Interview

Veteran journalist reflects on career:
from print to radio to television to print

Charles Bierbauer, CNN Washington correspondent, was honored by the Journalism Alumni Association during the college’s J Days celebration April 5 and 6. Broadcasting professor Rick Alloway and news-editorial professor Charlyne Berens visited with him during his time on campus about his observations on Washington, politics and his own career. Following is an edited transcription of that interview.

Alloway: I’d like to lead off by talking about the transition in Washington the last few months. I remember back when President Clinton first came to office, it looked as if they were setting up more distance between the executive offices and the media. There was all this controversy — not just about the president but about how the press was being treated by the president. Now that we are a few months into a new administration, what have you seen in terms of how the Bush administration wants to deal with it?

Bierbauer: It’s a little difficult for me to give you a precise response to that because I am not dealing with the Bush administration per se. I am dealing with nine individuals who have lifetime tenure (the Supreme Court justices) and do not have to face re-election or, for the most part, the press.

The justices deal with us as little as possible by their choice — and to some degree by the nature of their job, which is as they will tell you, is to issue opinions and not debate them publicly and not hold press conferences about them. And so, covering the third branch of government, the least seen one, is quite different from covering the White House.

But I did cover the White House during the Reagan administration and during what we now call Bush One. We have never gotten to where we refer to Roosevelt One or Adams One or Harrison One or for that matter Johnson One and Two, although they weren’t related. But it is so close that you do tend to think of them as part of a rather narrow continuum.

In terms of the media, you made the point that between Bush and Clinton there was this very rough transition. Let me take it back even a step farther. I was there in the Reagan administration. And the transition from Reagan to Bush was simple because it really was a continuum. Although in terms of dealing with the media, there was a shift. There was a change. Reagan was very guarded, or the people around him were very guarding — starting with Nancy Reagan. He was a president who would say, “I just go where they tell me.” With his acting experience he hit his marks, and he delivered his speeches with impeccable timing and was perhaps justifiably called the “great communicator” even though you had very little contact with him.

My first day on the job at the White House in 1984 came between the political conventions that year. I had been at the Democratic convention in San Francisco and was on vacation in northern California when I got this call: “You have been invited to lunch with the president.”

I thought, oh, well, I can cut short my vacation for that.”

So I went to this luncheon at the White House, off the record, on background. The president was there, a couple of his aides, Mike Deaver and other broadcast journalists and anchors. I thought, “It’s not bad. Lunch at the White House.”

Well, that was the only lunch I was invited to with President Reagan. But it was a chance to see him in an informal setting, which you didn’t have very often. And you said, “Boy this would be neat if maybe once a month we could sit over a beer and talk things over.”

What happened with Bush is that you actually came to a point where to some degree you could do that. George Bush was far more accessible. He would pop his head into the White House briefing room and hold press conferences on short notice. You would actually encounter him in the hallways, and you could have short conversations, and unlike President Reagan, to whom I was the man with the beard, to George Bush we were immediately Charles and Sam and Andrea. He was cognizant of who we were.

This was his political forte. He not only knew you. He knew your Aunt Millie and her blueberry pies, and he would ask about her. He was a very good retail politician. Sometimes goofy, sometimes awkward. Sometimes he would say these strange things like “Don’t cry for me Argentina” in the middle of a campaign speech. But in some ways it was the endearing nature of gawky, awkward George Bush. And you could empathize to some degree with him in a way that you couldn’t relate to Reagan with whom there was always a separation.

Well, then along came the Clinton administration. And the first thing they wanted to do was close the door, literally barring the press at the White House already confining 60 Type A personalities in a small room. Helen Thomas, Sam Donaldson, Chris Wallace — and I suppose me to a lesser degree — sort of elbowing each other for the nugget of news that everyone else didn’t have. Because everyone else got the same speeches, the same papers and the same briefings for the most part.

The first thing they did was say, “Well, you won’t have access to the press secretary’s office. You will have to knock on the door and say, “Joe sent me,” before you can get in.” That ended after a couple of days with Helen Thomas camped at the door every morning somewhere before 7 a.m. saying, “Let us in. It’s freedom of the press,” as only Helen could do.

They thought about moving the press physically out of the White House into the Old Executive Office Building. In fact, the Bush administration is going to think about doing that, too. There is already a project under contemplation to build a new underground press wing somewhere under the north lawn.

You don’t have a whole lot of freedom at the White House. The one thing you have is proximity. You don’t want to be moved farther away. You don’t want to be buried deeper underground, literally or figuratively. But what you always have, fortunately, is the telephone. And you work your sources, and much of the time that you spend covering the White House is talking to people. It is not standing and listening to the president make the 14th speech on education policy that you have heard in as many days. It’s trying to comprehend what goes on behind the scenes. You do that just as you do it just about anywhere, by working your sources and contacts.

Alloway: So compare and contrast your former beat at the White House with what you are doing now with the Supreme Court — probably not as much in the limelight.

Bierbauer: Oh, no. I am not on the air every day or every hour like at the White House. I don’t have anything new to report.

The court is very different, and it’s intriguingly different because it’s not thrown at you. It is not, “Here’s the president’s scheduled speech at 10, press conference at noon, reception at 2, dinner at 6, and, oh, then he’s leaving for Nebraska.” It is quite different.

It is far more research oriented. It is probably the most research I have had to do since I was in grad school. It’s reading legal briefs, and it is talking to lawyers because the justices are really not accessible. The number of times you see them outside the court is a handful. Maybe they make an occasional speech. Or maybe there is a reception.

I run into one or two justices at a Christmas party at a former senator’s home. But, you can’t exactly buttonhole them there and say, “Now, listen. What are the real prospects for Roe v. Wade?” It just doesn’t work that way.

I had asked to pay a courtesy call when I started covering the courts four or five years ago. Most of the justices were gracious to give me a half an hour, an hour, just to meet them and talk about media and the court. I said, “Well, if I don’t understand an opinion, can I call you up?”

“No.”

“Will I ever see you again?”

“Probably not. At least not outside the courtroom.” And one justice said, “Call all those smart law clerks of mine. Call all those brilliant law professors around town. They will tell you what my thinking is on this.”

In that sense, that is not that different than what you would do at the White House or on Capitol Hill. At the White House you would call Condee Rice and you would say: “What is the President thinking about China?”

So instead you call Lawrence Tribe and you say, “When you argued this before the court what did you think Justice Rehnquist was getting at?”

Or you would call Justice O’Connor’s former clerk, and you’d say: “Maureen, what do you think she is going to do on this?”

It’s journalist skills in a different venue.

Berens: How did you feel about the night they handed down the decision on the election. You were on the steps of court. Was that an adrenaline pumping moment?

Bierbauer: Oh, absolutely. And you don’t get those very often at the court. You get important decisions, and you get 70 or 80 of them every term. If you think about it in those numbers, you probably don’t get 70 or 80 momentous, important decisions at the White House in a year’s span.

Now, some of those decisions that the justices make are going to deal with (fairly mundane) provisions, and some of them are going to deal with taxation, and a lot of them are going to deal with habeas corpus rules and how prisoners can appeal their status. A lot of them are obscure. But they are important to someone.

We deal with a sense of urgency but not of the same sort that we encountered on the night of Dec. 12 when at 10 at night — after about 36 hours of waiting after the arguments were held — we were handed the opinion in Bush v. Gore, which was the second iteration before the court of how to resolve the rulings of the Florida Supreme Court.

I think it is important to say how the court addressed the rulings of the Supreme Court of Florida, not how the court addressed the election. I know, and we all know, that the opinion handed down by the Supreme Court effectively ended the election. But it didn’t end it in the sense that the court said “George W. Bush is president.”

It said, “We don’t think you can effectively count the ballots because you have no uniform standard. You have very little time. And you probably shouldn’t try because you would give away the safe harbor provision for the Florida electors if you get beyond this deadline of the night of Dec. 12.

So, how did I feel that night? Sure, the adrenaline was going. We had reached the point we were pretty sure we were going to get an opinion that night for a variety of reasons. One, because the staff at the court had not gone home. Two, because the clerk of the court allowed that he was giving a speech in Salt Lake City the next afternoon, and he hadn’t changed his plane reservations. (Now, that is not something you can go to the bank on, but it was a pretty good indication.)

And three, we were pressing up against the timeline as it was generally perceived — and as the justices themselves acknowledged. In fact, Justice Kennedy told me afterward that they were fearful. They were having printing problems and were fearful they couldn’t get the opinion printed before midnight and that they might have to crank out a one-page synopsis of it just to get it on the record before that time passed.

So there we were. Usually, the court delivers its opinions from the bench, and the justice who writes the opinion for the court provides two or three minutes worth of a synopsis. That I find extremely beneficial in understanding the underpinnings legally and also the argumentation that gets them there.

But this night was different. We didn’t have the benefit of any justice telling us a darn thing. We had 65 pages of opinions, really, because there was the opinion from the court, there was Chief Justice Rehnquist’s concurring opinion and then there were four separate dissents with little in the way of guideline — not even the usual one page summary at the top of it. And we were handed this document inside the press chambers. Actually, we were all sort of lined up in the corridor. They asked us try and do this in an orderly fashion. I think I was 7th or 8th in line. I had this in one hand, and I had my cell phone in the other hand saying, “I’ve got it. I’m coming.” The cameras were outside the court, and the press officer, as I passed her office door, said, “Page 13.”

That was the only clue I had. But that was a helpful thing. Page 13 was where the bottom line was, which said reverse and remand — which meant OK, they have overruled the (Florida) court. They have sent it back. Now what does that mean?

As soon as I got to the camera — I had pretty much broken into a sprint at that point. I couldn’t read it in the dark — I said, “They are sending it back.”

I put the microphone on and said: “Here’s what it says. Let’s work our way through this carefully.” It just was not an occasion where you could say, “Give me five minutes.” Usually that would be the format. I would take it in hand. I would have already have had the benefit of a couple of minutes of explanation. And I might say, “I need another minute or two to check something.”

But this was “Tell us what you have got because if you don’t, Pete Williams from NBC is going to pop up next to you in 15 seconds, and CBS is over there.” (I grant you only television executives sit with five TV sets in front of them. Most people do not do that at home to see if Pete is faster than I am.)  

The adrenaline is such and the import, the moment is such that you want to say, “Here is what it is. Here is what it means,” and then we work our way through it —I and our legal analysts and our anchors and whomever else happened to be on the air at that time.

Now, in hindsight, I have gone back and looked at that stretch, which lasted from a few minutes after 10 until about 12:30 in the morning when we were on continuously from the court. And, I think we did all right. There are places where you say, “I wish I hadn’t said that quite that way.” But factually it was intact.

The court did us no great favors in handing it out in the fashion that they did and did the country no particular favor by not giving us a little more guidance.

One thing in particular that I found was a reference to “seven of us have found that the Florida’s action was unconstitutional in not providing the equal protection of treating all ballots the same.” And then there were little parentheses that referred to Justice Souter and Justice Breyer who were in fact, not signed on to the court’s opinion. It was a 5-4 opinion. The seven was reached by adding in Souter and Breyer who agreed with the flaw but disagreed with the remedy. Their remedy would have been to give them (the Florida Supreme Court) one more chance to try and sort it out.

My own feeling about the result is that would have been a better solution to have said, “We don’t think you can do it. We don’t think you’ll meet the test of time and the barrier of a deadline, but as Justices Souter and Bryer point out, what is the harm in trying?”

If you had had a 7-2 opinion you would have immediately eliminated the notion that this was a hard-line, conservative liberal split. And it looked like Scalia and Thomas and Rehnquist engineering the election of George W. Bush — which it was not. But nonetheless, it had that appearance, and for those who wanted to take a political position on it, it was easy to say that that is what had happened there.

Berens: Besides the lack of accessibility that you have with the justices, what is the biggest challenge to covering the court and to reporting on the court?

Bierbauer: The biggest challenge is the knowledge. It is the comprehension of the law, which is not an easy thing in the first place. One day you are dealing with tax law and another day you are dealing with international piracy, and another day you may be dealing with abortion rights and so on through the vast spectrum of the law.

Most lawyers practice a specialized form of the law. Supreme Court reporters and court reporters in any sense have to be generalists. So you really have a steep learning curve. I am not a lawyer by training. I have really no more experience prior to taking on this assignment than most people do in terms of the law. You get a speeding ticket perhaps, or you have got a will to deal with or a mortgage or in some cases you may have had a divorce or an adoption. So that is how people encounter lawyers. They are not dealing with the elaborate appellate process that we are dealing with at the Supreme Court.

Now, the benefit of an appellate process is there is a track record. This issue has been before a lower court and an appeals court. And that is where you start. You start reading the briefs as presented to the court. You read the opinions in the courts below, and you talk to a lot of lawyers and law professors. And so I think the learning curve is steep, and the research is at times daunting. There have been cases where the paperwork will pile up at least that high. Bush v. Gore was about a foot of papers when you added all the briefs together.

Alloway: What kind of challenge is it to try to wade your way through all these issues in the limited window in which you normally have to operate?

Bierbauer: Well, I am at times envious of Linda Greenhouse of the New York Times who has been covering the courts for 20 years and has a Pulitzer Prize to show for it and has 20 or 30 column inches to explain the intricacies — and I’ve got two minutes. But that’s also what I’d have to explain World War II.

So that is what I have learned how to do for 30 years, I guess, in the broadcasting business: to compact and extract the essential elements and put them into understandable terms. It is at times daunting, but I don’t feel that it is an insurmountable matter.

One of the tougher matters in dealing with these court cases is illustrating them for television. It is much easier, I would suggest, to do a newspaper piece. Because, you have the facts. You can report the facts. You know what those are. You get the quotes.

But in television terms a case may come before the Supreme Court where — for example — there was one several years ago where a policeman stopped a driver on a highway in Iowa for having a broken tail light. And the incident happened nine or 10 years earlier because it takes a long time for some of these cases to work their way through the courts. And in the process of this seemingly routine highway stop, police opened the trunk of the car and found drugs. And so you wind up with a constitutional challenge to the Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure. And did the highway patrolman have any reasonable suspicion in stopping a car with a broken tail light.

Now how do I explain that? Or, how do I visualize that? Nobody was hanging around with a video camera at that particular time. This is an important issue. People need to know what their rights are. So we are challenged at times to make these things visual and also clear and apparent to our viewers. That is probably what I have found to be the hard part in putting a court piece on television.

Alloway: You mentioned the cameras in the courtroom. Larry Walklin from our faculty has been real involved with the Nebraska court system to try to get more ongoing live coverage of court cases. I know that there was a big push for the Bush-Gore case to try to allow some of that deliberation to be carried live. What do you think the prospects are of more of that happening down the road, the justices becoming more agreeable?

Bierbauer: The only thing I am allowed to take into the court is a notepad and a pen. And if I happen to forget and have my cell phone in my pocket when I walk through the electronic metal detectors, it will set that off. No tape recording. The general public is not even allowed to take notes in the court. Only the press is allowed to do that.

I suppose the irony of that is that it renders the court’s proceedings subject to the flaws of my ability to hear well and to put all those things I hear down on paper. I don’t have an instant record.

Now there is a transcript that is available in the most exigent circumstances later in the day, but I don’t have time to wait six hours for a rushed transcript — for which I would have to pay $5 a page or something like that.

I don’t think the chances of broad access to the court are very good. I think we may find very limited circumstances in the wake of Bush-Gore where the court released an audio tape almost immediately.

We raised the question in a death penalty case a couple of months ago. We were told, “Well, we don’t have time to consider (the request for a tape).” It was on fairly short notice, so we are going to keep periodically saying we think this case is important enough that you ought to release an audio tape.

But the justices themselves are generally opposed to cameras. Chief Justice Rehnquist does not want cameras. And I think it would take a new chief justice who is amenable to the idea in the first place to even start the ball rolling. And then, they have operated on the basis of sort of unanimous consent. And it seems as long as any one justice says, “I want no cameras here,” there won’t be cameras. That means Justice Souter who has famously said “over my dead body” is going to be resistant and perhaps even more resistant as a result of having opened the door even a slight crack.

I did run into the chief justice the day after the tapes were released on the Bush-Gore argument. And (I) said, “Well, what do you think? Will we get more of these?”

It was kind of amusing because the chief had wandered down to thank the court’s press officer for handling the things the day before. And we never see him wandering around in our turf. And he said he was quite surprised how favorably received the tapes were and how much public interest and enthusiasm there was for hearing those tapes. So perhaps they will consider it — not on everything but on a case-by-case basis. So the seed is planted, but this is going to be a slow germination.

Berens: Do you have any idea how the court feels about the coverage it received? Do the justices think that the court should be left alone by the media?

Bierbauer: Well, I think they are realistic enough to understand that they can’t hand these things down in a vacuum. Now Lyle Denniston who has covered the courts for more than 40 years and is one of your distinguished alums here will describe what it was like long before I ever got there — how they would put the opinions in little pneumatic tubes like they used to have in department stores and would send them down to the press room below. So technology has advanced to some degree, albeit, at a glacial pace. The justices understand that they have a public responsibility.

They do tend to feel that if they start discussing a case after they have ruled on it, that is tantamount to reopening the case. And they can’t do that. Justice Scalia has said, “What we put on paper is the final word. If we start doing interviews and start doing news conferences, we are debating it once again. And then it is no longer final.”

And I respect that. I think that is not necessarily an inconsequential point.

We would certainly like to have better access to the court itself and to the proceedings. I find it fascinating if you can sit there for an hour and listen to an entire case debated. … It fits neatly into a one-hour television time frame. I would love to see C-SPAN able to cover it, and from my own personal perspective, while I would like to have access that tape, I can understand the argument that says, “You will chop us up into six-second sound bites,” which would of course make Justice Scalia all the more vulnerable because he is the one who tends to engage in six-second quips and comments. And so I think the greater benefit would be to allow C-SPAN to come in an broadcast it and let the public see what is going on there.

Alloway: That doesn’t seem out of context with the rest of the way government is supposed to be handled in our country when the public is involved.

Bierbauer: I thought that the fact that Florida has a sunshine law was the most beneficial aspect of the whole post-election coverage and process because it allowed the public to see what was going on. And you better understood the process by watching these guys looking for dimpled chads and holding things up to the light of truth, one hopes, and understanding what they were going through and why this was a difficult process because these ballots were not uniformly marked and punched and to see the debate that took place in the boards of election commissioners. All of that, right on up through the Florida Supreme Court, completely available to the public across the country and, in fact, around the world.

I thought it was revelatory in our ability to understand the process and see what its flaws were and see what needed to be changed. And you say, “Why can’t the federal process be as equally visible under the circumstances?”

Now the justices will say, “Well, we don’t want posturing and people playing to the camera.”

But Larry Tribe, the Harvard law professor who argued on behalf of Vice President Gore in the first case said: “Look, any lawyer with half a wit knows that there are only nine people in the courtroom who are important. And if you are playing to the camera, you are not doing your client much of a service.”

Alloway: Since you have mentioned Florida again, how do you feel about the recount that the Miami Herald and New York Times just completed? Do you think that was a good idea?

Bierbauer: I don’t think it was a bad idea because the result was so uncertain that conducting a recount would be beneficial in understanding how the system might be fixed. Also, because as the results of this study have shown, the result is still somewhat inconclusive.

Depending on what criteria you set, you can come up with a circumstance where Al Gore wins by 3 votes, George W. Bush wins by 300 or 800 or 1,200. .… It just shows you that there is some need for uniformity here so that no one’s vote is discarded without being counted unless it is a vote that genuinely deserved to be discarded because it was invalidated. So I think it was beneficial almost because it didn’t come to the point of saying, “Ah, ha! The election came out wrong.”

Alloway: What should we have learned about covering elections by what some have called the fiasco of network coverage the night of the election?

Bierbauer: What the networks learned universally and each one individually in assessing its performance was that the pressure of competition should not be the driving factor in reporting. It is one of those old J school maxims that second and right is better than first and wrong.

It says that the flaw was shared because as a result of a budget consideration the networks established this exit polling consortium to provide them all with the same raw data — which then each network assessed in its own way but for the most part came to the same conclusion because the output was based on similar input.

So as a result, each network said: “We’re going to put some gates in here. We will re-examine what we want to do with the voter news service as our polling and data base. We will probably seek to establish some independent sources of our own, and we will certainly create a much more rigid, thorough process of vetting the data before we make our own conclusions.”

I think it is important also to note that the pressure was far greater on the television networks. And, again, it is this syndrome of the network executives sitting there with this bank of television screens and suddenly seeing Dan Rather saying, “CBS declares Florida for Gore,” and looking around saying “What is NBC doing? What is ABC doing? What are we doing?”

Or the similar hazard of saying, “CNN declares Florida for Bush” and seeing no one else follow suit. Are we out in front, or are we wrong?

There is just this paranoia that runs through executive suites. It is probably a good thing in the sense that it should make them more cautious. It is a bad thing because often they don’t trust their own judgment.

There was one other point I wanted to make, and that was with great credit to the Associated Press for never having called Florida that night. I have read accounts of this, and I know the people involved. Lou Boccardi, who is the head the Associated Press in New York, was calling down to his bureau chief Sandy Johnson in Washington saying, Why haven’t we called Florida?”

And Sandy was saying, “Lou, we can’t call Florida. We don’t think it’s definitive.”

She was right and had the courage to say so even though every network was going blink, blink blink: Florida this way, Florida that way. So there were some stalwarts who were willing to resist the pressure.

Berens: You have worked in print, radio, television …

Bierbauer: And Internet — which is print with no smudges. But go ahead.

Berens: What have you learned from the various media that you have worked in that has helped you be successful where you are right now?

Bierbauer: Well, I like to tell my journalism students — I am teaching a course in media and government for Penn State’s Washington program — that there is no difference in your journalistic skills whether you are reporting for print or television or radio. You are telling a story.

The mechanics are certainly different, but you still have to be curious, inquisitive, tenacious, dubious, skeptical, preferably not cynical. You have to understand complexities. You have to be able to work the phones and call your sources. And it doesn’t make any difference what medium you are working.

Stylistically, you are going to change the form in which you write when it is in print as distinct from television. In television you have all these logistical encumbrances. Do we have the tape? Can we find the tape? Did it come in on the satellite? Was the audio good? Was the video green? And there are lots of those things that get in the way of telling the story. The camera man was changing tapes when the president said, “We are bombing in five minutes.” You tear your hair out.

Well, the print journalist doesn’t have that problem.

I spent many years in radio, including when I was in college. I was the weekend newsman on a small station in Allentown, Pa., when John F. Kennedy was shot. I was dealing at a very young age with real news in radio, and radio still had news teams and news departments, as very few radio stations do any more. I think that is regrettable because … I can get on a cell phone these days and do radio. I need some technology on the other end to get it out, but it is a very simple and in many ways a very elegant process. It is also tough to boil it down to 30 seconds –– which is what radio is sometimes demanding.

One of the things that I am really pleased with is that the Internet has allowed me to get back to writing in the way I started. That is to say, print writing. It is print. And I don’t have to worry about the sound bites. And I enjoy writing a column for CNN’s Law Page, which you can find at cnn.com/law. Just being able to write in a rather free-flowing and uninhibited and only marginally edited style.

So writing is the essence of all that we do. I tell my students that when they stand in front of a camera and talk to that camera, they are not doing anything dramatically different in terms of organizing their thoughts than they might do if they were writing it. I am just composing it and speaking it rather than typing it. And so if you don’t have the writing skills, you are going to be deficient as a journalist.

Alloway: One of the things we are working toward in our move to our new building next year is a converged newsroom where the print and broadcast folks will work side by side and be interchangeable in their places at some points.

We are encountering colleagues in the media who have expressed some great skepticism after their years of working in a particular medium. But we don’t feel that 21- and 22-year-olds have any of those same biases about being separate.

Bierbauer: Oh, no inhibitions at all. The detriment might be that they all want to be on television first without necessarily acquiring all the other skills that may go along with that.

I have always felt that journalism is all-encompassing. I once said that to a board of professors that included a film professor, who took great umbrage at being called a journalist. It seemed to me that in making a film you are telling and selling a story. And, I don’t see a small “j” distinction in that sense. …

I don’t like the notion of splitting print and broadcast apart at too early a stage, if at all. I think there is precisely the reasoning for that in what you are describing: the all-in-one newsroom, the universal newsroom. And the fact that every time, much of the time, we look up at the television, and there is a print reporter explaining his or her perspective on the story. We go to print reporters a lot.

The New York Times, which once scoffed at the notion of putting its reporters on these television talk shows now pays them a bonus when they get on the air — as do a lot of print operations. I think that young students should learn all aspects of this and should think of themselves much more as universal journalists in the first case. It is a very different kind of profession than it once was where you tended to stay within your medium. It is very different from most other practices.

My daughter graduated with a degree in accounting and was hired by an accounting firm, which every year came to Penn State and hired 40 young accountants and is still doing so. A very logical track.

Well, CNN doesn’t recruit on campuses, doesn’t hire 30 new journalists every June because it doesn’t know whether it is going to need them. And that is the point. That’s this fork in the road notion. I have come to lots of forks in the road, and they have taken me from print to radio to television to print. And you weave back and forth. So I am all in favor of nondifferentiation at an early stage.

I should probably add that when I graduated from Penn State many years ago I was told, “Gee you have enough credits to get your degree in broadcasting” because I had taken a number of broadcasting courses. “Or you can get it in journalism.”

I said “Why would I want a degree in broadcasting? Give me a degree in journalism,” which to my thinking encompassed all of that. That might be heretical now, but I still feel that way.