Here are some of the excerpts from Howard Kurtz‘s new book Reality Show: Inside the Last Great Television News Race.
• Drudgereport.com: Dan Rather and Josh Howard discussing the Bush-National Guard story that is now the subject of Rather’s lawsuit against CBS & Viacom:
The night before the story was tentatively scheduled to air, Rather was sitting at the anchor desk, with less than half an hour before the start of the Evening News. He called Josh Howard, who had recently been named as executive producer of 60 Minutes Wednesday, and asked what they were doing to promote his story.
“We’re not,” Howard said. “We haven’t gotten the lawyers to sign off. The script isn’t finished. We haven’t even talked to the White House. I’m not going to start promoting a story when we don’t know what we have.” That was not the answer Rather wanted to hear.
“Other people are chasing this story,” he said. “We’re going to lose our exclusive. We have to get our hooks into the story.”
When Howard again refused, Rather raised the stakes.
“I’m going to give one of the documents to The New York Times to run in Wednesday’s paper,” he said. “They’ll have to credit CBS News. That way we can put our stamp on it.”
“You can’t do that either,” Howard said. “We haven’t finished vetting this.” Rather grumbled and hung up.Advertisement
• The Washington Post: On anchors reporting from Iraq, as the security situation began to improve:
Charlie Gibson had not been to Iraq in three years and felt that he should go back, to get a better feel for the situation. Some generals had invited him to make the trip and promised that the military would keep him safe. He brought it up at a lunch with ABC News President David Westin..
“Not on my life are you going,” Westin said. “Not with my track record.” After what happened to [Bob] Woodruff, Westin felt that he couldn’t take the risk of losing another anchor.
• Editor & Publisher: Katie Couric, then still at NBC, receives an email from NBC CEO Bob Wright about a viewer’s concern that Couric was too confrontational with Condoleezza Rice during an interview on the Today show:
What was the message here? Couric felt that Wright must be telling her to back off. She wrote him a note, saying that she tried to be persistent and elicit good answers in all her interviews, regardless of the political views of her guests. If Wright had a problem with that, she would like to discuss it with him personally. Wright wrote back that such protest letters usually came in batches, but that he had passed along this one because it seemed different.
Couric felt there was a subtle, insidious pressure to toe the party line, and you bucked that at your peril. She wanted to believe that her NBC colleagues were partners in the search for truth, and no longer felt that was the case. She knew that the corporate management viewed her as an out-and-out liberal. When she ran into Jack Welch, the General Electric chairman, he would sometimes say that they had never seen eye to eye politically. If you weren’t rah rah rah for the Bush administration, and the war, you were considered unpatriotic, even treasonous.