Harvard International Review: What would you say are current advantages and disadvantages of your profession?

News should take a far more serious and in-depth, content-full look at the world. News needs to be less drawn to stories primarily because of their dateline or lack of dateline and much more intent on giving people news they need to know. Networks have been working off a business plan that doesn’t work.

Big audiences do not seem to be a problem when there are big events—in your term at CNN, you saw events ranging from the US impeachment proceedings to the Egypt Air 800 crash—but what about the level of interest in between the big events?

One network has done extremely well in the lulls, and that is NPR [US National Public Radio]. In fact, in the evenings, their listeners are greater than the sum of any two evening news broadcasts on television. They’ve done it because they have not succumbed to the thrill of tabloid reporting. They play to their core audience, [which to] a serious news journalist is a serious news audience. A lot of that audience has disappeared from television because television has let people down and because the number of soft stories and tabloid stories has skyrocketed. Networks never adequately found what it was they needed to replace the Cold War. When we went away from how many Soviet missiles were pointed at how many US cities, we didn’t know what to do; there were no more spy-versus-spy stories, so what do we replace them with? Some people chose to replace them with the Gary Condit story. Sometimes OJ Simpson can carry the day, but if you’re a serious news viewer, there are a lot of stories out there that you want to know about.

There are issues in healthcare and technology, spirituality and religion, education—a whole list of issues people pay attention to. Moreover, if you want to be a good citizen, you need to know something about international news as well because if we’re going to have an honest debate, that knowledge is necessary. The Bush administration now is pretty famous for changing its public and private stance on various foreign-policy issues. This drives US allies nuts, but the reason why they do that is because those issues aren’t discussed. US citizens need to be more interested in international news too. We’re becoming one world, and those are issues that really do place us.

What about the general public, an audience that is commonly believed to be uninterested in the type of serious news you mention?

For those who want to tune into news for entertainment, there are other ways to be entertained; there is a whole crop of US tabloid news programs. If news programs did not devote their time to serious issues, they’d be pandering to an audience that is not loyal to them. People will only tune in to you when you have the sleazy stories. Why would you want to do that?

What happens when you are in charge of programming at CNN and all the rival groups carry the Gary Condit story? Polls often show that these stories are popular.

During the OJ Simpson trial, I was executive producer at ABC’s World News Tonight. We had something like a two-tenths rating point lead just before the trial, and we were in first place. At the end of the trial, we increased our rating-point lead twofold. We did less OJ Simpson coverage than other programs and we increased our lead because news viewers understood that OJ Simpson isn’t worth reporting every day. The rule of thumb in television or in print is you have to play to your core audience. If your core audience is news viewers, they want real news stories. It’s not that it’s not an important story some days; there were days when my coverage was twice as much as everyone else’s, but that focused coverage occurred on what I thought were the critical days. News is circumstance-oriented.

What do you think of the reporting since September 11?

Coverage by and large has been superb. The US networks have done well and I think the New York Times has done great. This is news media at its best. When it dies down and people have become immune to it all, my fear is that people will sink back to where they were prior to September 11, which was a rather despicable place. I hope the networks can do something about that.

Because of recent happenings, people are scrutinizing the media and trying to see how there can be a reconciliation between the idea of patriotism and journalistic objectivity. What is your perspective on this debate?

US journalists individually, I am sure, are as patriotic as the most patriotic US citizen, but journalists when they are working are journalists. When you’re a doctor, you don’t give someone who is an American better care than someone else. When you’re working, you are not there to be a patriot. If wearing an American flag is what it takes to prove your patriotism, there is something wrong with the scale. I think journalists are journalists, and they have to avoid the cheap, flagrant kind of patriotism that you see manifesting itself on certain US networks, among certain anchors. That’s pandering.

Terrorists rely on publicity to maximize terror. And it’s a well-known fact that television news gains a wider audience when terror becomes publicized. Do you feel that between these two factors, facts are exaggerated or even created?

At the heart of your question, you’re asking, do you feel that television exacerbates terrorism? That’s crazy. Poverty and hopelessness create terrorism. If you want to get rid of terrorism, get rid of that poverty. If a disease shows up as a bed sore, the point is not to put a Band-aid over it but to cure the bed sore and the disease. In terms of terrorism, the only way to get rid of it is to get rid of the poverty and bad conditions it came from.

US National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice criticized the networks for carrying video-taped statements of bin Laden and his associates. How do you think the networks should have responded?