The Kalb Report: A conversation with Dan Rather...Today I went to the National Press Club with a couple of my GW MBA classmates to watch a taping of the Kalb Report for C-SPAN. Marvin Kalb was interviewing Dan Rather on a variety of topics but mostly focused in on the theme of journalism (more specifically what is journalism?) and how journalism has changed over the past several years. I guess it makes sense that they were speaking about journalism because we were at the National Press Club. An historic club on the corner of 14th and F Street, just a block or so east of the White House. The event was also sponsored by GWU and the Harvard University Center for Press, Politics and Public Policy which I believe is part of the Kennedy School of Government. For the past month I had seen posters around the GW campus advertising the Dan Rather interview and knew that it would an interesting event. It was a good change up from the many MBA events I had been attending lately. Back to the topic of journalism... After a couple minutes of Rather and Kalb defining journalism, reporters, and the media; the next question surprised me a bit. Were bloggers considered journalists? This question actually took up most of the interview or at least was referred back to many times. Rather actually knew before most of the audience why this question was asked by Kalb. It turns out that a blogger was the source of the orginal attack of Dan Rather's Texas Air National Guard story about George Bush. I didn't know this before the interview and I doubt many in the audience knew this either. So are bloggers journalists? I believe it was said, and I'm just parapharsing here: if the blogger was accountable for what he/she wrote, attached their name to it and were factually correct, than the blog could possibly be seen as a new form of journalism. But the highlight of the interview was the following:

Rather: an independent panel, it was appointed, headed by a longtime Republican, a man who.......Thornburgh, who was a former Attorney General of the United States, and a distinguished American. But a good friend of the Bush family headed this independent panel. And the independent panel concluded...what did they conclude? One, that what we did, whatever anybody thought about it, was not borne of political bias. Number two, that with three to four months, and many millions of dollars to spend on trying to determine, they could not, and did not determine whether the documents in question were what they were purported to be or not. And the third thing that was said by the panel was that the major, the main reason that a panel had to be appointed, and what they were most critical about, is how we defended the story after the story had run. And I'm paraphrasing here, but I think it's an accurate paraphrase. I want it to be said in my own case, that my principal...I don't want to say crime. My principal problem was that I stuck by the story. I stuck by our people for too long. I'm guilty of that. I believed in the story. The facts of the story were correct. One supporting pillar of the story, albeit an important one. But one supporting pillar was brought into question. To this day, no one has proven whether it was what it was purported to be or not. But at times it was that he stuck by the story. I stuck by the story because I believed in it. He stuck with his people. Listen, I've made nearly every mistake in the book. But my attitude when we go into stories, is we go into them together, we ride through whatever happens, and we come out the other end together. And I didn't give up on my people, our people. I didn't, and I won't.

Kalb: You said, I believe you just said, that you think the story is accurate.

Rather: Well, the story is accurate.

This was the serious side of Dan Rather. But the funnier side occured when Kalb spoke of "the end of an era" in evening news, with Tom Brokaw's retirement as well as Dan Rather's and now the passing of Peter Jennings.

Rather: Listen, three guys who read the news, is not all that important, now in what ever we did...

Kalb: 30 million people watched the three guys who read the news.

Rather: Now, but you know, 50 million watch nymphomaniac housewives on Sunday nights!

An article about tonight's interview can be found here at The GW Hatchet

Here is a photo of two of my GW MBA friends (Evan and Tetsuro), Dan Rather and I at the National Press Club in Washington DC.