Two Men, One Story, 15 Years : Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer

Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer are a TV news duo that has lasted longer than the pairing of Chet Huntley and David Brinkley on NBC in the 1960s. Their “MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour” on PBS has been praised by critics for its even-handed style and its format of focusing on one or two stories in depth each night.

MacNeil, 59, a Canadian who had worked for NBC and the British Broadcasting Service, and Lehrer, 56, a former Texas newspaperman, began working together as co-anchors of PBS’ daily coverage of the Watergate hearings. Off camera, each has published numerous books, including novels, plays and nonfiction. They also received Emmys, Peabodys and the Dupont-Columbia awards for excellence in journalism.

This week PBS will broadcast a 90-minute retrospective of the journalists’ 15 years together on the “News-Hour” and its predecessors, “The Robert MacNeil Report” and “The MacNeil/Lehrer Report.”

Jane Hall interviewed the pair together-MacNeil in New York and Lehrer via speaker phone from Washington, D.C.

Q. What was your impression of each other when you first worked together during the Watergate hearings? Did Lehrer seem like a noisy Texan?

MacNeil: He didn’t seem like a cliched Texan. He’s a modest man, very engaging. Lehrer: When I first met Robin (MacNeil), I was intimidated by him. He’d been around the world 15 times, worn out eight or nine trench coats. I’d mostly been to Nuevo Laredo. But one of the reasons it worked is that we were in sync on journalism.

Q. How would you differentiate yourselves from network news shows?

MacNeil: I think our distance from the network evening shows is greater now than when we started. Partly, it’s in the demeanor and the feel of what we do, and certainly in our intention.

NBC News recently announced with lots of trumpets that they were going to devote the whole newscast one evening to the state of the nation because they think it’s so important. That’s 22 minutes, when you subtract the commercials. We’ve been devoting 22 minutes and more to one story every night for 15 years because we think it’s so important.

I know that when NBC News does it, with all their very talented people and their serious journalists, and their good training and everything else, they’re still going to have to do it with the kind of dash and pace and lots of sorts of excitement noise and fast talking, a kind of barely controlled hysteria about it. It’s the culture of what they do as well as the intention, which is so different from what we do.

We are quieter, more thoughtful. I’m not saying that we’re God Almighty or that we’re the right way or anything else-it’s just that we are very different in what we do and the way we do it. And, I think, as they get more frenetic, as their competition increases and their audience shrinks-while we have stuck to what we do, which is a reasonably, civil, quiet, thoughtful way of doing it-I think the differences between their product and our product get more pronounced.

Q. Some of the elements of “MacNeil/ Lehrer” have shown up on network news.

MacNeil: One thing I think we can say we did is redirect attention to the value of talking heads and to debriefing news sources. What we introduced was letting the audience hear directly from the kind of sources that a reporter would go and talk to on a story.

Q. Do you think you’re ever dull?

MacNeil: We are dull for those people who think we’re dull, and they probably don’t watch or have stopped watching. We are not dull to the people who like our product.

Lehrer: Where the networks have got it wrong, in my opinion, is that they think that in order to avoid being dull, they have to jazz up the news. If there’s somebody out there who doesn’t care about arms control, then anything you do about arms control-I don’t care if you can find a way to get bombs coming out of your TV set-it’s going to bore them.

If you’re in the business of doing serious journalism, you do serious journalism for those people who want serious journalism-you do not do it for those who do not. We have an obligation to make a story as interesting as possible. We don’t have an obligation to hype it.

Q. A media watchdog group called Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting commissioned a study this spring that concluded that the “MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour” has too many white establishment figures on as guests, that your program is overly white and overly male. (The group drew similar conclusions about “Nightline” in a study last year.) What do you think about the FAIR report on your program?

Lehrer: It was extremely unfair. It was incompetently done. It was done from an ideological point of view. They attacked us, which they have a perfect right to do. The only problem was that they were not honest about (their point of view.)

It’s a left-wing organization, and the right-wing went after us at one time. Everybody wants the news to fit what their view is, and they want to decide who the guests on everybody’s television should be-who should represent this position, who should represent that position. We didn’t let the right do that-we’re not going to do the left do it.

There are legitimate criticisms to be made about every program in American journalism, but it isn’t a matter of sitting there with an adding machine and looking only at what the color of a person’s skin is, and what a person’s gender is, and not listening to what the people are saying or how they’re being held accountable.

It is true that a lot of the power in this country is held by white males. For instance, in the U.S. Senate, there are 100 members, none of them black. Any time we cover what the U.S. Senate is doing, we’re not going to have a black person on. And there are only two women in the U.S. Senate, so the odds are there aren’t going to be a lot of women on either (when the show covers the activities of the Senate).

MacNeil: They did their arithmetic wrong and in a prejudiced way. They chose only certain stories at a certain time, at the beginning of a new (presidential) Administration when you would naturally have more of a certain kind of people on.

They said, for example, that we didn’t put environmentalists on-that is so much a distortion of this program’s record on the environment over the last 15 years that it’s extraordinary.

I would point out, too, that a new study of print and TV news by a group called Women, Men and Media (a University of Southern California group co-chaired by feminist Betty Friedan) says that, among TV news programs, we did the best job of integrating women into our show.

Q. You had a woman on the program recently who is a military analyst on Iraq. Is it harder to find a female military analyst on Iraq than a male one?

MacNeil: There are fewer women in that field than men.

Q. Do you try to have a broad spectrum of people on the show?

MacNeil: Yes, and we succeed sometimes better than other times. If you asked people who book the guests, I think they’d say they’re supposed to find women, blacks, people who aren’t official. ... We’re also planning to expand a new segment of the show called “Conversations,” lengthy pieces where we’ll have an opportunity to bring on individuals who have provocative views on subjects such as the Persian Gulf crisis.

Q. You are said to be best friends. Given the world of television, do people find that hard to believe?

Lehrer: This isn’t some friend you see every six weeks-this friendship is tested every damn day of the week. As a consequence, it has defined friendship for me-what it means, what it requires.

MacNeil: We tell each other things we may not tell our families, and the program is only part of what is valuable in the friendship. If the program stopped tomorrow, we would still be friends, and we would enrich each other’s lives because of that.

Lehrer: You know, some people, the first time they get recognized in the 7-Eleven store, they never get over it. Being on television does things to grown-ups-it can turn them into little children very quickly. Robin and I are not immune from that. Having somebody there to help you through the shark-infested waters of your own ego, as well as shark-infested waters of the sharks themselves, is a terrific asset.

MacNeil: We can express our selfish thoughts to each other. And we can talk with each other while thinking, think while talking. We don’t have to have finished, articulate thoughts- that’s one of the greatest values of friendship.

Also, we’re both interested in all kinds of other things. We found we like to talk about the printed word. And we both are introverts in the pure definition of that, people who can amuse themselves without a lot of stimulation from the environment. We’re not loners-we don’t avoid people. But one of Jim’s favorite things is to get into a car and go off through the little towns of Kansas or Texas on the backroads, often looking for old bus stations. (Lehrer’s father worked for a bus line.) I’ve spent periods of my life where I’ve gone off on very long walks; in England, for instance.

Q. But you’re involved in daily news.

MacNeil: What’s daily news? I know some people who are consuming news morning, noon and night. They’re listening to the radio in their car, listening to the latest five-minute summary, getting in and turning on the television set to see another show, constantly reading the newspaper. That is not me.

News is something we make our living at-and I know I’ll find out the daily news in a much more compact way here on the job than by constantly consuming news 24 hours a day.

“Fifteen Years of MacNeil/Lehrer” airs Monday at 8-9:30 p.m. on KOCE and Tuesday at 7:30-9 p.m. on KCET. The “MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour” airs 6:30-7:30 p.m. weekdays on KCET and 7-8 p.m. on KOCE.