Caffeinated Politics

Richard C. Hottelet, one of the original “Murrow’s Boys,” a group of wartime journalists hired by CBS’s legendary newsman Edward R. Murrow. “It was not our job to inspire people, to educate, to move them,” Hottelet told The Hartford Courant in 2003. “It was our job to tell them what was going on.”

I drank a pot of coffee this morning and thought about what I wanted to write. Need to write.

I do not relish writing that I am old enough when it comes to revisiting the past. In truth, I do not feel my age. The nearly three-year-old girl at our home on Christmas Day surely thought that with my interactions with her, I was not far from her age. But alas, I do have some years of experience behind in the rearview mirror, which allows me to write with confidence that last night’s introduction of Tony Dokoupil as the anchor of CBS Evening News lacked credibility and continuity.

Missing was the gravitas of a professional news reporter that needed to fill the legacy shoes worn by the likes of Walter Cronkite, Ran Rather, Scott Pelley, or Norah O’Donnell. Instead, it felt like open-toed sandals were worn as the nation expected continuity of the highest standards that CBS News has long been identified with over the decades. Even with dramatic changes in how news is obtained by people in this high-tech age, I argue that naming a new anchor to one of the big networks is still a civic ritual many of us follow.

Over the past weeks, the professionalism of CBS News has taken a severe hit. Last night, we were offered a broadcast shaped by the partisan CBS leadership behind the camera.

If you were watching closely, you could see and feel the unmistakable shift in editorial gravity, the quiet but deliberate reorientation of a network once defined by its firm reluctance to kneel to political power. For all the truly amateur mistakes (such as Dokoupil introducing himself two times after the main introduction at the start of the broadcast, and I am sure a third self-introduction would have included stating he worked for a rival network, it was that bad), the truly troubling failure of the “new era” was the corruption of the network’s news philosophy.

For decades, the network built its news identity on a simple premise: the news is not a weapon, not a shield, not a megaphone for the powerful. It is a public trust. Walter Cronkite embodied that trust. He was known as ‘Uncle Walter’ around the nation. He made the news understandable and knew he had limited time to inform as many people as possible about as many stories as possible. Then he would encourage his viewers to read the morning newspaper for more information.

Dan Rather was another solid example of professionalism in journalism. I have read more history of the years surrounding Richard Nixon, Watergate, and the press than any other time period. I feel grounded in writing that the post‑Watergate generation of correspondents understood that their authority came from journalistic independence. The willingness to report what those in power preferred to keep hidden.

But under CBS News current leadership, that independence feels increasingly negotiable. That saddens me as a news consumer. Frightens me as a citizen. The torpedoing of the 60 Minutes investigation into politically sensitive extradition decisions — a story with deep implications for justice and executive overreach — was the flaming canary in the coal mine. If all it takes is the lack of a response from the White House to kill a story in a newsroom, the power of the press is scuttled. When a newsroom begins shelving stories that might anger the ruling administration, it is no longer practicing all-out journalism. It is practicing risk management.

That is what Tony Dokoupil willingly signed up for as anchor of the CBS Evening News. Instantly, he lost his credibility as a journalist.

The new head of CBS News, Bari Weiss, has, in just a short time, proven she has an allergy to stories that might provoke the conservative political establishment. It is stunning for someone old enough who experienced the journalism of CBS for decades to now witness the network trying to reposition itself in a political climate where access is currency and solid reporting is treated as a liability.

CBS’s leadership under Weiss believes that the path forward lies in appeasing the loudest, most crass, most illogical, and most dangerous faction in American politics. A faction, I note, that has spent years attacking the legitimacy of the press itself. The irony is too rich. In an effort to win back viewers who distrust it, CBS News risks becoming the very thing those viewers accuse it of being.

In so doing, it reminds me of a task I loved to fulfil when Dad was putting new siding on our Hancock home. I would sand down with a file the rough edges of each plank. That is very similar to what is happening at CBS News with their desire to sand down the sharper edges. The difference is that when we finished, our home looked really nice. At CBS, the dulling of accountability journalism makes the network look weak.

As a boy, decades after they were heard by millions of Americans, I listened to many of the Edward Murrow radio broadcasts aired during WWII. Thanks to the inter-library loan services and my local one-room library, Murrow became a hero to me. (One of the men who helped me want to become a radio broadcaster.) Years after the war, Murrow warned of “wires and lights in a box.” He wasn’t talking about technology, but rather about turning the news into spectacle, into something that flatters rather than informs. He understood that the anchor person’s desk was not to be a stage. It is to be a witness stand where honesty dominates.

For decades, CBS understood that fact in the news department. Today, however, shelving investigations, softening needed scrutiny, bending toward political pressure from the most absurd people our government has ever had in the White House, shows what happens when it purposely hollows itself out from within.

I am sickened to know that CBS News has drifted away from its legacy and toward a future where its news will be shaped not by truth, but by fear of who might be offended by it.

‘Uncle Walter’ would be deeply offended.