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September-October 2012 THE JEWISH GEORGIAN Page 9
The news, then and now: a conversation with Bob Bahr
BY
George
Jordan
This Rosh Hashanah, when Bob Bahr
looks out over the congregation at Shema
Yisrael—The Open Synagogue, where he has
led High Holidays services for the last five
years, he’ll be speaking to a very different
audience from the one he had for nearly 25
years as an award-winning writer, producer,
and news executive at CBS News, in New
York, and later at CNN, in Atlanta. As I
learned when we sat down to talk, he’s seen a
lot of changes.
What were your impressions of CBS News
when you worked there in the ‘70s?
I had begun my career as a foreign correspondent
in London, for Westinghouse
Broadcasting, which owned an important
chain of television and radio stations in the
United States. When I returned to New York
as a reporter and producer at CBS News, the
three broadcast networks dominated what
Americans saw and heard about America.
CBS was at the top of the heap, with a
nightly half hour newscast that was headed by
what some considered, then, the most trusted
man in America, Walter Cronkite. Just how
trusted he was is clearly outlined in an excellent
new biography. He was surrounded by a
team of experienced and capable journalists,
many of them Jewish-Americans.
They included Daniel Schor, Marvin
Kalb, Bernard Kalb, Mike Wallace, Leslie
Stahl, Morley Safer, Mort Dean, Robert
Schakne, and Murray Fromson, to name just a
few. Behind the scenes, the producer of “The
Evening News” was Sanford Socolow, and
the producer of “60 Minutes” was Don
Hewitt.
When I arrived there, William S. Paley,
who had started the company in 1926 with the
money his Russian Jewish immigrant parents
had made in the cigar business, was still
active in running the company. He had helped
to guide CBS News to the influential role it
had played for decades.
A keen competitor in the business of
commercial broadcasting, he was justifiably
proud of what the press often called CBS in
those years, the “Tiffany Network.” There
was a special aura around the CBS Broadcast
Center, at Tenth Avenue and 57th Street,
where both the “CBS Evening News” and “60
Minutes” were produced. When I walked in
there for the first time, it was like walking
into a sacred shrine.
Working alongside men who had become
popular icons in everyday life and were shaping
American public opinion every day was
heady stuff for a 26-year-old journalist, like
myself, just back from London.
You worked for the national CBS News operation
in Atlanta as well, didn’t you?
When I moved to Atlanta to continue my
career at the CBS News office here, in the
mid-‘70s, Ted Turner was just beginning his
rise as the owner of WTBS, a local Atlanta
station, which had its office on West
Peachtree Street, downtown. He was one of
the first to realize the power that new technology
held for popular entertainment generally
and for broadcasting in particular.
WTBS became the Superstation, as
Turner renamed it, when he rebroadcast the
station’s programs
around the country by
satellite. A few years
afterward, he took
advantage of the rapid
growth of cable television
and the new technologies
that came with
it, to start CNN in what
had been the old
Progessive Club, one of
Atlanta’s Jewish country
clubs, on Techwood
Drive, just north of 10th
Street. The old clubhouse,
with not many
changes, housed CNN’s
first offices. Downstairs,
they added a cheap steel
building for studios and
built an antenna farm for
the many satellite transmissions
that came in there. Today, Time-
Warner, which bought out Turner several
years ago, has built a huge production facility
there.
What has been the impact of new technology
on the way we view the news?
CBS didn’t take the new challenge of
CNN very seriously at first, nor did many others.
It was several years before CNN was
granted full broadcast press privileges at the
White House, for example. The Internet was
still a few years off, and high-speed satellite
and DSL cable to bring it all into the home
were even farther off.
But it was CNN’s Ted Turner, not CBS’s
Bill Paley, who was the ultimate visionary of
broadcasting’s future in the late decades of
the 20th century. The days that I, a CBS News
reporter, could stand in a cornfield in Iowa
and know that the story I was working on that
day might be seen by a hundred million people
in America who had access to the CBS
Evening News are long over.
The three major broadcast networks
helped to define us as Americans during much
of the latter half of the 20th century. They
helped to shape a national consensus on such
crucial issues as our role in the world and our
obligations to one another and to those who
have not always been full partners in the
American dream. Today, that’s all been
scrambled and fragmented.
How have news and journalism changed
since then?
News gradually has become not something
you sit around watching only during the
dinner hour but something you watch whenever
you want. Sitting at a computer keyboard
today, you can make the news yourself. There
are said to be over seventy million blogs, reg-
ularly written by people all over the world.
Facebook, Google, and YouTube are literally
responsible for revolutionary changes in the
way people see themselves, as citizens of
America and the world. The PR industry has
gained an enormous influence.
At the same time, as technological
changes and changes in American life have
contributed to the decline of the broadcast
networks as unchallenged
opinion makers,
the corporations that
own the networks are
still a powerful economic
force. CBS earnings
in the first quarter
of 2012 were up 80%.
The head of CBS, Les
Moonves, a nice Jewish
boy from the Bronx,
last year took home an
astonishing paycheck of
nearly $70 million dollars.
Of course, it helps
the bottom line when
you leave most of the
serious cultural and
documentary production
in America to public
broadcasting and the
people at CNN.
The networks are working very hard to
play technological catch-up. You may not
watch the CBS News like you used to or pay
much attention to the present anchor of the
CBS Evening News, Scott Pelley, but CBS
still dominates many of the hours we spend
each day watching entertainment, whether on
the Internet, smartphones, cable and satellite,
or traditional broadcasting. CBS still owns a
large group of very profitable local stations,
including WUPA, channel 69, in Atlanta. It
also owns Showtime, Movie Channel, and
Bob Bahr
another broadcast network, with Time-
Warner, the CW Network. A few years ago, it
spun off Viacom, which owns a long list of
cable channels from MTV to Nickelodeon
and Comedy Central. It owns a couple of
dozen cable channels in all, as well as
Paramount studios.
NBC News has recently reorganized its
news division to incorporate the cable channels
it owns, MSNBC and CNBC. CNN is
also a part of a vast media blockbuster. In his
new memoir, Dan Rather lays out in stark
detail just how deep these connections have
become between huge modern corporations,
individual politicians, and the political
process.
How people get their news, how news is
shaped and defined, and how people use it is
not nearly as simple as it once seemed to be.
The bottom has fallen out of the newspaper
business, and, according to the most recent
surveys, so has our confidence in newspapers.
Only 25% of us trust them; that’s half of what
it was thirty years ago. Same thing with TV
news—only 21% trust what we see on TV. As
Americans, we’re probably less trusting of
one another too.
Where’s all this leading?
Well, at one time, the broadcast networks’
news operations stood for authority.
Today the greatest casualty of communication
technology is authority, the hierarchies that
support authority, and individual authority
figures. In such diverse fields as medicine,
religion, education, business, and politics,
authority has been undermined. And because
it’s happening so fast, it’s causing great turmoil.
We just don’t seem to agree on how to
reconstitute authority in our new age. In short,
Walter Cronkite is gone, and he’s not coming
back.
Beryl H. Weiner is one of the early contributors to The Jewish Georgian. The following
is a poem that he composed with the assistance of his wife, Eleanor Weiner, as a
memorial to his friend Dr. Robert L. Bunnen.
Much More
I pray for my friend of seventy years awaiting an angel to soothe the pain,
Relieve the suffering, which he bears with all the courage of any soldier.
God, please let him enjoy another spring with its beauty -
dogwoods, azaleas, gardenias, hydrangeas and much more.
Bob is a friend and much more, as close as a family member,
my brother, my cousin, my in-law.
A mench? Much more.
Much more than a dental specialist, a gentleman who always
extends kindness and gentleness to everyone he meets,
An athlete, like a tennis pro, who could teach much.
Bob is a generous philanthropist and a man of impeccable integrity,
always maintaining high standards in all of his endeavors.
Much more than that, he is a father, a grandfather,
a husband and a role model as a family man.
God bless you, Bob Bunnen.