Katie Couric with Marvin Kalb
Because you wonder at a certain point what will the media be in 10, 15 years without newspapers? Or with such a reduction in the newspapers that it begins to affect the way we think about news, it begins to affect the way we think about democracy, for that matter.
Marvin Kalb
The Kalb Report
The need to be competitive and to be mindful of the bottom line is so overwhelming that it becomes almost impossible for editors to say no. They’re now driven by such pressures that when they see the information is already out there in the mainstream press, they feel they have to go with it, even though, deep in their guts, they know it’s wrong.
Marvin Kalb
Kalb Report
February 2, 1998
The Kalb Report started out to be about journalism in the context of public policy, but events of the last decade have broadened Marvin Kalb’s focus to include what began as failures of journalism but which have broadened to include the apparent collapse of journalism in traditional media. At the heart of his message to journalists is a sense of urgency driven by concern arising from the uncertainties of new media. Both Kalb and his guests speak to both, but what largely goes unsaid is the stark reality of America’s faltering, if not failed, competence. Not just in media either, for ours, the most educated, resourceful and wealthy of all nations, has assiduously adopted incompetence, intolerance, and anti-intellectualism as national guideposts.
The evidence is overwhelming. Our banks are so incompetent they cannot differentiate between prudent risk and shooting craps. Our business insurance companies so incompetent they became insurers of greed, forgoing the safety of calculated risk assumption. Look at your favorite college or university and you’ll no longer see an institution operated for intellectual discovery but a business eagerly adding trade-school level courses and degree programs absent substantive education about who we are as a nation, what we stand for as a culture, or what we aspire to be as a people.
More On . . .
Kalb Report March 23 transcript
Unlike nearly every other television program, The Kalb Report examines the competence of something. That something is the effective conjoinment of journalism and public policy and how the two are inextricably intertwined and co-dependent. Each program is a forum for intellectual exchange, a place for open discussion of values and standards, and a place for young minds to be exposed to ideas of substance articulated by people who matter. Since its origins in 1994, The Kalb Report has produced 64 such forums in cooperation with Harvard University, The Washington Press Club and The George Washington University.
Marvin Kalb is a tough interviewer. Although he is not prone to bait or attack his guests, he is a master at the television interview for what one learns from his questioning goes beyond the words because Kalb knows how to let people be themselves — which often reveals more than what they say. What one learns from Kalb’s first 64 forums is the stark reality of journalism’s capitulation to incompetence. Not just by by way of his interviewees, although his 2008 broadcast with a giggly Katie Couric demonstrated both her television stardom and scant journalistic qualifications, but from his own personal experience as a real, serious and credible journalist.
Marvin Kalb and Bernard Kalb, Former CBS & NBC News Correspondents
Marvin Kalb is more than a theoretician about journalism, for after having been perhaps the last of CBS’ Murrow Boys to be hired, Kalb spent two decades in network television. The men of the Murrow era at CBS were serious-minded, but few were as intellectually astute as Marvin Kalb — and his brother Bernard, who also joined CBS News. Both men later worked at NBC News where Marvin served as moderator for Meet The Press. Bernard served as spokesman for the Department of State and originated the CNN journalism commentary program Reliable Sources.
Marvin Kalb offered his own insight into the state of journalism earlier this year,when he commented,
Because you wonder at a certain point what will the media be in 10, 15 years without newspapers? Or with such a reduction in the newspapers that it begins to affect the way we think about news, it begins to affect the way we think about democracy, for that matter.
Kalb made this statement during his March 23, 2009 Kalb Report broadcast. In that forum he and guests Jonathan Klein, Tom Curley, Alberto Ibargüen and Vivian Schiller were examining the implications of failing journalism to our society and nation. At the heart of their concerns were two very different issues — ones often discussed in the context of journalism: the changing media that has so confounded big media organizations and the diminishment of standards and ethics in mainstream media. Both of these themes are illustrative of our nation’s crisis of competence, for they tell us of journalistic failure and decay not at the hands of journalists, but at the hands of media in an era where money matters so much that it destroys what it seeks to profit from.
Neither the notions of failing media or ebbing journalistic competence are entirely new. What’s different today is that spreading incompetence at things our nation has been immensely successful at doing for many decades has so badly damaged our national ability to rebuild, redirect and restore that it threatens us as nation and culture.
Ours is not a fearful nation, nor is it one of intentional malfeasance, or weakness of purpose. But we are, as we have become, a nation that demands little of itself and a people of enduring belief they we are divinely entitled to do as we damned please no matter the consequences to ourselves, our families or our nation. What’s new is that today’s generation must listen if we are to survive and prosper from the efforts, contributions and blood given by those who gave us all that we have, but which fails to satiate our appetite for more.
All of this has been said before, more eloquently and perhaps to a more interested audience. His name was Edward R. Murrow, the man who so deeply influenced Marvin Kalb when he arrived at CBS News in the 1950s. Not long thereafter, Murrow openly lectured his contemporaries from the podium of the 1958 convention of the radio and television news directors association. In that speech, portrayed in George Clooney’s movie Good Night and Good Luck, Murrow knew his message was not one anyone might want to hear. He was right, for what he said then was omniscient to the degree that broadcast journalism in specific, and journalism in general, has adopted incompetence as an acceptable substitute for relevance, credibility and integrity.
This just might do nobody any good. At the end of this discourse a few people may accuse this reporter of fouling his own comfortable nest, and your organization may be accused of having given hospitality to heretical and even dangerous thoughts. But the elaborate structure of networks, advertising agencies and sponsors will not be shaken or altered. It is my desire, if not my duty, to try to talk to you journeymen with some candor about what is happening to radio and television.
Edward R. Murrow
