In the 1970s, PBS Broke Broadcast News-- And Made It Better
Honoring the work of television journalist Robert MacNeil, January 19, 1931 – April 12, 2024
PBS television journalist Robert MacNeil accepting the 2008 Cronkite Award. Photo credit: Cronkite School/Wikimedia Commons
On September 11, 2019, as part of the research for my book, Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter; How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books: 2024), I had the pleasure of interviewing Robert MacNeil at his Upper West Side apartment. The veteran broadcaster, who died last Friday at the age of 93, answered the door when I arrived. I greeted him as “Mr. MacNeil,” and he said in a baritone familiar to all of us who watched him on what is now The News Hour, “My friends call me Robin.”
This was, of course, perfect, since—although we had never met—I already thought of MacNeil as my friend.
I had “known” Robin, and his broadcasting partner Jim Lehrer, since the late spring of 1973. That year, when I was 15, I became hooked on the Watergate Hearings, a Senate investigation into campaign interference by the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP—really!) in 1972 and the subsequent illegal coverup of those activities by President Richard M. Nixon. The triggering event for Watergate was a group of thugs, hired indirectly by the campaign, executing a break in of Democratic Party headquarters at the District of Columbia’s Watergate Complex. It was an event that had been originally investigated and reported by Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein; their work became the launching pad for the Congressional investigation that ended in the first Presidential resignation in American history.
The hearings, and House impeachment hearings once it became clear that the White House was involved, were broadcast in their entirety on PBS because of MacNeil and Lehrer (you can see all the broadcasts here.) I was in the tenth grade when I became transfixed by this daily political drama, and while I did not understand it at the time, it was a personal, as well as a national, turning point. Forever after I would be committed to three things: politics and political news, history, and the form of journalism that was cultivated, first in the hearings, and then, in the show that is now called The PBS NewsHour.
As I told Robin, and later, readers of Political Junkies, I understand the gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Watergate Hearings, with their unexpected drama and interviews with both participants and experts, as a form of alternative media. Why? Because if its insistence that news required time and thought, and that it should engage the viewer with analysis.
There was one more element as well: that the Watergate broadcast, and the weeknight news show that emerged from it, eschewed coverage for analysis, an approach that had, in the 1950s been the guiding principal of I.F. Stone’s Weekly newsletter. In fact, since the 1954 Army McCarthy Hearings, the American public had almost never seen Congress in action because no network had been willing to give up broadcast time devoted to the afternoon soap operas that brought in such valuable advertising revenue. Nor had any network ever been willing to devote more than half an hour to the day’s news (in fact, it was more like 22 minutes when you subtracted the time for advertising on those shows), with each news item allotted up to two minutes of air time. And, while all networks decided what to show and what not to show (a frustration MacNeil recalled from editing out the most grisly images returned from Vietnam every day in the 1960s), no nightly news show delivered conversation or analysis.
MacNeil and Lehrer experimented with, and then developed, a news format that later became, in a commercial and partisan form, the design for today’s cable news shows on Fox, CNN, and MSNBC. Their format had three main elements: facts; well-prepared anchors who asked intelligent questions rather than speaking from a script; and guests who either explained what the days events meant or were participants in the events in question. It took time, it took money, and in 1973, it was a job that only the Public Broadcasting Corporation was brave enough to do.
That isn’t to say financing the project was easy, however. First, PBS had already been attacked by the Nixon administration, and it largely relied on public dollars appropriated by politicians. Second, the pair had to persuade the chairman of PBS, businessman and philanthropist Ralph Rogers, to sign off on the project. As I wrote in my book:
“We had dinner with him and his wife,”Jim Lehrer recalled, “and we said, ‘Mr. Rogers, we think the Watergate hearings are going to be an important thing and we think PBS should broadcast them gavel-to-gavel, and possibly even rebroadcast them at night.’ And he said, ‘You guys, you guys! You don’t know what the news is. There’s going to be an energy crisis like nothing we have ever seen,’” and then Rogers launched into a polemic about oil. “And we could barely stay awake while he was talking”—Lehrer laughed—“and of course, a year later, there was the biggest energy crisis we’d ever had.” Nevertheless, when the pair left, they had secured Rogers’s support for broadcasting the Watergate hearings.
Finally, Robin and Jim had to persuade public television affiliates around the nation to carry the broadcasts, which meant not replacing advertising-rich soap operas but popular children’s programming like Sesame Street. So,
The team arranged to poll the stations one by one, beginning with those in large, urban, liberal markets where Nixon was especially disliked. As soon as 51 percent of the stations had agreed, the decision to carry the hearings was announced, which “meant that the people who were wavering had to come on board,” Lehrer explained, so that their viewers wouldn’t feel left out.
The result was 51 days of Senate Hearings on the Watergate break-in and seven sessions of impeachment hearings. Americans got to meet and hear from politicians, White House aides, and other players in a national drama that ended in President Nixon’s resignation on August 9, 1974.
What the pair produced, working 12 or more hours a day, was
250 hours of riveting television, breaking news, and expert analysis. MacNeil began every broadcast by reading the Special Committee’s charge, both to “set the tone,” as he put it, and to highlight the fact that this was democracy in action, not a media attack on the president. On May 17, 1973, the first day of the hearings, Lehrer spoke straight to the viewers and explained why PBS had taken the extraordinary step of pre-empting regular programming. This would be, he reminded them, the first time congressio- nal hearings had been broadcast in their entirety since 1954. “We are running these hearings because we think it is important,” Lehrer explained, “and because we think it is important that you get to see the whole thing and make your own judgments.” He also emphasized what it meant for viewers to get the whole story and why the broadcasts were different from receiving summaries and highlights from mainstream newspapers and networks. It was an experiment, Lehrer emphasized in his soft Texas accent, in telling the whole story by “temporarily abandoning our ability to edit . . . however many hours it may take.”
Next year, what began as an experiment and became a nightly news show will have been on the air for fifty years, setting a standard for television journalism that is still an alternative. No other broadcast does as good a job of bringing informed commentary to the public, in my view, and about so many places, in the United States and abroad, that other news outlets do not cover at all. And unlike the MSNBC evening shows, which I like very much, the show remains non-partisan, and grapples with the complexities of having conservative politicians and scholars in the mix to speak for themselves and advocate for policies that attract fawning praise on Fox and mockery on MSNBC.
Over time, through The PBS News Hour, I have made so many other friends too: Charlayne Hunter-Gault, Judy Woodruff, the late Gwen Ifill, Jonathan Capehart, David Brooks, and current co-hosts Geoff Brown, and Anna Nawaz are just a few of them.
So, I will miss Robert MacNeil. I only got to meet him that once, but it was one of those extraordinary experiences in which a person I admired turned out to be exactly as wonderful, generous, modest, and smart as I had imagined.
I’ll end with Robert MacNeil’s own words, as he signed off the broadcast for the last time on October 20, 1995:
“Thank you for understanding what we do:” what more can any of us—including me— ask for?
Follow up:
Miraculously, right after I dropped my podcast with Becky Nicolaides about the post-war demographic evolution of suburban America, Catherine Lacey and Ken Thomas of The Wall Street Journal published this piece: abortion, they argue, is the number one issue for 39% of “suburban women.” Support for Trump among this demographic, they argue, has softened. “According to the Journal poll, 57% of suburban women thought Trump’s policies on abortion were too restrictive,” Lacey and Thomas write. “Just 20% said Biden’s policies weren’t restrictive enough.” But the piece also illustrates a theme of my conversation with Nicolaides: by not mentioning or analyzing race in the article, the authors leave the impression that these suburban women are all white. (April 12, 2024)
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What I’m reading:
I just finished Mary V. Dearborn’s Carson McCullers: A Life (Alfred A. Knopf, 2024), an immensely readable and fascinating portrait of a classic southern writer whose books I have (weirdly) never been drawn to. Dearborn may have changed that. Any reader who enjoys literary biography will be drawn to Dearborn’s brisk, straightforward, descriptive prose about a person—brilliant, alcoholic, queer, and in equal parts lovable and deeply annoying—who was a literary sensation and then lost to illness, booze, drugs and self-inflicted drama.
I would be tempted to press a little harder on whether part of McCullers’ complex psychology was gender dysphoria: her evident anorexia, determination to remain “child-like” and erotic attraction to gay men as well as women strike me as even more relevant than the fact that she preferred to wear men’s clothes. Yet, Dearborn is a model of shaping her narrative with this difficult question, but not gumming it up with useless speculation; she then state straightforwardly in the Epilogue where the evidence does, and does not, leads her. The other “gumming up” Dearborn eschews is endless, digressive, literary criticism, making the book a manageable 400-odd pages. I think many literary biographers think they have to do this to be seen as scholarly; as a reader, I have always found these pages of literary criticism so dull that I dread it when the subject is about to publish another book—and then I skip them.
Short takes:
It’s kind of amazing that, even as women are being forced to have babies in almost half the states, American workers are also still discriminated against for gestating children. But they are. Nearly half of pregnant workers were not covered by the provisions of the Family and Medical Leave Act, passed in 1993 because they hadn’t been on the job long enough, were part time, or were essentially too vulnerable in some other way to warrant government protection. That should change with the 2023 Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, just finalized this week by the EEOC. Under these new rules, Bryce Covert writes at The Nation, “workers with physical or mental limitations related to pregnancy or childbirth can request unpaid time off as an accommodation. The PWFA has no waiting period: It kicks in as soon as someone applies for a job. It also covers employers with 15 or more employees, the same threshold for other civil rights laws.” (April 15, 2024)
In Ms. Magazine, Jill Filipovic asks: would the O.J. Simpson trial be different today? “Today, public opinion” about Simpson himself and the verdict in the case “has changed, and most people, Black and white alike, agree that O.J. was guilty,” Filipovic writes. “But many of the dynamics at play in the Simpson trial have not changed nearly as much as one would hope—including deep racism in policing and criminal justice, a resulting deep skepticism that the system is fair, and a related impulse to filter facts and information through the lens of identity first and reality second.” (April 15, 2024)
If you follow on Threads, you will have seen me chortling about the Incredible Shrinking Stock known as DJT, or Trump Media: it dropped another 18% today to a little more than $26.00 a share. It has lost almost 75% of its value since its IPO two weeks ago. The Former Guy’s original $8 billion stake is now $2 billion (one expert told me that it is expected to settle at about $2 a share.) But what is really sad is that many ordinary Americans have sunk their own savings into Trump Media. As The Washington Post’s Drew Harwell writes, Trump supporters think their hero is invincible, so “investing in Truth Social is less a business calculation than a statement of faith in the former president.” And they are losing their shirts. (April 14, 2024)