Face the Nation

After striking out with the last audiobook I chose, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, I still needed something to listen to while doing some tedious chores.  From the limited selected at the Covina Library I picked Face the Nation by Bob Schieffer because I figured a book about the news couldn’t be too boring or strange.  The book is subtitled “My Favorite Stories from the First 50 Years of the Award-Winning News Broadcast.”  I knew of Bob Schieffer as the anchor of the CBS Evening News between Dan Rather and Katie Couric.  He also moderated the last of the three debates between the presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain.  I learned from the book that he also hosts the Sunday morning interview show on CBS called “Face the Nation” where he interviews key players from the biggest news stories of the week.  The name of the show sounded familiar.  Its main competitor is “Meet the Press” on NBC that I had heard of.  The book is about the most interesting stories and behind-the-scenes occurrences during the first 50 years of “Face the Nation” that was first broadcast in 1954.

The book provides an excellent history of television news from the 1950’s to the present.  Much has changed and not just the technological advances in communications.  The players have also had to work out issues of where television news crews were allowed to bring their cameras and whether the people being interviewed could get their questions in advance.  Airways are regulated by the government and they had to work out how much control they had over the news going over them.  These were issues that did not surface in print journalism, the primary news media prior to television.  Later in the book, Schieffer also gives an interesting discussion of how the news from different sources has become more specialized.  An example is Fox News being more popular with conservatives.  As news programs target specific audiences rather than one general audience, it’s questionable whether anyone gets an accurate picture of what’s going on.

Most of the chapters summarize various news stories and the corresponding interviews on “Face the Nation.”  Some stories such as the interview with Fidel Castro are interesting while others such as the Monica Lewinsky affair are rather dry.  Schieffer does try to describe aspects or parts of the stories that weren’t necessarily the focus when the events were originally covered.  He writes each chapter as if he’s doing a newscast.  He starts with a catchy summary and then goes into detail.  He offers his opinion on events and even suggests ways that the news coverage affected the course of events.  A promising presidential candidate appeared on “Face the Nation” and didn’t do well.  He soon dropped out of the race.  Schieffer believes another interview around the time of the Pentagon Papers may have affected the events of the Watergate scandal.  Some of these theories seem farfetched though they’re still interesting to consider.  I found the chapter on the coverage of the Iraq War interesting because it described how close reporters were to the action, and how, for the first time, they had real time or nearly real time reports.  The military agreed to allow the coverage in order to counteract the propaganda reports from Iraq’s state-controlled media.

The last chapters consist of some of Schieffer’s commentaries that he has given at the end of “Face the Nation” broadcasts and his thought process in writing them.  He describes how it is difficult to keep the commentaries short, how a famous speaker once said, “I didn’t have time to prepare a short speech so I’m giving a long one.”  I can relate to that.  He also mentions some of the behind-the-scenes people: the producers and the researchers and their roles in the broadcasts.  One producer was held at gunpoint during the interview with Fidel Castro.  Schieffer describes how he gets a lot of mail and e-mail from viewers both positive and negative.  He makes an interesting point that since the advent of e-mail he has received more scathing negative messages.  His theory is that when people wrote snail-mail letters that had a little bit of time to rethink them before sending them but with e-mail, they just hit “send”.

The book is an extended plug for “Face the Nation” and maybe I’ll check it out sometime when I’m not busy on a Sunday morning.  Schieffer writes it and reads it as his side of the story but doesn’t assert that he’s always right.  He just seeks to provoke thought and discussion.  The move from print to TV as the primary news source has caused people to be overloaded with lots of shallow information without giving it much thought or exploring it in depth.  “Face the Nation” seeks to put the thought and depth back into the news.