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THE WOMEN WHO REPORT

The 21st century is just about one-quarter over. And, in my mind, it’s a slam dunk as to what’s the most consequential piece of journalism of the last 25 years.

It’s the 2018 “Pervasion of Justice” series in the Miami Herald. The reporter was Julie K. Brown, and what she detailed – and detailed should be underlined and bolded there – was the sex trafficking ring maintained for the wealthy and powerful by financier Jeffrey Epstein.

In the series, Brown interviewed about 80 victims of Epstein, some who were as young as 13 when they were exploited. Those victims never knew the terms of Epstein’s two state charge convictions or that he made a deal that canceled federal charges. 

The stories also detailed how Epstein’s “incarceration” included frequent home visits and trips to New York and his Caribbean retreat.

Brown’s work led to new charges against Epstein in 2019 – charges that were pending when Epstein died in his New York jail cell, supposedly by his own hand.

Here it is, 2025, and we’re still amidst the reprecussions of Brown’s reporting. Largely because one of Epstein’s most prominent associates, Donald Trump, was president at the time of the publication and somehow managed to get elected again last year.

Brown is the Woodward and Bernstein of this generation. She should have a Pulitzer Prize to show for the incredible work she did.

That she doesn’t is possibly due to the machinations of attorney Alan Dershowitz, who knew Epstein and was implicated in Brown’s reporting. He complained loudly and publicly, and lobbied the Pulitzer committee against awarding Brown for her work.

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When I started my career, there were few women in newsrooms. When I retired, more than half the people in my newsroom were female.

That is a remarkable change and there’s only one reason for it. And it’s not because of affirmative action, DEI, wokeness or anything else detractors conjure.

The reason is that the women who go into journalism are very good at journalism.

It has been my privilege to work with, work for and to mentor women of exceptional talent. They put in the time, they put up with the frustrations, they deal with the vagaries of corporate capriciousness. Like all journalists, they don’t get paid as well as other professionals – and too many of them still don’t get paid as much as their male counterparts.

They also have to contend with a lot of crap. Which brings us to this week.

I once aspired to be a White House correspondent – that what’s I thought was the ultimate job in journalism. That viewpoint changed as I saw other uses for my abilities – and I saw the way people who cover the president never seem to stop working.

So when two women covering the mishegas known as Trump dared to ask questions that he didn’t want to answer, he lashed out in a way you kind of expect from a low-life grifter.

When a reporter for Bloomberg News asked why he didn’t just release the Epstein files instead of having Congress vote to subpoena them, he told her “Quiet, quiet piggy.” Implying that a woman looking for a simple answer was less than human.

When a reporter for ABC News confronted Trump about welcoming Mohammed bin Salman – the Saudi leader who allegedly masterminded the murder of a Washington Post journalist – he went into a diatribe against her and urged the FCC to take away the network’s broadcast license.

Bloomberg’s Catherine Lucey and ABC’s Mary Bruce stood firm against an abusive old fart. Hopefully, their employers will have their back. They join a long line of female journalists – April Ryan and Abby Phillips, among others – who’ve had their professionalism and integrity challenged by someone with none of either.

What a lot of people are wondering is why other White House reporters, particularly male counterparts, didn’t come to the defense of Lucey and Bruce.

One reason is that a president’s feeble attempt to humiliate a reporter is not in the J-school playbook. If you want to know how far Trump is from what considered acceptable behavior from anyone in public life, think of any other president in our lifetime who would talk to a female reporter in that manner. Not even Richard Nixon – the standard for miserable presidents until now – would do that.

But there’s also the problem of fear. Other journalists aren’t brave enough to risk Trump’s wrath.

And there’s also the problem of sycophancy. This White House has brought more of those who suck up to Trump into the ranks of supposedly objective journalists

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So to Julie Brown and Catherine Lucey and Mary Bruce and all the American women working in newsrooms around the world, thanks for making journalism so much better. 

When you think about what makes America great, they should be among the first thoughts.

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THAT’S THE NEWS

I lucked into a daughter whose love of theater surpasses my own.

In fact, she’s written plays that were staged or read, and – BRAG ALERT – they’re really good.

What my daughter doesn’t write is news copy. That’s what I used to do – for much of a 40-year career.

I’m glad she loves writing. I’m also glad she’s not in the profession that helped pay for the education that led her to writing plays and TV scripts.

The reason this thought  came up this week is that my daughter took me to see the Broadway production of “Good Night, and Good Luck.” It stars George Clooney, who directed the film from which the play is derived. In the play, he portrays broadcast journalism legend Edward R. Murrow after playing Murrow’s producer, Fred Friendly, in the film.

In case you haven’t seen it, or forgot, “Good Night, and Good Luck.” highlights Murrow’s CBS broadcasts on Sen. Joseph McCarthy, whose crusade against people he perceived as Communists led to an atmosphere of fear in the 1950s. It captured – and was focused – on the fear of the era, educating another generation about a dark period in American history.

The movie is excellent and I recommend it if you can find it on a streaming service or old DVD. 

But I thought the play underscored a great point in a way the movie didn’t.

The play, much more that the film, takes place in the CBS “See It Now” newsroom. It depicts what’s great about journalism – the collaboration among colleagues, the rush of tracking down a hot story, the matching of wits with really smart people.

Murrow and his crew were disgusted by McCarthy’s intimidating and smearing. The parallels to 2025 America are obvious to anyone who checked their news alerts at the theater before turning off their phones.

But the play also highlighted the nature of the business known as broadcast journalism.

TV stations and networks have big newsrooms. They produce some incredible work – few newspaper pieces can match the power of a well-produced piece on a “See It Now” or its offspring, “60 Minutes,” not to mention some of the great PBS documentary series such as “Frontline.”

But big newsrooms are expensive. And, as many of the scenes in the play highlight, they don’t exactly bring in big numbers – news only gets ratings when it’s catastrophic, like the September 11 attacks. People even turn off Election Night coverage to watch old movies

There are scenes throughout the play when CBS’ chairman, William Paley, reminds Murrow that it’s the sponsors who pay his and his co-workers’ salaries. Murrow and Friendly even have to pay the costs of their McCarthy broadcasts because sponsors won’t.

I’ve seen the respect for broadcast journalism go from awe to awful. When I was young, there were icons on the air – Walter Cronkite, John Chancellor, Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, Mike Wallace, Daniel Schorr, Judy Woodruff. Barbara Walters was an outstanding interviewer, pressing for a point when a politician kept trying to dodge it. 

People trusted and admired these men and women. They accepted that what they reported was as factual as it could possibly be.

Time, unfortunately has eroded that trust in two ways.

One is the quality of what we call news. Too much of what passes for news in the 21st century would have been scoffed at when I was young. Somebody setting a record on “Jeopardy!” A male celebrity’s stupid remark. A female celebrity’s apparel choice.

On TV, local newscasts forsake important issues in their community if they have video of somebody being rescued from a river in Thailand. The only stories that seem to take place in their market are easily filmable crime scenes and suspects, often the exceptions to the statistics that show crime decreasing in a city.

Celebrity and sensational stuff have been increasingly infringing on news. Even Murrow, the patron saint of broadcast journalism, did interviews with people like Liberace and Zsa Zsa Gabor to satisfy CBS’ ratings cravings. 

The other problem has come up a lot more in the past 30 years, since the creation of Fox News by Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch: Calling propaganda “news” and blaring it 24 hours a day.

It plays on people’s fears and addiction to personalities. And it makes crises out of nothing – think famously of Barack Obama wearing a tan suit or Joe Biden eating an ice cream cone. It trumpets clowns like Donald Trump – unless he accidentally does something that hurts Fox’s bottom line – and promotes morally bankrupt ineptitudes like Jesse Watters and Sean Hannity as “newsmen.”

In the play’s final monologue, Murrow – speaking to some unnamed awards dinner – muses that television should inform as much as it should entertain. That primetime should be used not just to show westerns and comedies, but also discussions of domestic problems and foreign policy.

The problem is that it’s unlikely you’d get even 1% of the audience for “Tracker” or “Chicago Fire” for those kinds of discussions. The most popular news show, “60 Minutes,” is a notable and laudable exception, but it is more about hot-button issues than in-depth discussion of matters that matter.

As a result, we’re not as smart as we should be. We’re susceptible to demagogues and liars.

I went into journalism as my way of informing a world I wanted to improve. I thought the truth, whether it fit with what I believed or not, was the most important thing – that’s what I told the Northwestern professor who interviewed me in 1971. He warned me that, while my thinking was admirable, the truth was not as rock solid as I thought.

As “Good Night, and Good Luck.” reminded me, I love journalism. I love what it accomplishes when it’s good. There are still colleagues of mine doing incredible work – and I’m so proud I know them.

But I’m happy my daughter is a playwright and screen writer. Because I think that, in 2025, she’ll help people find the truth about the world a lot more efficiently than if she worked in a newsroom. 

This isn’t Edward R. Murrow’s America any more. We’re all the worst for that – and the path back from that is hard to see.

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26 – THE MOST TRUSTED NAME IN NEWS

(NOTE: Admittedly, I’m biased about this. But at least I didn’t make it No. 1)

The evolution of television news as a window to the world was still in its early stages in 1954.

Both CBS and NBC carried network newscasts that were 15 minutes long, having done so since the late 1940s. The anchor for CBS was Douglas Edwards; for NBC’s “Camel News Caravan,” it was John Cameron Swayze, who puffed away on Camels.

But 1954 was a very important year in TV news.

Just four days after I was born, Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy finally responded to Edward R. Murrow’s “See It Now” March 9 broadcast highly critical of his brutal tactics. 

McCarthy, predictably, tried to turn fire on Murrow, alleging he was tied to communists. He also gave a long-winded statement about the evil of communism without once specifically rebutting any of the points Murrow made.

Murrow’s efforts were a factor in the taking down of McCarthy. They showed the power TV news had on determining the national agenda.

Network newscasts expanded to 30 minutes in the early 1960s and created the image of the powerful anchorman: Chet Huntley and David Brinkley on NBC, Howard K. Smith and Frank Reynolds on ABC, and, of course, Walter Cronkite on CBS.

TV began to show events live or within minutes of their occurrence. More remarkable than Cronkite’s emotional delivery of the news that President Kennedy was assassinated was actually watching his assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, get shot live at a Dallas police station.

But the idea of 24-hour news seemed unworkable. News wasn’t a moneymaker for the networks and it was expensive to produce.

Two things happened to change that.

First, technology made instant news possible. Cameras that were more mobile and communications satellites that allowed almost instantaneous broadcast from anywhere in the world. 

And second was Ted Turner.

The billboard magnate took advantage of the breakthroughs in technology and the fact that Georgia was a non-union state to first create the WTBS SuperStation, a local operation that was broadcast by cable across the nation.

In 1980, he started Cable News Network, the first all-news TV network, in Atlanta. After some initial struggles – he once sold bumper stickers for $5 to help support the network – CNN became a go-to for breaking news. The Challenger explosion in 1986, the upheaval in China Tiananmen Square in 1989 and the start of the Persian Gulf War in 1990 all embellished the network’s reputation.

The first effort to challenge CNN, Satellite News Network, failed in the early 1980s. However,  MSNBC and Fox News, both launched in 1996, cut into CNN’s dominance. Both reflected the nation’s growing political polarization, MSNBC on the left, Fox on the right.

But CNN remains the place people turn when some sudden event breaks anywhere in the world. Wars, natural disasters, political upheaval. The network’s reputation – enhanced by some of the bravest and hardest-working people in the history of journalism – brings people back in moments of crisis.

I worked at CNN for 16 years and, even though I’ve been away for almost a decade, I still call it the home team. It’s an idea that was hard to imagine in 1954, but very much on point with the mission that Murrow exemplified 70 years ago.

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