Out of Frame

Lessons from the shameful events at CBS News

In my circle of journalists, many of them current and former employees of CBS News, the ripples from the spiked 60 Minutes story on the Trump regime sending people without due process to the torture chambers of a notorious Salvadoran prison continue to resonate. Thankfully, the full report—a solid piece of journalism—did get out, and it arguably had a bigger impact than if it had aired as originally scheduled.

But I also understand that in the whirl of the holidays and the approaching year’s end, the lasting imprint of this chilling episode for press freedom will likely dissipate into yet another distant data point in this dangerous age of autocracy. I am left instead with a broader feeling of loss, one with roots stretching back decades, to a time when it would have been inconceivable that we would be facing such escalating threats to democracy.

When I arrived at CBS News in 1998, I knew I was entering one of the most consequential news organizations in the country. History was everywhere you looked: photographs of on-the-ground reporting from the most important datelines of the past fifty years. I saw star correspondents in the cafeteria and I ate up the reminiscences of producers and editors whose work had shaped how the world understood itself.

I remember jaywalking across West 57th Street from the 60 Minutes offices to the Broadcast Center with my mentor, Michael Rosenbaum. He had countless war stories—literal and figurative—from his years of service. We were going to meet Dan Rather to pitch a story, the first time I would meet the legendary journalist who would later become a dear colleague and friend.

I was nervous as I entered his office overlooking the newsroom. But I also felt as if I had arrived on a sweeping upward slope of my career. Dan was gracious, curious, and encouraging to our pitch, caring about the reporting in ways that have propelled my sense of drive and purpose to this day.

Yet there were other forces, already apparent at the time, that were pushing CBS News in the opposite direction. What had once been a global enterprise was atrophying: shuttered bureaus, budget cuts, and trimmed plans for the future. There were many potential culprits—the rise of cable news and then the internet, new business models, changing viewing habits.

The terror attacks of 9/11, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, briefly ushered in a resurgence of urgency and interest in the work we were doing. But the broader trend lines proved too powerful to escape.

Have you ever arrived at a buffet when there was still ample food, but you could tell that the best moments of the feast had already crested? The fruit has been picked over, the sauces are congealing, and the abundance of once-heaping serving plates has abated. In the kitchen, you can hear preparations for the end of service. There will be no more replenishing.

That was what I remember it feeling like to be at CBS News in the early 2000s. But I also recognize that a long tradition of excellence has continued to propel the news division’s work. The quality of the reporting, and of the people who do it, has remained impressive, especially given the broader journalism landscape.

Watching 60 Minutes now, or Sunday Morning—two programs where I worked as a producer—is to step through a portal into my own distant, retreating past. I remember the exercises I was trained to do: pitching stories; the preparation and travel of a shoot; working with camera crews in the field; anticipating the needs of the correspondent; the writing and rewriting of the script; the edit rooms; the screenings for executives; and responding to rounds of notes requiring reediting and rewriting.

All of that work was evident in the wonderful piece on the El Salvador prison. But the world in which it went out, and the organization in which it was made, have changed to such a degree that I can no longer imagine superimposing the network environment in which I once worked and worried onto the present. The threats to the ethics and ethos of journalism from the new corporate ownership and their installed head of news further exacerbate the crisis.

This concern is much bigger than 60 Minutes, or even CBS News. It is about journalism more generally—about long-form storytelling and investigative reporting. It is about our attention spans, and our willingness to engage with complicated issues in depth and with context. I know many committed and talented people who continue to work at CBS News, and I hope they are able to keep doing work that lives up to high journalistic standards, as well as the quality of writing, filming, and storytelling that has marked the network for decades.

But I know many more of my colleagues from twenty years ago who have left journalism because it is an industry that has shrunk so dramatically. There are simply fewer jobs, fewer places to do this work, and less room for the kind of reporting we once took for granted.

We are visiting my in-laws for the New Year and going through old boxes from my father-in-law’s decades as a print reporter and newspaper man. My eldest daughter, handling a time-weathered clipping, asks with wonder about the jumpline of an article, and how it resumes on a different page. She reads newspapers all the time, but online, where you only scroll to the bottom. I think about how much the visual and spatial experience of news has changed, and how having everything on a small screen limits how we experience it.

But how many are even scrolling these days past the headlines? CBS News, with its field reporting and story lengths of several minutes, feels both refreshing and dated. Watching it reminds me of reading Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World as a child, about a remote region where dinosaurs still live. To call someone now, or the work they do, a dinosaur is usually an insult. But I don’t mean it that way. It is something powerful and marvelous that is no longer broadly sustained by the current environment.

It is trite to say there is no going back. But it is also true that we can learn from the past. And in the end, that’s where I end up. The furor around the 60 Minutes piece was not just that it was pulled, but that this kind of reporting is vitally important. We are in a daily fight for the continuation of our democracy, yet we can’t allow momentary battles and skirmishes to obscure the need for quality journalism.

We need those stories—and more—on 60 Minutes, in our news feeds, and in the debates that will define our democracy. I am not a cynic who believes our minds have been so transformed by the stimuli of the modern world that we are incapable of appreciating or supporting the kind of reporting my colleagues and I once strove to produce, and many still do. We need reporting with depth and context, work that wrestles honestly with new ideas. Our democracy depends on it, and as we fight to preserve this country and remake it stronger and more just, we will have to find ways for journalism of real value to endure. The response to the outrage at 60 Minutes is a hopeful sign that it can.

I learned at CBS News that journalism sometimes takes time. So does democracy. Both are instincts we inherited—and institutions we are responsible for sustaining. We can do so if we remember how intertwined they are in each other’s survival.