What Made Him a Hero

Of all the dragons, temptations and trials that a hero must face on his perilous path through life, none has become more challenging than the encounter with a biographer. So it is a relief to travel between the hard covers of a biography of a modern American hero and return from the journey with the hero and the ideals that inspired him, and us, still intact. Edward R. Murrow is a man whose name has become a synonym for quality, courage and integrity in broadcast journalism and whose life was the enactment, and in some ways the fulfillment, of the broadcast journalist's dream. If one is curious to find out what makes some people stand out above the rest, what makes a person a hero, the story is in "Edward R. Murrow: An American Original." Murrow had talent, drive, intelligence, personality and vision. Add to those qualities the power of his good looks - that piercing gaze, those heavy, furrowed brows and that voice that seemed to resound from some inner sanctum. In sum, he added up to more than most of us

"From Here to Here"

These are the Inaugural Day Remarks given by Joan Konner, former Dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, at Columbia University on September 6, 1988, her first day as dean. This speech was then published in Vital Speeches of the Day (55:8) on February 1, 1989

The Missing Beat: Ideas

An idea has swept across the pages of recent news reports, and what an enriching addition to the daily fare of facts and opinion. The idea comes from Francis Fukuyama, a State Department official, in an essay called "The End of History?" It was published in the National Interest last summer, and it holds that the great ideological war of this century, the war of ideas between communism and democracy, has been won by Western liberal democracy. Therefore, he writes, history, as Hegel defined it, is over

“Partial View: Truth in Documentary Filmmaking”

This is a speech by Joan Konner, former Dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, given in Riga, Latvia, in September 1990, at the Robert Flaherty Film Festival. She discusses the concept of truth in making documentaries

How To Climb The Greasy Pole

If success is the guiding star in the murky firmament of this capitalist culture, never were the navigational lanes more visible than in two recent autobiographies of media moguls. "Confessions of an S.O.B." by Al Neuharth, founder of USA Today and builder of the Gannett media empire, and "Succeeding Against the Odds" by John Johnson, founder and publisher of Ebony and Jet magazines. recount the classic rags-to-riches, poverty-to-power story and, in the process, define the values struggle that is the issue of our time

Pinning Down a Force in 20th-Century History

We have a choice: to remember William S. Paley as the television tycoon lionized by the media throughout his life, or to remember him as portrayed in Sally Bedell Smith's new biography, "In All His Glory." The two portraits are not the same, and it remains to be seen which has the greater power - the biographer or the press

“Broadcast Journalism: What’s Missing?"

This is a speech given by Joan Konner, former Dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, at the Cosmopolitan Club in New York City on February 24, 1987. She discusses what's missing in her field of broadcast journalism

Concluding Remarks

How do you bring a rodeo to an end? It's my assignment today to get my arms around what we heard—and, yes, that's a pun on making love—and to help you get your arms around it, too, by doing what journalists do: connecting the dots, to try to make a coherent whole out of different presentations and perspectives on love and its obstacles. Part of what I heard, however, was how difficult it is to get your arms around even one person, a mother or child, a partner or mate, much less somebody Other in the world. Love is a subject that encompasses so many different worlds of knowledge, thought, and ideas. Every time I heard the word today it seemed a hyperlink to some experience, some memory, some feeling, something I knew or needed to know more about. If it was like that for you—and I expect that it was—then what we really should do is be quiet for a few minutes to allow you to concentrate, and then let you speak from your own hearts and your own experiences of love

The Case for Caution: This System is Dangerously Flawed

On any election day, interested citizens want to know one thing--who won. News organizations are in the business of getting accurate results to !heir audience as quickly as possible. but counting actual votes takes hours, and sometimes days. Beginning in the early 1960s, news organizations developed ways of projecting the outcome of races in order to speed the process of reporting before votes were actually counted. They began to develop methods and systems of modeling and polling that could indicate, statistically, the likely winner in any given race. The motive was to give the audience what it wanted--the faster, the better. Of course, the news media intended to make their projections as accurate as possible. In time, polling and analysis became increasingly sophisticated. Results from preelection samples, along with extrapolations from precinct models, exit polls. and partial election returns, were combined into what I will refer to as the networks' election-day polling and projection system. This system provided the basis for making election projections faster and better, meaning with fewer mistakes. Year after year, the systems were improved, spurred on by competition among the news organizations to be the first to report outcomes to their audiences. Not incidentally, the highly competitive polling and projection business grew increasingly costly. In 1990. the first network pool for exit polling and projections, Voter Research and Surveys (VRS), was formed with the intention to meet the increasing costs and share expenses. Cost sharing made it possible for the networks to provide the greatest sweep of polling. Without the pool, the networks would have had to restrict their reach and coverage because of budget limitations. Of course, in journalistic terms, pooling meant the information would be less re liable. While the networks could, by combining resources, undertake larger polling operations and more sophisticated modeling that could reduce the risk of certain types of error, the vulnerability of the networks to any errors that did result was increased. When data are wrong, with only one source of information, there is no opportunity for correction. Nevertheless, financial considerations trumped reliability--and the best practices of journalism. By election day 2000, after several permutations, a comprehensive polling and projection system was in place backed by a consortium of five television networks and the Associated Press. Its purpose was to collect and disseminate polling data and voting information by which news organizations could make their independent calls, maintaining an element of competition among them. In thinking about this system in its entirety, we must consider not only the Voter News Service (VNS), the reconstituted consortium operation, but also the analysis and reporting operations of the separate networks as well. The system was economical. and it was fast. But was it accurate? The answer: not as accurate or as reliable as it was intended, promised, or needed to be, especially when it came to calling a very close race. We learned that answer on election night 2000. At the core of the reporting problem were two mistaken projections in one state, Florida, which turned out to be key to the outcome of the national election. The television networks and other news outlets twice projected the winner and twice recalled those projections. News executives, particularly television news executives, as well as editors, correspondents, and producers themselves described election-night coverage as a "debacle," a "disaster," and a "fiasco." Something had gone wrong--terribly wrong--in the polling and projection system. It is not the purpose of this article to ferret out the exact sources of the errors on that night. The experiences of election night 2000 do, however, serve as a useful lens through which to examine the overall efficacy of the system that was in place. It is my contention that this system is too fraught with the potential for error for news organizations to rely on its projections in the way that they have in the recent past

TV Editorials: A Last Whimper

We do not wish to let the death of television editorials go unnoticed. Quietly, they are slipping into the sea of television commercialism, with no markers at the site. With them hand-in-hand goes their partner, the editorial reply by opposing viewpoints, but they lived a useful if pedestrian life, and someone should speak a proper eulogy