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Watching the new DVD release of All the President's Men the other night, Brooke came upon a bombshell, buried in one of the DVD's commentary tracks. It concerns the unlikely genesis of what has become the prevailing symbol of all that is fine in American journalism.
The past year has been a tumultuous one for administrators of public broadcasting, and programmers have had to fend off accusations of political bias. Into the embers of the skirmish steps Paula Kerger, who's just been chosen as the new president and CEO of the Public Broadcasting Service. Bob speaks with Kerger about the challenges ahead.
At the start of the 2004 Campaign, John Kerry’s military experience was a political asset. Then came the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, whose smears against the candidate’s military record were picked up and reported uncritically by the media. Last week, there was another attempt at swift-boating, as the GOP-connected Cybercast News Service ran a story poking holes in Congressman John Murtha’s military career. This time, Brooke says, the press didn’t take the bait.
If you were watching a lot of TV this week, you might have caught the debut of a new Absolut ad. In itself, the spot is hardly revolutionary. What was revolutionary was the accompanying announcement that after 25 years and some 1,500 print ads, Absolut is moving away from the bottle-focused spots that made it both a popular vodka and a cultural icon. Longtime Absolut ad exec Richard Lewis talks with Rick about the end of the campaign.
$1.13 trillion. That's the net worth of America's 400 richest people, according to the magazine's 2005 tally. But is the Forbes 400 to be trusted? Brooke talks to New York Times business reporter Timothy O'Brien about the list's shaky underpinnings, and about the obsession it constitutes for one of its recurring members - Donald Trump.
Bob reflects on the difficulty of covering the mining tragedy in West Virginia, where a convergence of official misinformation, tight deadlines, and desperation for good news led to incorrect reports that 12 of the 13 miners were alive.
In the last days of 2005 the Justice Department announced it was launching an investigation into who leaked that the President had authorized the National Security Agency to wiretap people in the United States without court warrants. Whether the source was a leaker or a whistleblower, a traitor or a patriot, is unknown. What the future holds for the story's lead author, the New York Times' James Risen, is unknown too. University of Chicago Law Professor Geoffrey Stone joins Brooke to discuss the possibilities.
Leaks, part and parcel of the Fourth Estate, were and are a tremendous irritant to the Bush Administration. Back in the early days of the War on Terror, Bob produced this piece on the pros, cons and mechanisms of the ever-present, and indispensable, Washington leak.
