Taking Aim at Experts on Gulf Crisis

From his listening post somewhere in Los Angeles, Calendar’s Answer Man has been closely monitoring television coverage of the Persian Gulf story. He has graciously consented to share his findings in this live interview.

Question: What is your sense of the mood of the coverage?

Answer: I sense the mood as being one of confusion.

Q: Well, I am confused by the zillions of so-called experts I’m seeing on TV talking about the Gulf conflict. What is going on here?

A: Yes, TV’s Middle East and military experts (many of whom double as terrorism experts) are as thick as oil. I sense their mood as being one of moodiness.

Q: But. . . .

A: Why are we seeing so many of them? Because no crisis is possible without experts. Every crisis runs on speculation, and the chief purveyors of speculation on TV, besides reporters themselves, are experts.

Q: But where do these people come from, and who are they?

A: Mostly, they’re from think tanks and universities. They’re the media-traveled people whom Ed Fouhy refers to as “Rolodex commandos.”

Fouhy, an independent producer who has been a news executive at ABC, CBS and NBC, breaks experts down into three categories: “First, there’s the guy who’s written a best-selling book on the subject at hand. Second is someone who has written an Op-Ed piece or paper that has gotten into a data base used by network researchers. Third--and most reliable of all--are those people who have been on someone else’s program identified as an expert. All bookers watch each other’s shows.”

To illustrate the latter point, I called Fouhy in Washington this week only after seeing him interviewed on CNN’s “Headline News” as an expert on experts.

I asked him what qualifies someone as an expert in the eyes of the media.

“There are several things you have to do, and one is return phone calls,” said Fouhy, who returned mine within the hour. “Another is show up. Third, you have to speak in reasonably short paragraphs that are easily digested by (news) bureaus or cut into a beloved sound bite.”

Yes, and please note the brevity and simplicity of the above paragraph.

Behind Fouhy’s facetiousness is a serious message about the expertizing of TV.

“One thing is that they (the networks) don’t throw the net widely enough,” he said. “They tend to pick the experts from the think tanks that are close to the news bureaus. The fact that they’re from your area code doesn’t necessarily endow them with wisdom.”

Fouhy also believes that these experts should be better identified. “We don’t really know as much about some of these people as we should,” he said. “Some of them come from (academic) chairs that are endowed by oil companies. And I don’t know how some of these think tanks in Washington are funded.”

Q: Isn’t this problem wider than the Gulf conflict, though?

A: Yes. In all stories, TV should do a better job identifying so-called experts and interview subjects, not just by listing their titles and pedigrees, but also by informing viewers, for example, if they have financial ties that could tilt their views on the issue at hand.

Q: Something else I’m seeing now is reporters interviewing each other, just as I’m interviewing you. Is this crazy or what?

A: Absolutely. By making the reporter a substantial part of the story, moreover, self-promotion frequently eclipses information.

For example, take “CBS Evening News” anchorman Dan Rather, who based himself in Amman, Jordan, during the Gulf story, and on Monday night reported from the U.S. aircraft carrier Independence in the Gulf.

Later that evening, he was interviewed on “Face to Face With Connie Chung” by Chung. And earlier that day, he was interviewed on KCBS-TV Channel 2 by anchors Jim Lampley and Bree Walker. He began, “I think, Jim and Bree, it’s important to understand. . . .”

Wrapping up the interview, Lampley asked Rather if he was tired and what he thought about when falling asleep at night. Rather began his reply thoughtfully: “Jim, you’ve done this line of work. . . .”

Q: Didn’t Rather know that Lampley was a sports reporter before becoming a Channel 2 anchor?

A: Maybe Rather was referring to Lampley’s dangerous moonlighting job as a boxing announcer on HBO.

Q: What was Rather doing in Jordan, anyway?

A: When the Gulf story broke, he was vacationing in France and then flew to Amman (Kuwait, Iraq and Saudi Arabia were closed to Western media) and began anchoring his evening newscast from there. It was an impressive setting, with Rather (who’s “more than just an anchorman,” the CBS promos say) the only network anchorman on the scene. But on the scene of what?

Even though he did get an early interview with Jordan’s King Hussein, he was mostly decoration last week and, as it turned out, was more out of the loop than in. There were several newscasts, in fact, when his only on-screen contribution from Amman was to do satellite interviews with people back in New York and Washington, where the real behind-the-scenes story was evolving.

Q: Isn’t Rather in Jordan a form of “parachute journalism?”

A: Exactly--dropping in the non-specialist to cover a breaking story. It happens in print too, but especially in TV, where critical foreign bureaus have been sacrificed in a wave of network-news budget cuts.

Able reporters usually will prevail, as evidenced by those nice human-interest stories on sailors that Rather beamed back from the Independence. But nothing beats having a specialist on the scene.

Q: Is David Jackson a specialist?

A: Oh, you mean the 9 p.m. anchorman sent to Amman by KCAL Channel 9 for no apparent reason other than for show? No, he’s no specialist. But at least Jackson, in addition to anchoring, is arguably Channel 9’s best, most worldly reporter, and someone whose reports from Amman have been distinctive for their measured tone.

It’s in the studio where Channel 9 has floundered. Very admirably, Channel 9 has hit the Gulf story harder than any other station in town. Yet Monday night, anchor Pat Harvey and Kerry Kilbride, who is filling in for Jackson, showed appalling ignorance of the region that the station was making a pretense of covering.

On two occasions in speaking live with Jackson, for example, Kilbride referred to the strategic Jordanian port of Aqaba as “Aqabar,” and it was this same guy who later, during a half-hour special on the Gulf story, took us on a tour of Channel 9’s “Persian Gulf Strategy Map.”

Is this the future of international coverage should local stations usurp the traditional role of the networks?

But don’t blame these anchors for being parachuted into quicksand. Blame Channel 9 for kicking them out of the plane.

Q: As always, you have been brilliant.

A: My sense, exactly.