"There is nothing wrong with making money off of the news," says Tom Fenton, former senior foreign news correspondent for CBS. "I wouldn't have had a career without that. But somewhere, in the rush for profit, the job itself of the media was forgotten. It is extraordinarily difficult to get past the gatekeepers a story that goes against the grain, a story that tells us something that we don't want to hear. My classic example, of course, is Osama bin Laden."

In December 1996, Fenton and a CBS producer arranged an interview with then little-known Islamic terrorist Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. The 60 Minutes television team wasn't keen on the idea or willing to fund it and neither was the CBS foreign news editor.

"Our bosses saw him as an obscure Arab of no interest to our viewers," Fenton wrote in his book Bad News, published in March 2005. "More concerned with saving dollars than pursuing the story, they killed the project." But Fenton persisted, and in early 1997 succeeded in accessing material via a London-based Arab journalist who had just interviewed bin Laden. The journalist reported bin Laden's hatred of America and his violent intentions toward it. Fenton forwarded the interview to CBS, only to be told there were "too many foreign names" in the story. Subsequently, the first televised interviews of Osama bin Laden by American journalists were conducted by Peter Arnett of CNN in March 1997 and by John Miller of ABC in May 1998.
   
"Do you still feel furious when you think about that?" I ask.
   
Fenton raises one silver eyebrow. "That is one of the things I will never forget till my dying day."
 
On a crisp November afternoon in 2005, I walk to Tom Fenton's London home through the genteel neighborhood where Chelsea blends with Knightsbridge. In my bag, I carry a newspaper with dour headlines in its folds: the French declare a state of emergency following twelve days of riots; Saddam Hussein's trial lawyer shot dead; the United States government refuses to confirm or deny claims by the Washington Post that the CIA has secret prisons abroad.
   
In his first-floor apartment, Fenton helps me remove my coat. He looks trim and groomed in a double-breasted suit, crisp shirt, expertly knotted tie, and polished shoes. He directs me into a large drawing room-cum-study, before disappearing into a galley kitchen with the remark that he will bring tea.
   
Fenton was born in Baltimore in 1930. After graduating from Dartmouth College, he served nine years in the United States Navy, witnessing Castro's arrival in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba in 1953. He began his career in journalism at the Baltimore Sun as a domestic then foreign correspondent. In 1970 he joined CBS to conduct the first interview with American hostages following the PLO hijacking. Over the next thirty-four years he reported on international conflicts from CBS bureaus in London, Moscow, Paris, Tel Aviv, and Rome, and from the field, including the India-Pakistan War (1971), the Arab-Israeli War of 1973, and the Cyprus War (1974). He conducted the first interview with Ayatollah Khomeini following the overthrow of the Shah of Iran in 1979. Along with reporting from the first Gulf War (1991), he also monitored the former Yugoslavia's descent into chaos and genocide in Central Africa. He is the recipient of eight Overseas Press Club Awards and four Emmys.

"The problem is not fairness and balance," he replies, to my first question about the challenges of reporting the news. "People talk about fairness and balance all the time. The problem is thinness. It's the lack of news. That's where you get bias."
   
In retrospect, he explains, the mainstream media failed the American public by not providing enough context and depth prior to the war in Iraq, by not analyzing if it was possible, or even logical, to "use an army as a blunt instrument to promote democracy in the Middle East." The media are not responsible for America entering the war, but he contends "our job is to see things that are coming down the road and to alert the public, and then, as a corollary, we have a responsibility to make sure that the people who are supposed to be protecting us are doing their job, keep their feet to the fire. The problem is that we work on the wrong side of the filter. The filter is the executive producers, the editors—the people who decide what gets on the air, and what doesn't get on the air."
   
Context and depth can be found in the media, he admits, provided you are willing to spend time on the Internet or read some of the more obscure journals. The communications revolution has changed the delivering of mainstream news but not necessarily the gathering of it, with the exception of blogs and citizen-journalists clutching cell-phone cameras and BlackBerries. He believes Americans know they are under-informed. "But most people still get their news from television. God help them."
   
Fenton's book, Bad News, was published following his retirement in December 2004 from CBS. In it, he lambastes both the Clinton and Bush administrations for what he perceives as the dire state of American foreign policy and takes all of the media severely to task (including CBS) for what he believes is the deteriorating quality of foreign news coverage. He saves his most pointed barbs for Fox's use of what he calls "parachute journalism"—such as when Geraldo Rivera, accompanied by foxy correspondettes, reported from the battlefields of the Afghan War, and for the blinkered tabloidism of many local and national television stations, which still advocate a news policy based on "if it bleeds, it leads."
   
"I could not have published the book while I was working at CBS," Fenton acknowledges. "Although the media take it upon themselves to criticize all and sundry, they are very thin-skinned when it comes to criticizing their own work. And I've become a media critic. I've become an advocate for something. And I come from the old school of journalism where you at least give the appearance of neutrality and try not to take sides. But I feel very strongly about the direction in which the American media have been going, especially in the last fifteen years since the end of the Cold War."
     
He interviewed television colleagues for his book, including Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, and Peter Jennings. Some of them proved cagey interviewees, as they were, at that time, still working for major news networks. Overall, he says, the reaction to his book has been "uniformly positive." Walter Cronkite, former CBS news anchor from 1962 to 1981, proved Fenton's staunchest ally. "It is not the journalist's role to educate," Cronkite said. "It is, however, our role to inform in such a way that the educators can have the raw material to teach." Without an educated populace, Fenton contends, the news service is a service without an end user. Cronkite admitted he no longer watched the CBS Evening News. "There's nothing there," he told Fenton. "Nothing but crime and sob sister material."
   
I mention a book, The Elements of Journalism, whose authors Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel assert that journalists work for the citizens of their country, and I ask Fenton if he agrees with their assertion.
   
"Just as firemen or doctors do," Fenton says. "You are performing a public service. Also, they should work for the story. You have to be very nosey, and you have to be driven by this desire to grab the viewer or the reader by the lapels and tell them, ‘Look what's going on! See what they're doing?' If you want to call that truth, that's what we're working for. A lot of journalists, and I'm sure I was one, work for the advancement of their own careers. But when that becomes more important than the story or than the truth, you're in trouble, and we've seen some pretty bad examples in recent years. Jayson Blair, Judith Miller, and others."
   
 Fenton's portrait of the current American media landscape is bleak, though he does concede one bright light. "National Public Radio, NPR. They give you news in depth, with context. They give you international news. They don't stop at the shores of our country. The public responds to news that actually tells you what you need to know, that doesn't try to titillate you or give you infotainment. Because we're not very good at entertaining. I'd much rather watch The Daily Show than the CBS Evening News if I'm looking for entertainment. In fact, sometimes you get more news on The Daily Show."
   
Despite billing itself as having "one anchor, five correspondents, and zero credibility," The Daily Show, hosted by Jon Stewart, is a primary source of national and international news for many Americans under 35. The Comedy Central hit has a tiny audience (of around 1.5 million viewers), yet has become "can't-miss" television for America's political and entertainment elite. Although much of Stewart's satire is directed at politicians of all parties, his real target is the media itself.
   
In 2004, Stewart was invited onto the CNN political debate program Crossfire hosted by Republican Tucker Carlson and Democrat Paul Begala. If CNN had expected Stewart to be funny, they were proved sadly mistaken. Instead, Stewart took the opportunity to step outside his fake newscaster role and take the real media newscasters to task. Both Carlson and Begala blustered unconvincingly in response to Stewart's accusations, obviously caught off guard. A few months later, CNN axed Crossfire.
   
One subject guaranteed to raise Fenton's ire is the recent trend by media corporations to "repackage" international news from other sources and present it as though they had shot the footage firsthand. Repackaging news is "very dangerous," Fenton says. "All of the major networks put news on the air that they cannot verify."
   
I wonder how a business practice, which appears ethically questionable, could become so prevalent and accepted. Many media organizations, he explains, did the same thing with their foreign bureaus that the American government did with their overseas intelligence services following the end of the Cold War. They closed them down to save expense, and began either to subcontract or to rely on third parties for information. Because it is extremely expensive to have journalists' boots on the ground everywhere where newsworthy events may occur, news collection services such as Reuters or the Associated Press now provide the bulk of the international data and footage seen and heard on American televisions.
   
"You notice when you watch CBS, NBC, CNN, and the others," Fenton says, "that they often have the same clips." The networks can neither confirm nor deny if such footage was staged or directed. Nevertheless, it's married to stories taken off the wire services based on local reportage and then "you wrap it in a package and you slap the CBS or ABC logo on it, and the correspondent will narrate on camera so you see his face."
   
Thereby making the viewer assume, I clarify, that the news we are watching has been investigated by that particular correspondent. "The networks don't have reporters covering the Muslim world on a permanent basis, not just the Arab, but the entire Muslim world," Fenton continues, "and you could argue that that is of some interest and importance to us. You send somebody in after the fire's broken out, but you want to be there when it's smoking."
   
Fenton confirms that many international journalists still work extensively in the Middle East and similar hotspots around the world, hotspots largely deserted by their American counterparts. "How much do you see on your evening news about what's happening in Africa? Or the former Soviet Union? Or Central Asia? There is a huge war going on in the Congo, and we don't see it at all."
   
I question whether the American media are not covering such massive news stories because they simply have no journalists available or because network executives have decided that the stories are not newsworthy.
   
"I think it's the latter," Fenton says. "But they're also not covering it because it's expensive to cover Africa, and they're black, and they're far away. It's like the old journalistic rule of thumb: When you have a catastrophe, one American is worth two Brits is worth five Israelis. And by the time you get to Bangladeshis, you've got to have ten thousand of them to die before you may be interested in covering it." He shakes his head. "America's window on the world has the shutters down."

   
One substantial change between the news coverage of the first Gulf War and the current Gulf War has been the use of embedded journalists, who are granted permission to either accompany the forward offensive ground forces or stay behind the lines in military press centers. The benefits of embedded journalism include a multifaceted view of war achieved by the synthesis of the different reports filed by media scattered throughout the field, along with providing safety and security for civilian press in dangerous and lawless environments. The challenge for the journalists however, is to provide rigorous reportage when their access to unfolding events may be limited or restricted by the military.
   
"It's better than no coverage at all," Fenton concedes, although "the present situation in Iraq is basically no coverage at all. Journalists stay in their hotel, they're afraid to go out. They're risking their lives to take the road to the airport." Embedded journalism gives the public, he believes, a soldier's-eye-view of war, and soldiers can have no grasp of the wider theater of combat or the geopolitical consequences of each stage of the military campaign. Furthermore, journalists naturally bond with the corps who feed and transport them, and when necessary, protect their lives. This can result in personal and affecting television, but it is also misleading as it is only one side of a larger, more complex human drama.
   
"You need to see the other side," he stressed. "You saw one war on American television; you saw another war on Arab television. They appeared to be two entirely different wars."
   
In February 2003, Fenton was in Qatar at the beginning of the American offensive in Iraq and attended many of General Tommy Franks' 11:00 a.m. briefings. At one briefing, recalls Fenton, "I asked him about Iraqi casualties and he replied, ‘We don't do Iraqi body counts.'"
   
Body counts are extremely important to Fenton; such data has direct consequences for the democratic process. "If you don't see the full ramifications of what your government is doing abroad, how can you have an informed electorate?"
   
Foreign correspondents travel to places few rational people would choose to visit and bear witness to terrible events. War, genocide, and poverty disturb not only an individual's sense of humanity and inspire empathy or rage, but can trigger conflicting emotions about the actions of one nation against another. It is hard for me to envision Fenton, with his soft pale eyes and crisp tailoring, standing in the muddy aftermath of a human atrocity.
   
"What I used to worry about most was sanitizing war … a problem that is especially poignant for television," he says. "So, you show a hand or a foot; you don't show someone's guts spilling out, but that's what war's like. It's awful. It's terrible."


These days Fenton gets his news from The New York Times, the French paper Le Figaro, and British papers The Guardian, The Times, and The Telegraph. He believes the best investigative journalism is in magazines such as The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly.  The Atlantic Monthly announced in May 2005 that it would reduce its fiction offering in order to make space for more nonfiction narrative reportage. "Today there is an urgent need," read its editorial, "and a corresponding hunger, for this kind of writing." Fenton is not surprised by the decision. Investigative journalism is just too difficult and expensive for the television networks to tackle thoroughly and well, he argues. It is also "anathema to the people who are only interested in the bottom line." I ask Fenton if there is a media structure that could offer an alternative to the current system of news programming in the United States.
   
"The BBC, with all its warts," he suggests. "It's not a model that can be transposed elsewhere, but because of some quirk in the British character it works here." Fenton is referring to the fact that the BBC is required under its charter to operate free from any political or governmental influence. Its fifty-plus news-gathering bureaus and 250 foreign correspondents around the world are similarly bound. CBS, by contrast, at the end of 2004, had a total three news-gathering bureaus overseas, consisting of eight foreign correspondents, four of whom live in London, and no permanent correspondents at all in Eastern Europe, Moscow, Cairo, Beirut, Beijing, or anywhere in the Arab world or the Muslim world at large, including Pakistan.
   
The BBC's reputation for rigorous, unbiased reportage, combined with previous BBC investigations into Chinese political and human rights issues, caused the Chinese government to demand that Rupert Murdoch, owner of News Corporation, remove the BBC's World News channel from his satellite offerings before it would allow him access to the enormous Chinese market. Murdoch agreed.
   
Murdoch's News Corporation is one of the eight multinational entertainment conglomerates that own the movie, television, music, magazine, and newspaper corporations within the United States (and elsewhere), and therefore control the dissemination of domestic and international news. They are, in descending order of size: General Electric (NBC, Universal Pictures, Focus Features, Bravo), Time Warner (CNN, TBS, TNT, America Online, Warner Bros. Pictures), Walt Disney (ABC, ESPN, Miramax, Touchstone, Walt Disney Pictures), Vivendi Universal (European Cable, Universal Records, Def Jam), News Corporation (Fox Broadcasting, Twentieth Century Fox, Sky, Star TV, New York Post), Bertelsmann (Random House, Sony), CBS (CBS, UPN, Showtime), and Viacom (MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, Paramount Pictures, VH1). The fundamental objectives of these conglomerates, it could be argued, are to increase market share and maximize stockholder value.
   
The requirement of news divisions to be profitable has caused, as Dan Rather told Fenton, "fear in the newsrooms." News managers no longer feel empowered to decide which news stories take priority and must struggle for quality reportage within the confines of the system. When the hit reality TV show Survivor first aired during 2000, the contender who had just been kicked off the latest episode often turned up the next day on the CBS Morning News. This tidy confluence of events was orchestrated by the media corporation Viacom, which at the time owned both Survivor and CBS. It has become frequent business practice for the entertainment divisions of media corporations to stage news, which their news divisions are then required to cover.
   
"Do you think it's going to get worse?" I ask Fenton. "When the media giants say it's not about the money, is it about the money? Are we bang up against capitalism run amok?"
   
"I've thought about this long and hard." Fenton leans forward in his chair. "In theory, the FCC should be our watchdog. It's a toothless tiger. Most people don't know that their local television station is there by the good grace of the government and that it must, supposedly, meet certain requirements. If you complain hard enough, and there are enough of you complaining, perhaps, they might even lose their licenses. All the FCC has to do is just lift its little finger." Fenton says. "And they are not doing it in the area where they really have the greatest responsibility, the responsibility of providing real news to an informed electorate."
   
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was created in 1934, in part to ensure that no single broadcasting company gained excessive control over America's public airwaves. The FCC granted each broadcaster a license to use a specific portion of the radio signal spectrum, while the spectrum itself remained public property. In exchange for the license, the broadcasters were required to provide programming that served "the public interest, convenience and necessity." Furthermore, broadcasters could not own a newspaper and a broadcast station within the same city.
   
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 changed everything. By removing a national cap on radio ownership, it allowed media companies more and more access to the public airwaves, while the definition of "public interest" remained vague or mired in controversy.
   
"I'm afraid the only answer is pressure from the public," says Fenton. "Remember Howard Beale in Broadcast News? ‘I want you all to get up and get out of your chairs.'" He lifts his arms aloft like an inspired preacher, "‘and open the window and shout, I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!'"
   
The movie Fenton mistakenly identifies as 1987's Broadcast News is, in fact, 1976's Network, directed by Sidney Lumet. Network won four Academy Awards, most notably for its lacerating screenplay by Paddy Chayefsky.
   
Network's plot is well known. A dispirited newscaster, Howard Beale, announces he will blow his brains out on national television. His news division is now required to make a profit and he senses all his years of journalistic integrity have come to naught. Realizing Beale's unscripted apocalyptic jabbering about the state of the nation is producing phenomenal ratings, the network executives transform his evening news show into a glitzy entertainment, complete with an orchestra, soothsayers, prizes, and a live studio audience. Every evening Beale preaches to the masses, and one of his sermons is worth quoting in part:
   
"You and sixty-two million other Americans are watching me right now … . Because less than three percent of you read books. Because less than fifteen percent of you read newspapers. Because the only truth you know is what you get over this tube! … This tube is the gospel. … This tube can make or break presidents, popes and prime ministers. … And woe is us if it ever falls into the hands of the wrong people. … Because this network is now in the hands of CCA, Communications Corporation of America. … And when the twelfth-largest company in the world controls the most awesome goddamn propaganda force in the whole godless world, who knows what shit will be peddled for truth on this tube? So listen to me! Television is not the truth! … We're in the boredom-killing business. … We'll tell you anything you want to hear. We lie like hell! We'll tell you Kojak always gets the killer and nobody ever gets cancer in Archie Bunker's house."


Paddy Chayefsky eerily predicted the consolidation of the media under fewer and larger entertainment conglomerates, the transformation of news divisions from public service operations to profit centers, the rise of reality television, and the development of a new cocktail called infotainment. News shows now have celebrity anchors, theme tunes, and catchy trailers. Major news events are titled like movies-of-the-week: Attack on America! Katrina's Wrath! Terror in London! Jackson on Trial!
   

"One of the problems with twenty-four-hour cable news," Fenton says, "is that you have a lot of time to fill and a lot of it's filled with chatter. Talk is the cheapest thing you can put on the air."
   
This turns our conversation to the dangerous brew of media, money, and politics. Considering Fenton's assertion that the integrity of news is under threat within the context of the increasing privatization of the public airwaves and the low American-voter participation (according to several data sources, between 55.3 percent and 60.3 percent of eligible voters voted in the 2004 presidential election), one could conclude, I suggest to him, that we don't, in fact, govern ourselves at all. Will it ever be possible, I ask, to change the nature of the relationship between the media and the electoral campaigns?
   
"Yes. Stop selling airtime to candidates," Fenton says. "Give them the free time instead. Most northern hemisphere democratic countries do that. But it's such a huge money-making machine every two years for the American television companies that it would take a revolution to get them to do that. They have one of the most powerful lobbies around. They control your politicians' access to their electorate."
   
It is a dry, chilly evening. The newsstand at the Tube station displays the evening's headlines on sandwich boards: Tony Blair loses Commons vote to extend police holding period for suspects without charge to ninety days; Kate Moss bounces back after drug scandal; Charles and Camilla complete U.S. tour.
   
I return to my hotel room, order some food, and switch on the news. Desperate Housewives actor Page Kennedy has been fired from the show. And three hotels have just been bombed in Amman, Jordan. Early reports list fifty-seven dead, and over one hundred injured.