Rather Defends Remark After Stem Cell Segment

Dan Rather says he was only telling the truth when he instructed viewers, after President Bush’s stem cell research speech last week, to read a good newspaper for a better understanding of the complex topic than they can get from radio or television.

“I’m a lifetime reporter. I’m not into ‘Let’s pretend,”’ the veteran CBS anchor said by telephone from New York, expressing surprise that his comments last Thursday night had started another brush fire in the readily flammable media world.

After his network, like its rivals, carried George W. Bush’s 11-minute prime-time speech Thursday announcing support for limited embryonic stem cell research, Rather had just a couple of minutes to deliver a post-mortem before CBS returned to regular, more profitable programming.

Among the anchor’s comments was this endorsement of the print medium, surprising for seeming to violate the journalistic dictum that one’s own efforts should always be promoted or, at minimum, not denigrated:

“It’s the kind of subject that, frankly, radio and television have some difficulty with because it requires such depth into the complexities of it. So we can with, I think, impunity recommend that if you’re really interested in this, you’ll want to read in detail one of the better newspapers tomorrow.”

Readers will not be stunned to learn that the comment drew criticism from people in television and radio news and praise from at least one newspaper editor and the head of a journalism think tank.

Some observers thought the anchor, who had interrupted a vacation to head CBS’ coverage of the speech, was expressing frustration at the minimal amount of time that coverage was allowed.

But Rather said he was merely stating what seems to him self-evident: that a person can more fully grasp a topic like stem cells when he or she is able to “see something in print and go back over it until you understand it--or reach the point where you have to say, ‘I’m going to an encyclopedia.”’

Proclaiming himself a “lifelong voracious newspaper reader” and a “proud” member of the broadcast media, Rather said, “I don’t think in this country a person can be well-informed and not watch television and listen to radio. However, I don’t believe a person can be well-informed and only listen to television or radio, particularly when a subject is as important and as complicated as the whole genome revolution, with stem cell research being a part of it.”

“Well, it makes sense to me,” Leonard Downie Jr., executive editor of the Washington Post, said of Rather’s newspaper endorsement. “I just think he should have used the names of a couple of newspapers.”

Downie said he hoped the comment would remind people “that newspapers alone these days have the size and expertise of staff to deal with subjects like that in depth.”

Paul Friedman, executive vice president of ABC News, disagreed. He didn’t buy the value judgments implicit in Rather’s comment.

“I’ve always thought the irony of that kind of sentiment is there are so few good newspapers in the country,” Friedman said. “I understand Dan’s frustration because sometimes the constrictions of time are frustrating. But I do not agree that it’s something that television can’t do at least as well as newspapers. In point of fact, ‘Nightline’ did it as well as or better than any newspaper [the other] night.”

Joe Palca, a National Public Radio science correspondent who has been covering the stem cell controversy, said he learned of Rather’s remark from a colleague who was “just astounded” by it. Palca objected not to the recommendation that people read the newspaper but to this broadcast icon “seeming to say that the broadcast media couldn’t cope with complex scientific topics. The answer is, ‘Sure we can.”’

The trick, he said, is to be patient and careful and not ask that listeners get it all at first exposure. “Come on,” he said, “people go to graduate school for eight years to figure all this stuff out.”

Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Washington-based Project for Excellence in Journalism, was reminded of his days in journalism school and another CBS anchor.

“There was a famous quote from Walter Cronkite that said that network television was basically a headline service and that for people to understand the news, they needed to read a newspaper the next day,” Rosenstiel recalled.

To him, Rather’s comment “follows in the long--and best, probably--tradition of network anchors who acknowledge that television should not supplant print. It also, by the way, follows the media research these days that the people who watch network TV are more likely to read a newspaper, that media consumption leads to more media consumption.”

Steve Johnson is media critic for the Chicago Tribune, a Tribune company.