By Paul Greeley
817-578-6324, Paul@NewsBlues.com

NOTE: This is from Stacey Woelfel’s Substack column, The Last Editor by Stacey Woelfel.

Stacey Woelfel spent 35 years on the faculty of the Missouri School of Journalism.

And for 24 years, he was the news director for KOMU, the University of Missouri-owned NBC affiliate for central Missouri.

News Blues does accept submissions for Guest Commentaries, but we reserve the right to publish or edit them. Send your commentary to Paul@NewsBlues.com

In Praise of Academics and Advocates

The corporate owners at CBS may not want these people on the news, but we need them.

I have vivid memories from when I was 10 or 11 years old of my father packing my brother and me into the car and making the drive to the Space Age structure that is the James S. McDonnell Planetarium in Forest Park near downtown St. Louis. Every Saturday each fall, we’d make that 35- or 40-minute drive to attend astronomy classes. I enjoyed every minute of finding out about the sun, planets and stars, illustrated by the massive star projector in the middle of the auditorium. A series of astronomers led those lessons, each an academic expert who knew the field inside and out. Am I a professional astronomer myself now? No. But those enriching mornings have forever changed my knowledge and appreciation of the cosmos.

Flash forward to my early years in the news business. A group of advocates, mostly the mothers of young children, had formed a group originally called “MADD – Mothers Against Drunk Drivers” (the group later changed its name to “Mothers Against Drunk Driving”). These advocates aggressively targeted the news media to cover—and challenge—the way society accepted drunk driving. It seems impossible to believe now, but up until this time in the early 1980s, drunk driving was seen as no big deal, something to brag about if you made it home after one—or a lot—too many. But this group of advocates literally changed the national dialog on drunk driving nearly overnight. I still marvel at how, in just a matter of a few years, they were able to get people to go from thinking drunk driving was acceptable to making it such a taboo that friends out for a good time would volunteer to be the designated driver and skip alcohol altogether for the entire evening.

I’m thinking about academics and advocates after seeing the hostage video Tony Dokoupil had to record as he began his stint as the anchor of the CBS Evening News. It’s easy to picture a goon hired by Bari Weiss is standing off-camera with a gun to Dokoupil’s mother’s head as he delivers the message’s deliberately crafted lines. But the metaphorical gun in play is, of course, Dokoupil’s massive salary and the prestige of sitting in Walter Cronkite’s chair—a chair that certainly needs to hold a lot less metaphorical weight than it did when Uncle Walter occupied it.

In his message, Dokoupil delivers this punch to the gut: “The point is on too many stories the press has missed the story because we’ve taken into account the perspective of advocates and not the average American or we put too much weight in the analysis of academics or elites and not enough on you” (emphasis added by me). I understand, in this post-truth world, the need for the right to target the media and the educated as those who should not be trusted, but this approach has the power to destroy the entire purpose of journalism. Our job as journalists is not to relay what your neighbors think about current events. If that’s what you think news is, sign up for Facebook or Nextdoor. Our job as journalists is to go out and find information, search for facts and do the work regular people don’t have the time or the skill to do themselves. Often, we will find those facts by talking to experts. Real experts have spent their lives and careers learning about specific topics and know far more about those topics than average people do. That knowledge is valuable—and it is typically free from any particular point of view. Science, whether it’s biology or economics or psychology, is based on disproving theories until a theory emerges that cannot be disproven. Scientists don’t come up with an idea and try to bend the facts to support it. They, in fact, do exactly the opposite. And we need what they know to enrich our stories and make them valuable to our audiences.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against having “real” people in news stories, people affected by what we’re covering.

It’s a staple of journalism education to include what we call “CCCs” or “Compelling Central Characters” in our stories. Their presence allows the audience to connect with someone who’s affected by whatever it is we’re covering and to see what’s at stake. When Dokoupil says CBS News hasn’t focused enough on “you,” meaning the members of the audience, he’s just plain wrong. We’ve focused plenty on the audience, we just don’t use them in place of experts to give us our facts. Imagine if all the stories we did after a hurricane hit the Gulf Coast only included meteorologists. That would be boring, right? But imagine if we got all the facts about storm intensity, direction, cause, etc. from only the people who had experienced its winds. That would leave the audience with a very limited picture of what had happened. What works best is to focus on the real people affected by the disaster and bring the experts to explain what happened and why. That’s the right mix.

In that message excerpt above, Dokoupil also apologized for focusing on the analysis of the “elites.” That’s an interesting term for him to use. Clearly, it was written for him intentionally leaving out the word the CBS brass wants people to fill in on their own, the “liberal elite.” That adjective-noun phrase is the scapegoat on which many everyday people on the right blame everything they don’t like about their lives. But if you really look at the most basic definition of who makes up the elites, it’s this: people who have a great deal of power or influence. Dokoupil’s actually describing the people who now own his network and are destroying the CBS News brand at a rapid pace. Paramount Skydance’s power comes from the astronomical amount of money it puts into politics to get what it wants. The influence in the business that is journalism naturally follows.

Dokoupil’s tenure in the main seat at CBS News is off to a rough start. Aside from the technical problems the show has experienced (part of me wonders whether this might be some sabotage from disgruntled CBS staffers), he hasn’t impressed many with what most journalists would consider softball questions, a lack of follow up and failure to hold those in power accountable during what has been a very busy five days. But it’s early and perhaps he’ll find his feet and work out the kinks.

Will the CBS Evening News be a beacon of television journalism under its new anchor?

That seems highly unlikely. Will it further erode the Tiffany Network’s claim on the most storied brand in television news? I’m probably betting on that. There’s a weird effort at play in all of this. It would seem, based on that video statement and what has come since, that CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss wants to draw in viewers on the right of the political spectrum with a news product that’s more palatable than what they’ve seen from CBS for years. That seems like a tall order, given that the people she’s chasing have been told for decades the legacy media are the enemy. I don’t see them suddenly tuning in now just because Tony’s in the chair. What’s more likely is that she’s driven away thinking people in the center and left who no longer trust CBS News to be the hardworking, reputable news organization that once employed Edward R. Murrow, Ed Bradley and Mike Wallace. Those viewers will continue to look for news reported with journalistic standards that would hold up to scrutiny by the aforementioned trio. I’m looking for that, too.

Scott Warren Promoted to Regional General Manager of Northern California by CBS