Woodruff Lauds Recent TV News

The media has successfully risen to the challenge of covering global affairs since the terrorist attacks on the United States, CNN broadcast journalist Judy Woodruff told about three hundred attendees last night in the annual Theodore H. White Lecture on Press and Politics at the ARCO Forum.

Woodruff, 54, is prime anchor and senior correspondent at CNN, where she has worked since 1993.

Her speech, “The Worst of Times and the Best of Times: Television News from O.J. to Osama,” addressed the state of the media over the past few years and described the transformation of television journalism since Sept. 11.

“If the last 50 days have marked some of our finest hours, the period before [Sept. 11]...was under withering criticism,” Woodruff said, citing the coverage of the Monica Lewinsky scandal and the O.J. Simpson trial.

“In a total hard news environment, [like the current one], we’ve been aggressive and creative,” she said. “We made mistakes...in the first few days.... We re-ran that video of the airplane slamming into the Trade Center more than we should have.”

Modern journalism is “primarily crisis-driven,” because of the 24-hour news cycle of cable networks, she said.

However, she said that many national networks were under equipped to cover events of this magnitude in Arab nations.

“The major networks...are almost invisible in the Islamic world,” she said.

Woodruff said she was concerned at the U.S. government’s desire to limit access to information concerning the current military actions.

She referred to the war in Vietnam, where “the government was too selective with the facts, [and] ultimately the formulators of that policy paid an enormous price.”

“This is not about the convenience of journalists or ‘scoops,’ it is about trust and credibility,” she said.

Woodruff blamed the overall state of political journalism in part on the blurring of the line between pundits and journalists as well as attention to the “bottom line” by network executives.

In the past decade, national networks have cut two thirds of their stories with an international focus, she said.

Woodruff expressed optimism, however, that the media could learn lasting lessons from their coverage post-Sept. 11.

“For all that our country suffered...perhaps one of the good things that will come out of the dark days will be a renewal” in broadcast journalism, she said.

The Theodore H. White Lecture is sponsored by the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government.

The yearly lecture commemorates the late reporter and historian Theodore H. White ’34, who covered East Asia in World War II for Time Magazine and wrote a book on presidential campaigns and the political process, The Making of the President 1960.

Woodruff, who has been in broadcast journalism since joining an Atlanta CBS affiliate in 1970, primarily covers national politics.

She was the dominant CNN anchor on the day of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, remaining on air continuously until 6:30 p.m. that evening.

She recalls being “speechless [on air]... normally...the cardinal sin in television” but in this case “the only appropriate thing to do.”

Woodruff won a News and Documentary Emmy award in 1997 for her coverage of the Atlanta Olympic bombing.

Her nightly show on CNN, Inside Politics, was the first national program devoted exclusively to politics.

Before joining CNN, she worked for The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour as a Washington correspondent, and anchored the public television documentary series Frontline.

A graduate of Duke University, Woodruff serves on the boards of several journalism organizations, and is a member of the Visiting Committee of the Kennedy School.

She is married to Al Hunt, a television pundit and executive Washington editor of the Wall Street Journal, who was also present for the speech.