Interview with Tavis Smiley Ask Tavis - Show (Wednesday July 21st 2004)

Bonnie Anderson
Learn more about this guest.

Tavis: Bonnie Anderson is an Emmy award-winning journalist who was a highly regarded reporter, and executive for that matter, for CNN and NBC during her 25-plus year career in television news. She’s now taking a critical look at the news business in a new book called “News Flash: Journalism, Infotainment, and the Bottom-Line Business of Broadcast News.” Bonnie, nice to see you.

Bonnie Anderson: Good to see you, Tavis.

Tavis: I’m afraid to ask, but what is the bottom-line these days for broadcast news?

Anderson: Money.

Tavis: Yeah. Somehow I knew you were gonna say that.

Anderson: And it’s all money, and the sad thing is what we’re losing then is ethics. We’re losing professionalism. We’re losing standards and principles. They’ve all been lowered so that the mega-corporations that own the networks and the news organizations can make more money. And journalism is losing as a result of this, democracy is losing, but the public is losing. The public is not getting the kind of news and the quality of news and the amount of news that it should be getting, particularly in a democracy where free press is a cornerstone. We must be able to give people better news.

Tavis: I love the title, I love the book in fact, but it won’t surprise you to know that I had heard some years ago that news was all about making money. So, when you say “News Flash,” what’s made that reality significant enough for you to write a book about it? What’s new in “News Flash” about the fact that money is the bottom line for news? I’ve known that for some time now.

Anderson: Absolutely. Well, what’s new about it is now you have a lot more infotainment or entertainment now invested in so-called news programming. You have on “CBS Morning News,” they’re doing programs on “Survivor” and spending valuable news time on shows to promote things on their own broadcast--their own network. You have on the “Today” show when “Friends” was going off the air, I mean they were going crazy for weeks, you know, doing all the last “Friends” episodes.

But, meanwhile, you’ve got, you know, this is a country at war. This is a country that prior to 9/11… I mean, when 9/11 happened, this country and the people in this country were blindsided because instead of getting great investigative reports on Al Qaeda or investigative reports on U.S. policy overseas and the impact that, you know, how the rest of the world views this nation, what we were getting were the types and likes of, you know, gavel-to-gavel on O.J. Simpson, the Laci Peterson type of story, Chandra Levy. You know, it just goes on and on and on, and this is where the media was tuning in to these almost reality type soap operas, giving people hundreds of hours of this kind of broadcasting, but not doing what we are mandated to do by the first amendment, which is to inform the American public. It’s a responsibility that goes hand-in-hand with democracy. And, frankly, the media has let down the American public.

Tavis: What if I said to you, as I’m about to say right now, that to get folk to watch the news these days--you know the old story. The networks are losing viewers to cable and to specialty channels and to all kinds of other things these days, not to mention GameBoys and MP3 players and everything else that we can do technologically now. So, network news--networks are losing, period. Network news is especially losing.

What if I said to you that to get people to watch news, to get people to pay attention to Bonnie Anderson talking about something about news, I gotta have Maurice Greene come in behind her? To get folk to pay attention to hard-core news, you got to give them a little entertainment. It’s like feeding a baby. You put the applesauce on the front of the spoon, the strained peas at the back of the spoon, and before they know it--bam. You’ve empowered them, at least, but you had to it with a little trickery. What’s wrong with that?

Anderson: Well, a little trickery--I mean, I hate to use the word “trickery.” Let’s just say you want to give people a little bit of what they want, but then we also have the responsibility to give people what they need to know. We don’t sell shoes. We’re not selling widgets. We have a much higher standard that we have to abide by.

I love entertainment and I love opinion programming. And I think they’re great, and have them on the same network, but have, you know, very, very clear lines between this is entertainment, this is opinion, and this is news. I would challenge any news organization in this country to actually give it a shot and say, “We’re gonna close our doors on Friday, and we’re gonna open up a week from now, and when we come back, we’re not gonna just have pretty young bimbos on the set--”

Tavis: Hey, what’s wrong with pretty young bimbos? Just teasing, just teasing. Ha ha ha! Just teasing. Go ahead, yeah.

Anderson: But we’re gonna have--we’re gonna give you news the way it should be done. We’re not going to infuse it with entertainment. You will not find out who got kicked off of “Survivor” on our newscast. You’re not going to get, you know, 10 hours of what happened with the Laci Peterson case.

Tavis: And if they did that, what would happen? Since you say you would challenge--

Anderson: I challenge them because I believe in the American public and people’s need to know and want to know that there will be a viewership there. There will be… It can be very successful. News can make money. I have no problem with that. But there gets a point, as my colleague Christiane Amanpour said a couple of years ago, when you are sacrificing ethics and professionalism and standards to make greater profit. There is a point at which that profit becomes obscene, and it’s counterproductive. They are courting their own demise.

Tavis: What’s the greatest ethic, the single greatest ethic that news is sacrificing these days?

Anderson: In my mind, there’s tons of them. There’s the fake live shots, there’s pretending to be somewhere when you’re not, there’s closing down bureaus around the world. CNN, I think, is the only one that still has bureaus in Africa and the other networks do not. And so something breaks there, and they’ll pick up a stringer from anywhere and pretend that’s news.

But to me, what is truly the biggest problem in all of this is a management that does not reflect the people of this country in any sense. And I’m talking religious diversity, ethnic diversity, age diversity, gender diversity. You go across the--you know, economic diversity, educational diversity. And that, therefore, impacts who you see on the screen and the reporters and the producers who are trying to decide for America and for the world, in the case of CNN, what the world needs to see and should see. They don’t reflect the reality of this country, and this is a country rapidly changing in demographic senses. And, to me, that is unethical.

That is saying, “We want the pretty young blonde white thing on the air because more people are gonna want to watch her, or the handsome guy, you know, who might be 22 years old, who can’t pronounce Albuquerque.” And these are the people--I mean, that was a reality at CNN. It was a woman, who said “Alba-kew-kew.” She was gorgeous, but had the IQ of a kumquat. But this is the reality. And this, to me, is unethical, it’s unprincipled, it’s immoral, and it’s a horrible disservice to the public.

Tavis: Speaking of CNN, you hold no punches, you pull no punches in talking about the networks in this book “News Flash.” In fact, when I first met you, in terms of full disclosure, you were an executive at CNN. You were in charge of personnel.

Anderson: I wanted you to have a prime-time newscast.

Tavis: Well, CNN missed out. PBS got me, so I ain’t mad at ‘em.

Anderson: Good for PBS.

Tavis: Good for PBS. Having said that, you called it the Caucasian News Network for a number of reasons, not the least of which--to the point you just make now--at one point you were given an edict by the folk above you. They told you specifically who they wanted you to hire, who they didn’t want you to hire. What did they tell you?

Anderson: Well, I mean, I had the number-two guy at Turner Broadcasting, who’s in charge of programming--and he had the final OK on all on-air hires--tell me to my face, “We don’t want any more minorities. We have enough of those people.” He also told me in an e-mail that same day, “We only want to hire people who are young and attractive, who project credibility.”

Tavis: Hey, I’m young and attractive.

Anderson: Yeah, you sure are.

Tavis: [laughs] My mama thinks I am, at least. Yeah.

Anderson: But, I mean, here’s a guy who says, “project credibility.” He has a phenomenal résumé in the entertainment world. And I realized--I mean, this is a guy who doesn’t really understand journalism and journalists, who decides, “Well, you know, I’ve had shows. You don’t have to be a doctor to play a doctor on ‘ER,’ so why do they really have to be journalists?” This is the same fellow that same day who asked me, “What’s a journalist?” And I thought he was kidding. And I started to laugh when I turned around and I looked. I realized he didn’t have a clue.

Tavis: OK. I’m not laughing. What is a journalist?

Anderson: Well, I mean, to me, a journalist is somebody who’s absolutely dedicated to informing the public, to public service, to protecting the public trust, to defending the first amendment, and to giving information to the public so that the members of the public are informed and can make decisions about themselves.

It’s somebody who--I mean, I’ve never given money to any kind of candidate for any office. You have to stay as objective as possible. I love whales, but I’ve never given a dollar to save whales. I haven’t bought Girl Scout cookies, and I know people laugh at me for that, but, you know, the Boy Scout issue went before the Supreme Court.

So, I mean, a journalist is somebody--a true, respectable journalist and by the way, there are plenty of them still at all the networks, make no mistake. I’m not saying that everything has gone to hell. It has not. There are plenty of good journalists who are toiling against all odds to continue to bring the kind of news to the public that they should.

Tavis: When you say toiling against the odds, what concerns me is that if money is the bottom line--and I suspect no time soon, with conglomerates owning everything--no time soon is money gonna be not an issue for news organizations as a bottom line. If you’re telling me that the folk who are making decisions don’t look like America, I have no reason to believe, then, that people of color and women are going to be running news organizations any time soon. So tell me why I shouldn’t just crawl under a rock and be depressed about the fact that network news or television news period, broadcast news, is never going to get back to where it was or where it really needs to be.

Anderson: You know, I’m an idealist. I have to believe it’s gonna get better. You have a voice. Plenty of other people have voices. It has to be a ground-roots type of movement. The other networks are not putting me on the air. They don’t want the public to know what is in this book. CNN is trying to get at my hard drives. They want me to reveal my sources, for crying out loud. All of this is happening because they don’t want the public to know the truth. But if the public--if we’re able to get the word out and people are able to start fighting and say, “Wait a minute. You know, this isn’t right. This isn’t good for America. This isn’t good for us as a people or for the country.” We have to keep going. Can’t give up, can’t give up.

Tavis: I got a minute to go. Let me close with this question. You’re not the first person to decry what’s gone wrong--the tabloidization, we hear all the time, of broadcast news. For viewers, who really are, on a certain level, forced to accept what they give us, what does a viewer do?

Anderson: You know, I had one person tell me on a talk show, “You know, I just quit watching news,” and I’m thinking, “That’s really--that’s a shame.” Pick up the phone. E-mail, pick up the phone, call the network or call the news station and say, “I disagree.” If only one person does it, it’s not gonna make a difference. I pick up the phone constantly and call my local stations and say, “Why on earth did you just do that?” But if you do get a lot of people who are complaining, who say, “This is not the quality of news we need”--if it becomes a movement and if people realize that it’s patriotic to speak out this way--this is true patriotism. Let’s demand something that our Constitution protects for us. Let’s demand it. And so pick up the phone, write letters, you know, write e-mails, and just say, “We want news that is far more directed towards everybody in this country and that’s honest and truly fair.”

Tavis: Speaking of writing, I’m glad you wrote the book. The book is called “News Flash: Journalism, Infotainment, and the Bottom-Line Business of Broadcast News” by Bonnie Anderson, veteran reporter for CNN and NBC. Bonnie, nice to see you.

Anderson: Nice to see you. Thank you.