Halberstam Laments Lowering of News Standards

The quality of network news coverage is in steady decline, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Halberstam ’55 told audience members in a Monday evening interview at at the Kennedy School of Government’s ARCO Forum.

Halberstam, who is a former Crimson managing editor, said that a push to provide more entertaining programming has decreased the scope and depth of network news reporting.

“The power of print has gone down... [and] the people who run giant [television] corporations don’t care about the news,” he said.

Citing the dramatic increase in cable TV programming, Halberstam said that the growing number of stations has changed the dynamic of the market—and with it, networks’ attitudes toward delivering news content.

“When there were the three networks, they tried to make their shows like a mini New York Times—they cared about respect,” he said.

Halberstam said that the driving force harming national media networks’ news coverage is the increased pressure of television ratings. As a result of the expanding pool of competitors, networks have struggled to create mass appeal for their news programming.

He said that such pressure has forced news executives to compromise their standards, damaging coverage decisions.

“A great editor is someone who balances what the people need to know with what they want to know,” Halberstam said. “If you gave a child what they wanted at dinner, that wouldn’t make them a healthy person.”

Interviewer Callie Crossley, producer of “Eyes on the Prize” and formerly ABC’s “20/20,” used the media’s decline as a backdrop against which to discuss Halberstam’s newest book, Firehouse.

The work examines the lives of the 13 men on duty at the New York Fire Department’s Engine 40 and Ladder 35 on Sept. 11, 2001, 12 of whom lost their lives during the World Trade Center attacks.

Halberstam said his motivation for the book came from “the reward of discovering nobility in ordinary people.”

“It’s a reminder to people like me in the media that there are people who go out there every day...that are vitally important to society,” Halberstam said. “[The media is] rewarding things that don’t matter too heavily.”

In the author’s notes section of Firehouse, Halberstam writes that he felt it his journalistic duty to write the book, given his close ties to the incident.

“I’m a New Yorker,” Halberstam says, “When I was young, I went 12,000 miles [to Vietnam] to find danger...and years later it happened four miles from my house.”

—Staff writer David S. Hirsch can be reached at hirsch@fas.harvard.edu.