By Lily Abromeit
Tom Brokaw, special correspondent for NBC, announced last week that he will donate his papers and items from 50 years as a broadcast journalist with NBC to the University of Iowa Libraries. Brokaw visited the UI campus last week and sat down with Daily Iowan staffers to discuss the donation, the election, and how journalism is changing.
The Daily Iowan: How do you think social media and technology has changed journalism? Is it any better? Have there been any setbacks?
Tom Brokaw: I think social media is the most under-reported, high-impact development over the last 20 years of my business. I think that we don’t pay enough attention to it. I think it has enormous advantages. I think that there are great concerns about it because you don’t know the sourcing of so much of what you’re seeing. Who are these people? What do they have in mind? Will they present something as factual? How do we know what’s factual?
Some of them over time have developed their own credibility that you can rely on because what they had to say turned out to be correct. But a lot of them are what I call a kind of fragging operation. Fragging is when you pull a pin on a grenade, and roll it into a tent, and hope it blows up something. A lot of social media is like that.
But it’s here to stay; it’s only going to get larger and a larger part of our lives. For your generation, it is the primary source of social activity, and journalism, and research. And that’s great because on a handheld device you can get things that I’d have to come to the library and go into the stacks to find out.”
DI: How can we define journalists today, especially with this new media? And what would you say is a true journalist? Or does it matter?
Brokaw: “Well, I don’t know if the definition really matters or not. There is a much wider spectrum [of] journalism now than when I was coming of age. First of all, it was an all male profession when I started, and I started in the new form of journalism, which was television-broadcast journalism. And my friends in the print business kind of looked down on us. We were the lesser journalists because we were in show biz, as they saw it.
And we didn’t have as much time to devote to the details of the story that they did.
In fact, I had a kind of a summit meeting with the editor of the New York Times, Abe Rosenthal, he was one of the old sticklers, and he ran a great newspaper. And I took him to lunch and I said, ‘You know, the belief in your organization is that you hate television. And so when they write about television they reflect your feeling. I worked really hard on a documentary, and it’s an important one about a complicated issue, and then I get dissed by your reviewer, and it makes it hard for me to sell the idea of documentaries to the organization.’ And he said, ‘I don’t think that’s true.’ And I said, ‘Do me a favor. Go back and walk through the New York Times and ask the people on any floor what you think about television, about what they think you think about television. And he called and he said, ‘Oh my God, you were right,’ and he said, ‘The fact is, that the more news that is generated, and the more people that see it, it’s good for all parts of us.’
So I do think I had a little bit of an impact on him beginning to television more seriously. We still haven’t gotten there yet. I mean, for example, the New York Times this year had its cultural editor reviewing the debates and the performances of the various people, as if they were show business of some kind, and they’re serious journalists. So I kind of raised my hand and said, ‘You still haven’t gotten there, you still don’t get it in a lot of ways.’
DI: In the last couple of days, what we’ve been talking about a lot in our newsroom is how journalism is changing. Especially over the last couple of days, there’s been a lot of talk of people being worried about journalism. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that; if you think it’s changing and what that means for student journalists particularly?
Brokaw: “Well it’s changing a lot because there are so many sources of journalism now. Beginning with the traditional ones, the printed newspaper; it’s hard to see how that, 100 years from now, or even 50 years from now, it will still have the robust influence that it has had.
And then you have television journalism, broadcast journalism, the part that I’ve devoted much of my life to. We have an older audience, it’s an aging audience that it’s still very important to them, at the end of the day, to find out what’s going on. But between the “Today” show in the morning and Lester Holt in the evening news, people now can turn on to forms of other television news, which is cable. And it’s there 24/7.
It’s the genius idea of Ted Turner to have access to news all day long. So it’s not segmented the way that it once was. You had to wait in my day to see David Brinkley or Walter Cronkite. Dan [Rather], Peter [Jennings], and I probably had the last great run of broadcast journalism because we had satellites, portable satellites, we could go anywhere in the world in a hurry, and get on the air, and we still had an audience that wanted to watch what we had to say.
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Even my children, for example, they don’t make a point of seeing Tom, they call me Tom because they’ve seen me on television, my grandchildren and children, they don’t make an effort every night to see the news. That’s the continuing conundrum for us, quite honestly, how we stay viable.
And then something comes along something like the election or 9/11, and America turns to television news in its traditional form to find out what’s going on. But we need a linear strength; we need to be stretched out over a long period of time to make sure that we’re still relevant to the people who need to get the information they do.
And the way to do that, I think, I feel very strongly, is to do more original reporting. There’s too much on television now that’s just kind of holding up the mirror and reflecting whatever went on that day. When I was not well, I had to stay home for a while, I was watching more on the air, and I would see things at 9 o’clock in the morning and then at 6:30 at night I’d see them again, and I’d say, ‘Tell me something new.’
You know, news is about what’s changed, what’s different. What happens in a newsroom is ‘oh my god we’ve got to get that on the air because boy look how important that is.’ You’ve got to have the courage to stand back and say ‘everybody has already seen that, how do we build on that, how do we go from here?’
DI: During your speech [Nov. 10], you touched on the fact that you think the country is in one of its most dysfunctional states in years. Can you talk a little bit about that and why you think that and where you think we can go from here?
Brokaw: “Well, I think that this presidential campaign was a reflection of that. For me, the challenge, as a journalist and as a citizen, is to sort out how much of the perceived dysfunction is true based on the facts. How meritorious is that argument? As oppose to the perception that it’s dysfunctional. As oppose to people who want to promote dysfunction for their own personal advantages.
When Donald Trump said, for example, ‘Make America great again’ — you know, I go all over this country all the time, I think it’s pretty great right now. I grew up in South Dakota; the agricultural economy was just marginal, farmers were having a hard time making it. Now, the agricultural economy in the Great Plains — Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota, Minnesota — these are very smart operations, and they have grown exponentially over the past few years about crop rotation, what China wants, commodities and how they’re going to do it, how they produce better beef and better pork; it’s much more sophisticated than it used to be.
Yes, the Rust Belt is in real trouble, there’s no question about that. But the idea that it’s going to come back to its old, robust years — it’s not going to happen. So what you have to do in the Rust Belt and in the other parts, where we’ve lost many of our manufacturing, is find new forms of income for people. And there are a lot of opportunities in the digital world. I mean, Iowa lost Maytag, for example, to Mexico, and what ddid they do? They went off and got a big racetrack and had a lot of small businesses.
And digital businesses don’t require a lot of the hardware and the big buildings. You can do something that is very smart, informational-oriented. Those are the discussions that we ought to be having, frankly, and I think that journalism ought to be out on the leading edge of those discussions.”
DI: As a budding journalist, what advice do you have because with this new president-elect, he has been saying all the mass media have been ‘biased.’ What advice do you have for us when we go out into this field?
Brokaw: “Well I don’t worry about the bias part of it, that’s always been a factor. You know, people have mistrusted journalism as long as I’ve been in it, and it’s on both sides. You know, ‘you guys don’t know what you’re talking about’ or ‘you guys are loading it up to one side or the other,’ or ‘you guys just don’t really understand what’s going on here.’
Truth is like beauty; it’s in the eye of the beholder, very often. One person’s truth is another person’s big lie.
So what I would do if I were starting over again, is that I would pick a specific field, and concentrate on that, and try to develop a reputation for expertise in that field. And it could be everything from finance to medicine — which is growing exponentially in terms of what people want to know and the information that’s available to them — to cultural.
Richard Engel, who is our foreign correspondent, here’s what he decided to do: He left Stanford, and he went to his father, and he said, ‘I want you to stake me. For one year, I want to be a foreign correspondent in the Middle East.’ He moved to a walk-up rental apartment in a terrible part of Cairo and learned Arabic on the street, and then he went to Israel and worked there, and then he went to the war. He’s the single best reporter in the Middle East right now. But that’s what he had to do to become the single best reporter.
You know, it’s not easy. It’s not just you slap a label on yourself and say ‘I’m a reporter,’ you’ve got to develop expertise in some areas and constantly work at it.
I’m the old dude at NBC but I’m always turning over the rocks and finding out ‘What is new here? What is going on?’ I’m particularly interested in the new electronic age, the digital age. And often the younger people will come to me and say, ‘My God, you know more about this than I do’ — well, that’s because that’s the business that we’re in. What’s new? What’s different? What do the people need to know?”
DI: On our campus, a lot of students have been feeling obviously really surprised by the results of the election, and some of them have been feeling scared about what this means for them or the country. There’s just been a lot of confusion or a lot of people upset. So I was wondering if you have any advice for young people who may feel disheartened by this?
Brokaw: “When I started in journalism I used to worry that all the big events had already happened and it turned out not to be true. The first thing that happened in my journalistic career was John F. Kennedy was assassinated and that set off a whole series, sequence, of really cataclysmic events.
We went to war, it was called Vietnam, and more than 50,000 young Americans were killed there. That was an especially traumatic event for young people. It really divided the young in this country — those who went to war and felt that they had a patriotic duty [and] those who fought against the war.
And in 1968, this is what happened: Lyndon Johnson was forced from office after having on a landslide just a few years earlier. Dr. King was killed. Assassinated, murdered. The leader, the prophet of racial justice. Bobby Kennedy, the next Kennedy coming along who had changed, really philosophically and I think personally, was assassinated. We had riots that were almost war in the streets of Chicago between protesters and the police in Chicago. The same riots happened in Miami as well. George Wallace, who was the governor of Alabama, who was a unreconstructed and unapologetic bigot and racist, ran for president against Richard Nixon, who had been there before, and Hubert Humphrey, who had grown up in the traditional Democratic system.
So there was a lot of despair then, and the baby boomers were coming along, and they wondered what they’re future would be like. They got involved, they protested a lot.
But the solution is not to just walk on sidewalks, but to figure out what it is that you want to change and then get engaged with others of your generation to make that change happen. Not just carry signs but to run for state legislatures, to create movements that will have an influence on people.
What troubles me now is that we are still trying to resolve what we think and how we respond to social media. Donald Trump ran on Twitter, effectively. I mean he figured out the best way to get the message out was cheaply, on Twitter. Everybody would see it at once, and it would get a million hits, and he would say outrageous things, and it tapped into a kind of visceral anger in America.
So, if you’re not happy with that, how do you counter that? You don’t counter it — especially students [who] are still people of privilege in our society — by hanging out on your campus feeling sorry for yourselves. You’ve got to get involved.”
DI: Can you tell us a little bit about what you’ve decided to donate and why?
Brokaw: Well, it was the University of Iowa Libraries’ idea; it was not my idea. I had been thinking for some time, ‘Gee, do I have stuff that might be useful?’ It was kind of out of sight, out of mind. I had great cartons of materials stored away in different places. I would get things and say, ‘Oh, this is worth saving,’ and then I wouldn’t go back and look at it. And so when the university came to me I was very skeptical at the beginning about whether I had something that was worthwhile, and I was curious about what their plans were. And when they described their plans, it was not only flattering, it was exciting that it might be helpful.
Then I went back and started looking at my material, and we’d open one carton and say, ‘Oh my God, that was really something.’ The interview with Mikhail Gorbachev when the Soviet Union was on the cusp of coming apart, for example, the interview with Nelson Mandela two days after he was released from prison, the first documentaries that were done on the digital world: Bill Gates, a documentary called Tycoon. No one really quite knew who he was yet and what he was all about. I did a documentary called AIDS Country because I had a friend who was very active and largely out of sight and enormously frustrated that AIDS was not getting attention that it should, his name was Larry Kramer and he later wrote Pulitzer Prize-winning plays, and so we did a documentary on that, on AIDS. And then there were letters of all kinds that were my reflections on election nights.
And it turned out to be, immodestly, a fairly impressive body of work, and I thought, ‘Well, this could be helpful to new generations of students or people who are merely curious and want to see what’s going on.’
I have letters from everyone from Charles Barkley to the president of the United States to David Letterman, notes from him and other people, Johnny Carson, you know, over the years, whom I met. So those were kind of fun to see as well.”
DI: What was it like for you to go through all of that again? It sounds like it was kind of like you retracing your steps so what was that like?
Brokaw: It was nostalgic, and it was also kind of reassuring because I got it mostly right. And when I didn’t get it right, I quickly said, ‘I didn’t have that one right.’ But if I look back on my reporting, I’m pretty proud of how it happened.
But television, broadcast journalism, is a team sport. These [NBC] people who are taping this right now are old friends of mine. We’ve been everywhere in the world together under very difficult circumstances often. I couldn’t have done it on my own, you know, I had to have them with me, and it becomes a form of camaraderie, and it also becomes a kind of floating laugh game because we keep saying, ‘Why in the hell are we here? What could happen to us where we are?’ And a lot of that has captured what I did.
I just did a story with Tim [Uehlinger], who is here with us, in Sioux Falls about the refugees who are coming in there to fill the tough jobs, meatpacking plants and so on. Some of them are from Somalia, and so they’ve established a little store called Mogadishu to have Somali products in Sioux Falls. Well, Tim and I were in Mogadishu, and so we were able to describe what was going on in Sioux Falls right now and then it cut to scenes of me in Mogadishu, and I said it was the worst place I had ever been, most dangerous place. And then to show the contrast of the kind of life they now have in this All-American city in the middle of South Dakota and where they’re going to good schools and really enveloping themselves in the American culture. So it showed the arc of their lives.
