The Time of Our Lives

by Tom Brokaw

  Old-line print reporters and editors looked at the road ahead and saw a cliff, so a number of them jumped to the Internet with a new form of journalism.

  When Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation took over The Wall Street Journal, the paper’s managing editor, Paul Steiger, left for online journalism. Steiger put together a nonprofit online investigative journalism site called ProPublica in 2008, and within three years it had won two Pulitzer Prizes. Not a bad start for a newsroom with only thirty-four reporters.

  Gawker, an aggressive, take-no-prisoners website run by Nick Denton, who relishes his bad-boy reputation, is the antithesis of what once passed for high-church journalism. Denton believes in giving readers what they want, and he goes to almost any length to get the inside scoop on juicy scandals or simply outrageous behavior. Denton told James Fallows in an Atlantic magazine profile that he’s most annoyed by what he described as “the pompous liberals … with their endless handwringing” in the American media.

  The Huffington Post, managed by the enterprising Arianna Huffington, was an early high-profile success. It was established as an antidote to the conservative and lively Drudge Report. When AOL bought the HuffPost, as it’s known, Huffington pocketed a cool $100 million and kept control of the content.

  When the always inventive Steve Jobs gave the world the iPad, the electronic tablet, the always opportunistic Rupert Murdoch quickly came up with a newspaper, The Daily, to be sold and downloaded to iPad users. Two years earlier, at a Seattle conference, I had watched Murdoch swarm all over Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, inquiring about the possibility of using the Kindle, Amazon’s e-book reader, as an outlet for a new form of journalism. At the time I thought, This could be the accomodation my generation has been looking for: a larger print and page format and yet still portable.

  Washington quickly took to another electronic enterprise. Politico, a site devoted to all things political, was instantly a popular aggregator of political gossip, hard news, commentary, and video, all assembled in the early morning by the indefatigable Mike “Mikey” Allen, a former print reporter who gained sudden fame and a lengthy profile in The New York Times Magazine. His work is an electronic version of the three-dot journalism perfected by the legendary newspaper columnists Walter Winchell, Irv Kupcinet in Chicago, and the peerless Herb Caen in San Francisco.

  When Ronald Reagan was first running for governor of California and still primarily thought of as an actor, Caen wrote in one of his columns, “I had a dream it was election night and the television cameras cut to a stage with a heavy velvet curtain in Southern California as an offscreen voice said, ‘Now accepting for Ronald Reagan in Los Angeles, here’s Greer Garson.’ ” Dot. Dot. Dot.

  It was a funny line and perfect for Herb’s liberal San Francisco readership at the time, but as he always seemed to, the Gipper got the last laugh. In 2011, the nation celebrated what would have been Reagan’s one hundredth birthday with a series of galas and symposia in which he was widely hailed as a great and transformative president.

  Online news portals, whether it is Cleveland.com—dedicated to covering local news in Cleveland—Slate, or Salon, all seem to have the same DNA. They’re breezy with colorful graphics and a kind of pinball machine energy. They promote reader polls on popular topics.

  Lindsay Lohan, jail or no jail?

  Would you buy a ticket to a Mel Gibson movie?

  Should smoking be banned in the United States? Vote yes or no and check the results.

  These are not scientific polls, but they have a certain allure for readers who want some indication their voice is being heard.

  Local online newspapers drop the drawbridge across the moat and invite everyone in. Be a reporter, urges Cleveland.com. Send us your video—a standard practice for nearly all the online enterprises.

  A site called WikiLeaks became a nuclear reactor of online journalism in the late autumn of 2010 when it released thousands of pages of secret government documents to The New York Times, the Manchester Guardian, and a few other select publications. WikiLeaks in turn had gotten the documents electronically from a private first class who plainly had more unmonitored access to sensitive material than might be expected for someone so young and so low in rank.

  Suddenly, newspapers, broadcast and cable outlets, bloggers, and electronic and print magazines had the journalistic equivalent of an oil gusher: a vast pool of U.S. government cables and memos describing everything from the prospects of an Iranian nuclear weapon to the sexual appetites of Moammar Gadhafi.

  Public editors and radio talk show hosts praised, damned, and analyzed the leaks as government officials expressed public outrage but privately sighed in relief that the leaks weren’t more embarrassing.

  Bottom line: The news consumer can no longer be a couch potato, content to pick the morning paper off the front porch, check drive-time radio for weather and traffic, dip into the first hour of the Today show or any of the other network breakfast offerings, keep an eye on CNN or MSNBC or CNBC or FOX during the day, and try to catch the NBC Nightly News or ABC or CBS in the early evening.

  That does not even include the popular Internet sites and cable networks of foreign news outlets, ranging from Al Jazeera in English to the BBC World Service to Xinhuanet, a news site produced by Xinhua, the official press agency of China, out of offices in Times Square in New York. The fastest-growing part of the American ethnic strata is Latino or Hispanic, the preferred nomenclature changing from region to region. Whatever the shorthand, Spanish-language cable outlets and radio stations are now a fixed and important part of the spectrum, serving an audience estimated to be nearing fifty million in the United States in the next decade.

  THE PROMISE

  Information is moving too swiftly and emanating from too many directions and sources for a citizen to be well informed as just a casual observer. Moreover, there are cleverly designed sites and commentaries that give the impression of journalism when in fact they’re little more than propaganda forums or commercial product forums.

  However, with a little enterprise, the average citizen in the most remote part of the country is capable of being as well informed as the most sophisticated and educated urban dweller, if he or she is adventurous and vigilant. The adventure comes with the realization that the Internet and cable networks can now take you inside a vast vault of cultural, political, economic, and historic information with a keystroke or channel flip; the vigilance grows out of the same skepticism that compels us to research options before purchasing a new flat-screen television or automobile or insurance policy. In the modern age of news dissemination, more than ever before, it is “consumer beware.” Cleverness or bells-and-whistle packaging alone doesn’t equal reliability or integrity.

  Some outlets will pander to your fears or offer commentary designed to reaffirm your anxieties. They provide false comfort, and they represent the full arc of the political spectrum. They’re designed to constantly divide and conquer rather than attempt to find common ground on which to move forward.

  They have a place in a free society, but as Bill Clinton, the first president subjected to the full force of the electronic news feeding frenzy, put it, “There’s no sort of home base for what’s accurate or not. I worry about the atomizing of our society and creating an almost attention deficit disorder. We want to know everything right now. We want everything done right now. We want to make an opinion right now. And then we want to act on it, right now.”

  The numbers underscore his concerns. In 1990, total circulation of newspapers was 62.3 million; by 2010, it had fallen to 43.4 million. In 2000, 46 percent of the adult population used the Internet; by 2010, it was 79 percent. Furthermore, in 2010, 41 percent of Americans said they got their news from an Internet source, and 42 percent said they got their news from two to six platforms a day. Already many of those electronic platforms have proven their reliability for accuracy and integrity, but the opportunity for mischief, malicious and otherwise, is almost unlimited.

  News
consumers can no longer be couch potatoes. We all have to work much harder at determining the source, motivation, and long-term credibility of our news sources.

  Clinton, who has been called the baby boomer in chief by columnist David Brooks, had another concern: “One excess that the baby boomers had on both sides of the Vietnam and cultural divide was a tendency to sanctimony. If you get too sanctimonious it makes you really dumb, because you can’t hear anything anymore. Maybe one of the things we can do is give the American people the space to listen to each other across these divides again.”

  Journalism is not a craft I am personally willing to surrender to the dividers.

  As long as readers and viewers will give me the benefit of their attention, I will continue the work that has been so gratifying to me in all the forms now available. The selfish reasons are self-evident: Journalism is just so interesting and constantly changing, from the small-town police beat to the highest councils of government and inner sanctums of distant cultures. It is a license to turn over rocks, look around corners, engage anyone with something important or merely entertaining to say, to give voice to the voiceless and to correct wrongs.

  One of the most damaging consequences of the decline in economics for newspapers is the diminishing place of investigative journalism. It’s estimated that in the past ten years, newspapers—and that means the largest and most influential—have cut back their investigative staffs by at least 30 percent.

  Allow me to remind us all of one essential truth: The forms of journalism may be changing and the clatter and clutter may be more cacophonous, but the importance of journalism—the light it shines and the oxygen it provides—is indispensible. Without journalism, what would we know of the people’s revolt in Egypt, or, long before that, of Watergate? My Lai? The Silent Spring? AIDS? Iran-Contra? Tiananmen Square? War, Islamic rage, nuclear proliferation, peace, calamity, and heroism?

  The place of journalism practiced rigorously and ethically has always transcended the noisy presence of false prophets and exploiters, and I would like to continue to play a role in preserving that legacy for as long as I am vertical. I have adopted the terse response of my friend Andy Rooney, who, when asked when he would retire, responded in that endearingly gruff fashion he’s made so famous, “Retire from what? Life?”

  CHAPTER 14

  Partners

  FACT: One of the indelible and patently fallacious American myths is that of the heroic lone gunman riding into town to save the local law-abiding citizens from the evils of a villain with a black heart and a hat to match. Matt Dillon had Chester. The Lone Ranger always had Tonto. Wyatt Earp didn’t go to the O.K. Corral on his own; he had the help of his brothers and Doc Holliday.

  QUESTION: Is life more complicated now? From time to time, one of the Internet sites will pose that question and get a wide range of answers, from “Yes! And I’m going back to 1957” to “Are you kidding? Think of how much easier it is to find something on the Internet instead of going to the library, or to take your favorite music with you everywhere on a small device.” It really does come down to different strokes for different folks, but the big choices in life seem to be more complicated. There was a time when you could take a job with a big company and if you did reasonably well you’d become a lifer, working at the same place until retirement.

  You had a company pension or retirement program with health benefits. You were able to pay off a mortgage. You could have a small business on Main Street and support your family because you didn’t have to worry about Walmart setting up a superstore on the edge of town. You could see your friendly physician and he (for it was almost always a man) would have time to discuss your case personally, and maybe refer you to a friend who was a specialist, and your insurance covered it all, no questions asked. You get the picture.

  Now, all day long, choices, choices, choices, and how to decide which count and which don’t?

  THE PRESENT

  The rapid rise of social networking on computers and smartphones is another sign of how swiftly our world is changing. At first I dismissed it as an electronic form of junior high note passing and wondered why I had to have new “friends” letting me know their latest thoughts. After all, I have trouble enough keeping up with the long roll call of email that demands my attention every waking hour, wherever I am in the world.

  The popularity of social networking should not be a surprise in a culture where everyone seems to be surgically attached to some kind of cellphone all day and into the night. One study determined that 90 percent of Americans with cellphones were constantly within three feet of them. A Stanford law student stopped me as I was walking across that campus and said, “Mr. Brokaw, you’ve written about other generations. What about our generation? We seem to be redefining the meaning of ‘friend’ without understanding what real friendship means.”

  In a play on Descartes’s timeless observation “I think, therefore I am,” we now are a society that proclaims “I’m online, therefore I am.”

  No one understood that better than Barack Obama, who became the first truly online all-star presidential candidate. He had profiles on fifteen different social networks, including not just Facebook but also networks tying together Asian, Hispanic, African, and other ethnic groups.

  At its peak the My.BarackObama.com website had eight and a half million monthly visitors—that is, prospective voters who went to the trouble of finding his website and exploring it.

  Just as the television ad once changed the presidential campaign, the digital age with all of its current and future variations means that no prospective voter can escape detection. Beyond politics and commerce, it’s difficult to quantify just how much of the messaging is at best vapid. Twitter accounts don’t come with a twaddle alert.

  But I have become persuaded that social networking represents something deeper than just staying in touch. Consciously and unconsciously it is an acknowledgment that the world is a more complicated place and it is better to have several minds working on a problem than one. Pick any area of everyday life and compare it to the routines of, say, thirty years ago.

  Grocery shopping is now an exercise in reading the fine print on the content label: Can it really have that much sodium? Is this bottle made from recycled material and can it be redeemed? Gone are the days when you went to the family physician and did whatever he said. Should I buy the hybrid car or wait for the electric plug-in? Why can’t I get into this public school? I live here!

  Now, go to the next level of decision making. Do I wait until I am forty to have a baby? Will I ever be able to pay off this second mortgage or student debt or pay for my mother who needs live-in care at age ninety-one and whose doctor says she’ll probably live to be one hundred? What’s the family plan if there’s another terrorist attack?

  THE PAST

  I often think back to my days as a waterfront instructor at a Boy Scout summer camp.

  When it was time for a group swim, the buddy system went into effect. You swam with a buddy and watched each other. When I blew the whistle, every pair of swimmers had to raise joined hands so I could see that no one was missing. I didn’t realize it at the time, but life is richer and problems are easier if you have a buddy.

  There are manifold examples, large and small, through history, none more telling than Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt leading the Western alliance to victory in World War II, two men from aristocratic families with a common capacity to mobilize their spoken language as a fighting force. They also shared a ravenous appetite for the challenges of public service when the stakes for their countries could not have been higher.

  President Roosevelt is said to have commented to Churchill at the beginning of their joint effort to defeat Germany and Japan, “I love sharing this decade with you.”

  In turn, they were married to strong, smart women who knew when to nudge their spouses back from their excesses, not always successfully but often just enough to keep their reputations intact and their policies on trac
k.

  In my lifetime there have been so many examples of partners not just complementing each other but creating a whole greater than their two parts. What would Hewlett have been without Packard, Huntley without Brinkley, McCartney without Lennon, Woodward without Bernstein? Butch without Sundance, Redford without Newman?

  And vice versa for all.

  Partners range from the laboratories to the playing fields.

  Francis Crick and James Watson worked together to crack the DNA code, one of the most important scientific achievements, ever. Larry Page and Sergey Brin met as students at Stanford and teamed up to create Google. Joe Montana was my idea of the best all-time National Football League quarterback, but without Jerry Rice, who knows?

  Fred Astaire was a portrait of grace on his own but with Ginger Rogers in his arms he soared beyond whatever the choreographer had in mind. As my former NBC colleague Linda Ellerbe so pointedly put it, “Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did and she did it in high heels while dancing backward.” (The late Texas governor Ann Richards used the quote so often she got credit for originating it, but it was Linda’s first.)

  This lesson in the importance of productive partnerships and the often dissonant qualities that produce them came into personal focus for me during one of the most difficult assignments of my reporting career: Watergate.

  I was the White House correspondent for NBC News, all but surgically attached to the White House press room from the summer of 1973 to August 1974, when Richard Nixon became the first American president forced to resign the office.

  It was a tense and demanding assignment for a journalist and nothing short of a constitutional crisis for the country. America was transformed into a vast courtroom filled with citizens suddenly confronted with the possibility their president was a crook, despite his emphatic denials. The legal arguments were often complex and the political battles were nothing short of hand-to-hand combat for the most powerful piece of real estate in the world, the Oval Office.