Don Hewitt

RTNDF First Amendment Awards Dinner

Don Hewitt accepts RTNDA's First Amendment Leadership Award on March 7, 2001, in Washington. Don Hewitt revolutionized CBS News with the premiere of 60 Minutes, a program created by Hewitt.

I feel like I was in a casket listening to a eulogy.

The only thing better than getting RTNDA's First Amendment Leadership Award is having it presented to you by America's first journalist: my friend, my colleague, my hero, Walter Cronkite.

You know when you've been around as long as I have you become literally, the "pop" in snap, crackle and pop. The snap and the crackle come from a lot of people who are here tonight. Mike (Wallace), Morley (Safer), Lesley (Stahl), Andy (Rooney), Steve (Kroft), (Ed) Bradley, I think, is at a Knicks game tonight), Andy Heyward, Betsy West (we work with) and the people who everyday make me look good. Without them I'm nobody and it is people like Josh Howard Merri Lieberthal, Esther Kartiganer and Beverly Morgan and without them I wouldn't be here and without Marilyn Berger, I wouldn't be anywhere.

Let's get serious for a moment if we may.

About the First Amendment that we here this evening prize so highly and need so badly. In more than half a century that I've been in journalism, I can't think of a more stunning example of a journalist exercising his First Amendment rights than Ed Murrow taking on Joe McCarthy, Katharine Graham taking on Watergate, and Punch Sulzberger, and the aforementioned Mrs. Graham, taking on the Pentagon. And now, I think there is--and has been for several years--another wrong that needs a powerful voice if it is ever going to be righted. Specifically, I'm talking about the out-and-out bribery that has infected the body politic in what we like to think of as the greatest democracy on Earth. I can't believe that the Founding Fathers wouldn't turn over in their graves if they knew their precious First Amendment was being cited to justify why we can't do anything about putting a stop to the plain-as-the-nose-on-your-face political fact of life that the number-one qualification to run for office in the world's greatest democracy has become, in the television age, not the ability to govern, but the ability to raise money.

Just think, in this great democracy "freely elected" has become "expensively elected." A situation so damaging to our democracy that I find it difficult to believe that their are constitutional scholars who really believe the First Amendment gives office-seekers the right to buy as much commercial time on television as they can amass by putting the arm on constituents who are willing to pony up anything to curry favor with politicians---even with Presidents who frequently spend more time at fund-raisers than they do at the business of running the government. I don't think the millions and millions of dollars that politicians get in checks that come from the balances in personal bank accounts are the "checks" and "balances" those guys are talking about, those guys in the frock coats and powdered wigs. If The First Amendment doesn't allow you to holler fire in a crowded theater, why does it give you the right to holler "money" in a Buddhist Temple?

Somebody, for God's sake, has to take on the constitutional scholars who propound what I believe to be an idiotic notion that it is unconstitutional, unconstitutional for someone to stop someone from buying an election by prohibiting a television station from refusing to sell a politician as much commercial time as he or she has the money to pay for. As Harry Truman was wont to say, "Jesus Christ and General Jackson, how did we get ourselves into this mess?" How did it happen that the number-one qualification to run for office in this country is now--and has been for several years--not the ability to govern, but the ability to raise money? I think I know how it happened because I was there when it happened. It happened, fittingly enough, in a television studio at WBBM Chicago in 1960. That was the time and the place that a television debate between two candidates for the Presidency--Richard Milhous Nixon and John Fitzgerald Kennedy--first opened the eyes of both political parties to the fact that there was a whole new way to run for office. Forget the whistle stops, forget the bumper stickers, the campaign buttons, the speeches on the steps of the town hall. Television is the way--the only way--to run for office. And, while they saw us as the best way to reach the electorate, we saw them as a bottomless pit of advertising dollars. And so we got engaged and, before another election year went by, got married. I think it can be said without fear of contradiction that they married us for love and we married them for money. Admittedly, for them and us, it hasn't been a bad marriage. But for everyone else, it's been a lousy one.

What to do about it? What to do about the undeniable fact that politics in the good old U.S. of A. has become one big money game? Which was really not all that big a problem before television raised the stakes and made raising money to buy television time the end-all and be-all of running for office. Today, you can't get elected without television time and you can't get television time without paying for it and you can't pay for it without amassing a war chest and you can't amass a war chest without being beholden to people who want something from you and even worse get something from you.

How to deal with it? Well, first of all I don't think we should give politicians free airtime to toot their own horns. Just give them news time when they do something newsworthy. That, I think, is our only obligation.

Now, for a moment, because we all work for television, let's consider what would it do to the people we work for to lose all that revenue. I think that maybe the best way for them to recover that revenue is to cut out hard political commercials and start taking hard liquor commercials. We don't run them now it's not illegal. Let's face it; Jim Beam and Jack Daniels did less harm to America than Dick Morris. Now you can add Jack Quinn to the list.

At the very least, it makes only sense for anyone who does business with the government to be barred from making a political contribution because, any way you cut it, that is "bribery" and my guess is if we stop calling it campaign reform and started calling it by its real name, bribery, we'd clean up the mess faster than you can say "McCain-Feingold."

If I haven't worn out my welcome, I'd like to end on a lighter note about one of broadcast journalism's legends--Fred Friendly, who after leaving the presidency of CBS News joined the faculty of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. On his very first day, a student arrived in his class wearing a button that said "Make Love Not War," which prompted Fred, who lived in a world of his own, to tell her, "I don't think that's an appropriate button to wear in my class." To which she responded, "Oh, Mr. Friendly, you're so old-fashioned you think 'making love' is 'making out.'"

Now Friendly, as he frequently did, had lunch that day with the dean of Washington columnists Walter Lippmann, and told him about the student who criticized him for thinking "making love is making out." To which Lippmann responded, "What the hell is 'making out'?"

Friendly, who thought that pretty well summed up the generation gap, came back from lunch and told his class that Lippmann had said: "What the hell is making out?" To which a student said, "Who the hell is Walter Lippmann?"

I tell you that for one reason. And that is, the next time someone says, "Who the hell is Don Hewitt?" I'll be able to say, he's a guy who won RTNDA's First Amendment Award and is grateful for all of you for making it possible.

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