"News is something the public needs to know [but] that someone, usually in a powerful position, doesn't want them to know," Dan Rather told a group of Tufts journalists from the Daily, TUTV and The Observer before he spoke at the Edward R. Murrow Symposium yesterday. "That's news. All the rest is just advertising."
During the approximately 20-minute group interview, Rather spoke on the influence of external pressures on journalism and the adverse consequences of media conglomerations.
In his experience, Rather said that he has rarely been pressured by sources to alter his content to make them look more favorable.
Instead, this pressure exists in other forms. "Where increasingly it does manifest itself is in more insidious ways; in ways that are harder to prove, harder to nail down, but nonetheless they do exist," he said.
Most notably, he said that with the creation of media conglomerates that dominate the market, journalism has been subject to the political needs of massive corporations rather than the ideal of pursuing unbiased, investigative reporting.
"They have legislative needs in Washington, and they have regulatory needs in Washington, and these frequently come in conflict with integrity-filled journalism at its best," he said.
As a result, journalism has become less about public service and more about business, according to Rather. "As these corporations get larger and larger and get more international in their scope and breadth, which they need to as part of the globalization of the economy, the gap between the leadership and the led ... has grown immense," he said. "Public service has just about gone out of the language in the current corporate environment."
Still, this does not mean that all leaders of conglomerates are infected with a desire to defeat quality journalism. "But they see things in a different way and their priorities are the priorities that dominate the corporation and [they] sometimes, not all the time ... do come in conflict with quality journalism," he said.
Rather offered two solutions as to how to reverse this trend. One is for journalists to form relationships with the leaders of the conglomerates and convince them that producing quality journalism is in their best interest from a business standpoint. This is something he said that he, as well as other journalists, could have done better. "We failed to make that case," he said.
More important, though, is to have somebody in charge with a commitment to bold moves. "Great journalism always begins with a publisher or owner who has guts," he said.
Rather also discussed his experience in entering the field of journalism, a career path in which he said that catching the eye of the right person at the right time is incredibly important. "I'm a reporter who got lucky; very, very lucky and it's important to understand that," he said.
But with the expansion of the media into new fields that were technologically infeasible when he was a young journalist, he said that entering the field may be easier now than it was in the past.
"The competitive arena has been enlarged quite a bit, which means there's more demand for journalists," he said. "I think it's probably easier to break into journalism now, which isn't to say it's easy."
-by Rob Silverblatt
