CRAWFORD GRIFFIN - Never Stay Silent

William S. Paley When people talk about the giants of American journalism, the names that come up are usually reporters like Murrow, Cronkite, Woodward, and Bernstein. But the structures those reporters worked inside didn't just appear. Someone built them, and in the case of broadcast news in the United States, that someone was William S. Paley. Paley wasn't a journalist. He was a 26-year-old cigar heir from Chicago when his family bought into a struggling radio outfit called the Columbia Phonographic Broadcasting System in 1927. By the next year, he was its president, and by 1929 he had dropped "Phonographic" from the name and turned what was left, the Columbia Broadcasting System , into a network of 49 stations. He would run CBS in one capacity or another for the next sixty years. The Paley family cigar business What made Paley historically significant for journalism wasn't just his longevity, it was his structural approach. Before Paley, the network-affiliate r...

Rob Reiner's Shock and Awe is easy to file away as another Iraq War prestige drama, but watching it through a journalism lens turns it into a lesson we've seem to forgotten. The film tracks the small Knight Ridder Washington bureau, John Walcott, Jonathan Landay, Warren Strobel, and Joe Galloway, as they spend 2002 and 2003 reporting against the grain of every major paper in the country on the que stion of whether Iraq actually had weapons of mass destruction. The four of them turned out to be right. Almost everyone else turned out to be wrong.  Government Influence on the Press A government preparing for war has to win the story. It needs public consent, congressional authorization, and allies abroad, and all of those depend on the version of events it's selling. The press' job is to push back on that story, to test the claims, demand the evidence, and report it loudly when the two don't line up. Those goals don't coexist.  Dick Cheney on Meet the Press What Sh...