Television's Aging Rock Star

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 6, 2006 10:27 AM

When Dick Cheney had his quail-hunting accident, Bob Schieffer led off the "CBS Evening News" this way:

"The question was being asked at gas stations, in offices, restaurants, all across America today, and the question was: 'Did I hear that right? The vice president shot someone?'"

When terrorists attacked the U.S. consulate in Pakistan last week just before President Bush's visit to that country, Schieffer said: "Frankly, this is kinda scary stuff we're talking about."

If you were casting about for a hot personality to juice up a struggling news show, a white-haired man of 69 would probably not jump to the top of the list. But a year after Schieffer was tapped as a temporary replacement for Dan Rather, he has loosened the collar on a buttoned-up newscast and made modest progress in winning back viewers.

"Bob instills confidence -- a man of his experience, there's something comforting about that," says CBS President Les Moonves. "He's a straight shooter. He's a return to the old school. It's good to be able to say we possibly have the most trusted TV man in America again."

That reference to Walter Cronkite might be a stretch. But Schieffer has brought a bit of "Face the Nation" to the evening news, dropping many taped reports in favor of unscripted chats with the program's correspondents.

"If there's a fire across the street," Schieffer says, "you don't walk into the newsroom and say, 'A raging, three-alarm fire, whipped by 40-mile-an-hour winds, ripped through the home next door.' You say, 'There's a fire across the street.' " His push for plain-spoken language is "in many ways a radical departure," Schieffer says.

The "debriefs" with his reporters "are the equivalent of a newspaper sidebar," he says. "It gives you a chance to elaborate and do that second story that a newspaper does with great ease."

After correspondent Sharyl Attkisson reported on a Senate probe of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff's handling of Hurricane Katrina, Schieffer asked her: "Do you think, Sharyl, that Chertoff's job is on the line here?"

Schieffer dismisses criticism that his questions and comments are opinionated, saying this is the kind of analysis he has always done as a Washington correspondent.

Says Sean McManus, who recently took over as president of CBS News: "There's an authenticity about Bob. He really does speak to viewers like he's speaking to them, as opposed to reading a script. When I talk to him in the newsroom, he talks to me the same way one-on-one as he does when he is reporting the news at 6:30."

Who else would introduce a report as "some big news on a subject I know absolutely nothing about -- vintage wines"? He has downscaled the once-omnipotent anchor job from Voice of God to Voice of the Guy Next Door.

The CBS bosses are grateful to Schieffer for boosting morale after Rather stepped down early after the botched report on Bush's National Guard service, for which Rather later apologized.

"Bob has restored a great deal of credibility and faith in CBS News," Moonves says. "There's no question it was a year of turmoil for the 'Evening News.' "

Schieffer has been enjoying a wave of positive publicity, not least because reporters who cover television are fixated on ratings. For the season to date, the "CBS Evening News" has gained 183,000 viewers, from what had been a low point under Rather. By contrast, ABC's "World News Tonight," which is still rebuilding after the death of Peter Jennings and the injuries suffered by Bob Woodruff in Iraq, has lost 845,000 viewers and "NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams" has lost 741,000.

At the same time, Williams remains the undisputed evening news leader, averaging 9.87 million viewers to 8.78 million for ABC and 7.66 million for Schieffer's broadcast.

The network newscasts are all in various stages of trying to reinvent themselves. Williams writes a daily blog and has owned the New Orleans story. ABC co-anchor Elizabeth Vargas, who made news last week with an aggressive interview of Bush, does a daily webcast. McManus took the unusual step of having Schieffer rerun a story that drew a huge reaction: amateur video of an autistic high school student scoring 20 points in four minutes in his only basketball game. But changing the basic structure of these half-hour programs has been difficult.

Part of CBS's new look involves playing up the likes of chief foreign affairs correspondent Lara Logan, national correspondent Byron Pitts, White House correspondent Jim Axelrod and political analyst Gloria Borger. "When there's a big story overseas, you're going to see Lara Logan on the scene, much as CNN does with Christiane Amanpour," Schieffer says. "TV is a personal medium. When people feel they know our correspondents better, it really increases their credibility."

Whatever his late-in-life accomplishments, the onetime Fort Worth newspaper reporter remains an interim solution. CBS is still trying to lure Katie Couric from "Today" after her NBC contract expires in May. Asked about the negotiations with Couric, Moonves ducks, saying: "I've enjoyed her work on the Olympics."

The double duty hasn't been easy for Schieffer, who commutes to New York during the week and returns home to Washington to host "Face the Nation" and to see his wife, Pat.

"Had this happened 10 years ago, I'd be fighting for this job," he says. "Doing it under these circumstances is perfect for me. I don't want to do it forever."

Full-Service Conservative

Some liberals have been dismissing Fox News commentator Sean Hannity as a Republican flack following word that he is attending fundraisers for GOP Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania.

"Sean Hannity, conservative, an on-air advocate for conservatives -- it's a shock that I support a conservative and want him to get elected?" Hannity asks. "What's the big deal? Rick is a great conservative. I believe he's a great senator."

But isn't there a difference between a commentator voicing support and actively working with a campaign? Hannity says he has helped raise money for other candidates and campaigned for President Bush in 2004. "I'm in the opinion business," he says. "I do none of this in secret."

Besides, Hannity says, he has also offered to campaign for moderate Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, and "a lot of Republicans are angry at my opposition" to White House policies on the Dubai ports deal, immigration and Medicare drug benefits.

Phony Voice

Nick Sylvester, senior associate editor of the Village Voice, has been suspended after admitting he fabricated a scene from last week's cover story. Sylvester says he regrets the lapse into fiction, which involved a barroom meeting with other writers testing their pickup techniques.

Family Ties

MSNBC's Tucker Carlson says he's always been critical of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald and the CIA leak investigation that led to the indictment of former vice presidential aide Scooter Libby. And it is "outrageous," Carlson says, for blogger Arianna Huffington to suggest that his father had anything to do with it.

Former ambassador Richard Carlson, she noted on the Huffington Post, is on the advisory committee for Libby's legal defense fund.

"What an incredibly stupid thing to say," says the younger Carlson, adding that Libby was his father's personal lawyer for years. "I was red-in-the-face mad about it." Carlson says that he has met Libby only once and that his father's role "has nothing to do with anything. It's a ridiculous standard." On his show, "The Situation," Carlson said it was a "shame" that Huffington would not come on to debate him.

Huffington says Carlson "never addressed" what she called "a simple journalistic point," which is that he should have disclosed his father's role to viewers. She says Carlson unfairly portrayed her as ducking him -- and knew she had a scheduling conflict while traveling -- because she told him in an e-mail: "Rain check, please? Anytime, any place, any subject."

Pentagon Targets Blogs

A new U.S. Central Command team, according to a news release, "contacts bloggers to inform the writers about any given topic that may have been posted on their site. . . . The team engages bloggers who are posting inaccurate or untrue information, as well as bloggers who are posting incomplete information."

While that may sound ominous, the release says the unit works with more than 250 bloggers "to try to disseminate news about the good work being done by U.S. forces in the global war on terror." This, says Army Reserve Maj. Richard Norton, has a "viral effect" that drives Web users to CentCom's Web site. The team's motto: "Engage."

Furthermore . . .

Iraq remains a big newspaper issue. Dick Polman in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

"We can't stay, and we can't go.

"As the United States nears the third anniversary of its war in Iraq, there is irrefutable evidence that our military and political options are narrowing, that President Bush's democratization dream is lethally imperiled, that we are hostage to events beyond our control, and that nobody can agree on whether our troops would be better off digging in or pulling out.

"The fog of war has frozen domestic politics. Bush's 'stay the course' stance is being soundly rebuked in the polls, yet the Democrats, still divided among themselves, haven't come up with a better idea, a consensus alternative. Meanwhile, the clock ticks. The danger of a full-blown civil war - predicted 18 months ago by the CIA, but dismissed at the time by the Bush team - grows with each passing day."

Ron Brownstein in the LAT:

"President Bush barreled straight ahead with old answers when ABC's Elizabeth Vargas asked him a new question about Iraq last week. And like any driver who missed a turn in the road, the president quickly found himself in a ditch. Vargas sensibly asked Bush how the growing civil strife in Iraq between the majority Shiites and the Sunnis who dominated the country under Saddam Hussein might change the U.S. mission there. Bush, to his credit, acknowledged the importance of encouraging Iraqis to form a 'unity government' in the dangerously prolonged political haggling that has followed December's election...

"Those arguments reflect the model that Bush, his aides and most Americans have used to understand the war in Iraq. In that framework, Iraq -- like Vietnam -- is a contest between a central government and an insurgency determined to overthrow it. But many experts are asking whether that construct really explains the challenge in Iraq anymore -- especially after the horrific sectarian violence that swept the country following the Feb. 22 bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra."

American Prospect's Michael Tomasky throws down a challenge to the right:

"I'm really not sure at this point that the country and the world will survive three more years of this bumbling, deceitful, artificial, and thoroughly mediocre man, and his bumbling, deceitful, artificial, and thoroughly mediocre courtiers. (Liberals, let's just start saying it insistently and unapologetically: We were not being 'elitists'; we were right in the first place -- he is just not smart enough to be the president of the United States.) . . .

"Virtually everything is inside-out; virtually every reality, the opposite of what they say. Saddam has the weapons to harm us; Saddam had no such weapons. The terrorists are on the run; the terrorists are increasing in number and violence. The insurgency is in its death throes; the insurgency was just kicking into gear when Dick Cheney said that. We will prevail in Iraq; the soldiers themselves say that isn't possible. Clear skies; relaxed pollution standards. Intelligent design, something that deserves equal footing to science; a massive case of intellectual fraud, payola to a constituency, completely invented out of whole cloth. We won't negotiate with rogue states; we will instead isolate and vanquish North Korea; North Korea now has nuclear weapons it never had before. Dubai is our ally; Dubai boycotts Israel. This list could go on for about 5,000 words."

Well, speed it up, Mike, I'm running out of space.

"Honest conservative intellectuals: your nation needs you. Say, 'Enough.' By tradition, you believe in honorable principles. Today, you are flacking for an administration that has betrayed many of those principles. The principles to which it has maintained fealty, like low taxes, it has pursued at a high price to other principles you cherish, like fiscal prudence."

Andrew Sullivan is still upset over a letter from Sam Alito to a leading Christian conservative:

"A few emailers have asked what I see troubling in the Alito thank- you note to Dr James Dobson. First, Supreme Court Justices should be very careful associating with overtly political entities, and you don't get much more political than Dobson. Secondly, Dobson himself read it out loud on the air to brag of his influence on national affairs. Thirdly, there is more than just a hint of a constitutional quo for a political quid in the letter. That kind of horse-trading undermines the integrity of the court and the impartiality of the justices. Look: I endorsed Alito. But I hoped his jurisprudence would not amount to a carte blanche for whatever the Christianists demand. The letter suggests otherwise."

Eric Boehlert says the New York press is falling down on the job:

"Last month Gov. George Pataki, who is winding up his third term at the helm of New York state and busy positioning himself for a White House run in 2008, checked himself into a local hospital after complaining about abdominal pain. Later that day doctors announced they had removed Pataki's appendix and that the governor would be allowed to leave the hospital in a day or two.

"Pataki's wife assured the press, 'He's doing absolutely great,' and his flak echoed that spin: 'Doctors have indicated that the surgery was performed as expected without incident.' The thumbs-up talk was key since Pataki's unscheduled hospital visit came during the state's annually bruising budget negotiations, as well as against the backdrop of president Bush's port security controversy, where New York stands as a key player. Not to mention the fact Pataki had to cancel a speaking gig in New Hampshire.

"Problem is that was more than 14 days ago . Since the initial operation Pataki's health has continued to falter, he's been shipped off to another hospital and had to undergo a second surgery to try to unclog his digestive track and clean up internal infections. For now, New Yorkers have no clue when their governor will return to office, in part because during Pataki's never-ending, Groundhog Day hospital stay aides have given out very little useful information about the governor's health. In fact, they obviously concealed what was really going on in order to protect their boss. Yet to date, the press corps, while dutifully covering the story, has shown little enthusiasm or initiative. Instead, most New York news outlets have simply aired or published daily, 'He's-up-and-around' updates that read more like Pataki staff hand-outs."

Knight Ridder's Washington bureau breaks its share of stories, and in a letter to Romenesko , editors Clark Hoyt and John Walcott says that big papers are basically ripping them off:

"On Feb. 7, Warren Strobel reported on a State Department reorganization that sidelined career arms control experts who don't share the Bush administration's mistrust of international arms negotiations and agreements. Exactly two weeks later, The Washington Post published a virtually identical story by Glenn Kessler. We say 'virtually identical' only because the stories were written with different words. There was not a single fact in Kessler's story that was not in Strobel's, the product of weeks of careful enterprise reporting and interviews with 11 current and former government officials.

"We have asked, through the Post's ombudsman, Deborah Howell, who was once executive editor in St. Paul, for a published acknowledgements of the Knight Ridder story. To date, it hasn't happened. We understand that there has been vigorous opposition from the Post reporter, who has claimed, in essence, that the 'trade press' had already widely reported the story, a contention that is in fact not correct. We're waiting to see what happens.

"Friday morning, The New York Times led the paper with a story that concluded that fines for mine safety violations are down in the Bush administration. The story was based on 'a data analysis by The New York Times.' That's interesting. Knight Ridder -- the bureau's Seth Borenstein and Linda Johnson and Lee Mueller of the Lexington Herald-Leader -- published a data analysis on January 9 that arrived at precisely the same conclusion."

Kessler responds in Post ombudsman Deborah Howell 's column, which also deals with the paper's higher-than-everyone-else's death toll for last week's Iraq warfare. And NYT public editor Byron Calame says here that the Times was already working on its piece and had no reason to credit Knight Ridder.

A new media scandal is brewing: Napgate! Power Line's Scott Johnson is concerned:

"It appears that none of the three network news shows mentioned Justice Ginsburg's nap during the oral argument of the Texas redistricting case earlier this week. The folks at Fox's 'Special Report with Brit Hume' noted it. . . .

"Newsbusters asks us to 'pretend for a moment that this had happened to a conservative member of the Supreme Court.' I don't think it takes too much imagination to come up with the correct answer to that question."

Well, the oh-so-liberal Washington Post did report the judicial snooze.

By the way, I stand corrected in saying that President Bush wielded a fake turkey in Iraq. The bird was real; what I meant was that the staging was kind of phony.