Gulf war, the extremely limited access to military operations that the Pentagon permitted? Every indication is that the public was on the side of the military in the gulf war in approving the strict limitations on news people.

RM: They were on the side of the military, but if you look at the polls, it's also true that the public approved of the coverage. The military was clearly pissed off at the tone of questioning at some of those news briefings.

NH: Some of that questioning was quite amateurish.

RM: Quite amateurish because after all, what does war attract in terms of correspondents. It has always attracted, in addition to the seasoned older people, a new generation of hot young guys, and now gals, who are anxious and brave enough to seek that as an opportunity to make their reputations. And sure they're inexperienced, and sure they ask sometimes inconvenient and sometimes uninformed questions. The military was annoyed by it. But the public didn't mind it. The public approved of the coverage and the public also approved of the Pentagon's restrictions on the coverage. Interesting. The Times Mirror Center for the People & the Press calls this the American public's ability to entertain cognitive dissonance. It can approve of two apparently mutually contradictory things at the same time.

 NH: Let's look at the global picture for a moment. A colossal necklace of geostationery satellites now rings the earth 22,300 miles above the equator and makes it theoretically possible for all the planet's five-and-a-half billion people to have all the same news simultaneously. It's news without national boundaries.

RM: It's very exciting. It'll come down to how thoroughly the entrepreneurs do their business, how nationalistic the product is, and whether they're driven by the same goddamn feeling that they've got to bring everybody under the same tent at the same time by purveying something that is so gripping and sensational that you have to watch it. Different organizations will broadcast differently.

When television becomes increasingly an a la carte or a cafeteria style service -- not the blue plate special we all grew up on -- you'll know that out there, at any time of the day, you can watch the BBC from London or the Canadian international service, or the American CNN or Rupert Murdoch or God knows what. It will be part of what we were discussing earlier, the ability of people to choose what they want when. The little keypad that allows you to go out through your cable and get what you want will remember every time you make a selection. It's going to come back at you and say, well, you watched the BBC news this time last night, do you want to see it again. And it will reinforce your habits.

 NH: Your program has been kidded over the years for being populated by "wonks" bloviating endlessly. When it went from thirty minutes to an hour in 1983, one critic said he thought it already was an hour. Somebody once called the NewsHour "gloriously boring."

RM: It's a description I'll accept. We have the courage to be boring. And nothing is boring to people who are interested in it. The Bible is boring to some people. Schopenhauer is boring to some people, but not to people who are passionately interested in him. What we've created in this program is an audience passionately interested in this program.

 NH: That's a bit solipsistic, isn't it?

RM: It is. But solipsisms can be true too.

 NH: The interviewing style on MacNeil/Lehrer has always been rather benign by some standards -- not at all tough. You don't do "gotcha" questions, you don't try to nail people, you don't engage in loud, argumentative interviewing as do programs like Crossfire and The McLaughlin Group. Has it been a conscious effort to employ that style of interviewing?

RM: Yes, and it arises out of Jim's personality and mine because both of us really hate that. For one thing, we think it's phony a lot of the time and we think that smart people see through that. For another, it seems self-defeating to us when the principal ingredient of a news program is going to be the guests you bring on for what they know, and then beat them up, and try to make the audience feel you're smarter than they are. Being there every night, we don't have to reinforce our own presence. We're there all the time. A lot of interviewing is designed to show off the interviewer and not the interviewee. We figure we don't need to do that. For twenty years, we've been there five nights a week. People know who we are. And by our style of questioning they gradually get to know us and what to expect.

 NH: Catching more flies with honey than with vinegar?

RM: There's the Aesop fable about the competition between the Sun and the North Wind to make the traveller take off his cloak. The North Wind told the Sun "I can do it better than you," and he blew and shrieked and howled and the traveller pulled his cloak more closely around him. And then the Sun came out and shone -- and the traveller took off his cloak. Everybody knows that a lot of television interviewing, where the interviewer behaves like Perry Mason with a lying witness in the dock, is just theatrical. The fact that you put on that prosecutorial manner doesn't make your questions better informed, doesn't make you listen better to what the person is saying. In fact it may get in the way of that.

NH: You must be doing something right because viewership of the program is up by more than a third over the last nine years, which far surpasses the growth of the network evening news programs during that same period. And a recent Roper poll found that 63 percent of the NewsHour's regular audience -- about 17 million weekly viewers -- consider it more credible than ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN.

RM: Well, I think in the expanding universe of television news we are a fixed star and the other galaxies, with all their brilliance, are racing away from us. The fireworks may be astonishing, but we are a known quantity that doesn't change. There are some millions of people who like it that way. There are others who've tasted us and found us too dull for their tastes. That's fine. This is always the thing in television. Everybody assumes that you have to win or you're not valid. One of the things public television has shown is you don't have to win to be valid -- because it pioneered narrowcasting, which is going to be everybody's future anyway.

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