By Lee Michael Katz
During his five decades in the news business, Bob Schieffer, 68, has covered everything from the Kennedy assassination to 9/11. He began serving as daily anchor for a scandal-bruised CBS in March.But he considers himself a reporter. Schieffer started on the Fort Worth Star-Telegram ’s night police beat before moving into local and national television news. Even while anchoring the weekend edition of CBS Evening News for decades and hosting the Face the Nation talk show, Schieffer reported regularly from Washington until assuming the New York anchor post eight months ago. “Never in my wildest dreams did it ever occur to me that I would have the anchor job,” Schieffer says. But in the wake of the so-called “Memogate” scandal over forged documents related to President Bush’s military service, Rather stepped down. CBS turned to Schieffer to fill the anchor chair.
CBS chairman Les Moonves is skeptical about the traditional “voice of God” single anchor in today’s environment. Were you alarmed by that comment?
I do not believe he meant he wanted to do away with anchors or reporters. When I came to work at CBS , you had three networks and maybe a fourth independent station in every town. Now you have 200 choices, plus the Internet.
Probably we can’t tell the viewers any new news, but we can help them put it into context. And I think we do that with expertise. The people who are covering the news for the networks now simply have to be experts.
Is t he half-hour nightly network news still relevant?
Probably not as much as we were, simply because there are more places you can go to find the news. If we are going to survive, and I think we will, we have to find new ways to tell people things and identify news people really need to know about.
Do you think it’s still possible to report news that people should know? The “eat your vegetables” theory kind of coverage ?
We need to put the emphasis on what people need to know, but there is nothing wrong with also telling people the lighter kinds of things. Where we fall down sometimes, it’s when we tend not to put emphasis on things we really need to educate people on. There is very little interest right now in foreign news in this country, unless it has to do with Iraq.
You are also last place in the ratings .
Well, so be it. The ratings have to do with a lot of things other than just what you put on the newscast , to be quite frank. I don’t use that as an excuse, but stations that have Oprah Winfrey come before their local and national news, across the board, they generally do better.
Given ratings concerns, do you worry the Evening News could wind up like the movie Network, with the mad commentator used to boost ratings?
No. I think if it ever got to that point, they’d just do away with the news. I’m not worried about the news becoming an entertainment program. But I do believe if we don’t evolve into more than what these programs are today, we’ll go the way of afternoon newspapers. People just won’t see a need for them anymore. I still think we have a chance and can make these programs more relevant.
There is nothing wrong with doing things in a more informal way, which we have done. Talking in language that people use. These little two -way chats I’ve initiated with the correspondents is the television version of a lead story and then a sidebar. It’s giving our viewers something they weren’t getting before: the reporter’s personal impressions.
In other words, there is going to be a group of younger stars, much like years ago with you and Rather when Walter Cronkite was the anchor?
Yes. We are like a baseball team . And we need to find the best young players and build this news department around them .If I were putting this news department together right now, I wouldn’t want me as the anchor. Frankly, I’m too old. I consider myself perfectly capable of doing it, but you want somebody who is going to be around for the next twenty years.
Did ex-CBS News President Andrew Heyward suffer from pressure to reinvent the news? Do you think that’s why he lost his job?
I think Andrew was in an impossible position, with problems and issues that nobody who has run CBS News has ever had to confront. It was almost as if he was driving a car on a road where nobody had a map. This landscape has changed and all of a sudden he had to keep steering the car around a hairpin curve and change a flat at the same time.
Andy Rooney commented on the CBS News blog that the emphasis used to be on collecting and distributing news, but now is on saving money.
[Heyward’s successor] Sean McManus is a big-time player, used to negotiating billion-dollar contracts. He has the record and success of being president of CBS Sports. When he goes to see Les Moonves and says, ‘I need to spend x amount of money,’ he’ll be a very good advocate.
However, Moonves did muse recently about the possibility that “with any luck we’ll have a naked news show.”
He was joking. We had just gone through Dan leaving and Les was very frustrated at the time. I do not think you should take that seriously any more than you should when Sean McManus came to his first staff meeting here and they were running through the line-up for the day. Sean said, ‘But I think the White Sox winning a World Series is more important.’ And all of a sudden people stood up and he said, ‘Oh come on guys!’ He was joking.
You’ve noted your average viewer’s age is probably around 60. How are you going to make the news younger and hipper as Moonves wants?
You don’t make it hipper. But young people relate to young people. And I don’t see anything wrong with finding smart young people, investing in them, and making them your correspondents.
He also just called the current way of presenting the evening news “antiquated.”
I think what Les meant was he wanted to see a new spirit. Something bright and up-to-date. I am more convinced than ever that he does not want to turn this into Entertainment Tonight .
Moonves didn’t even rule out hiring Jon Stewart from the Daily Show.
Let me tell you something: If you could put Jon Stewart on Friday evening and he did a column like Andy Rooney does on 60 Minutes, I’d do that in a New York minute . In the same way, if I could get Tom Friedmanof the New York Times. Maybe you should have a columnist every day. What if somebody like Sean Hannity did a piece for you on Thursday, and somebody like Jon Stewart on Friday? I hate to use the term ‘thinking outside the box,’ but thinking outside the television set maybe.
Does McManus have a mandate to lighten up the news?
No. I’m as sure on that as I am sure my name is Bob Schieffer. His assignment is to make it better.
Will the CBS Evening News five years out be very different? Will there be more than one anchor? Or maybe no anchor at all?
If we determine that it’s good to have an overseas anchor because Lara Logan is such a strong correspondent, then we ought to have an anchor from wherever the biggest foreign story of the day is. Maybe you have another anchor in New York. And maybe one on the West Coast .
If you could have total control over CBS Evening News, how would you shape it to fit the current news environment?
If I could, the first thing that I would do is expand it to an hour and put it on eight o’clock Eastern Time. That would be my goal. I’m not sure that’s ever going to be realized.
Do you want to be the permanent anchor of CBS Evening News?
No, no, I don’t. This is not my goal in life. If this were ten years ago, I would have jumped at the chance. But I’m 68 years old. And it would mean I would have to move to New York .I’m going to live in Washington. I’ve really enjoyed doing it. Sean McManus asked if I would be willing to hang around for a while — and I told him I would. I had bladder cancer. I think everything is temporary. And I look at this part of my life as just a bonus.
Lee Michael Katz , former senior diplomatic correspondent of USA Today and international editor for UPI, is a Washington, D.C.-based writer. He can be reached at lkpeace@yahoo.com.
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