Award Recipients

Jane Pauley 1998 Paul White Award Recipient

ALL JANE, ALL THE TIME

An Interview with Jane Pauley, 1998 Paul White Award Recipient

By Mike Cavender for September 1998 Communicator

She's been given many titles, virtually all of them flattering. TV Guide called her St. Jane. USA Weekend dubbed her Ms. Perseverance. The headline in Television Quarterly referred to her as Lady Jane.

But, at 47, Jane Pauley is something else, too. She is, arguably, one of America's most popular anchors, and she can be seen almost any night of the week, either hosting Dateline NBC or helping us relive the past on MSNBC's Time & Again.

Jane has built a 25-year career at NBC News. At 22, she was on the staff at WISH-TV in Indianapolis. At 24, she was the first woman to co-anchor a weeknight newscast in Chicago. A year later, she began a 13-year run as co-anchor of Today, first with Tom Brokaw and later with Bryant Gumbel. After Today came Real Life with Jane Pauley and now, Dateline and Time & Again.

She is alternately polite and passionate, depending on whether the conversation is about her accomplishments or her views on everything from the state of broadcast news to the future of journalism education. Regardless of the topic, Jane Pauley is someone to whom you listen closely because what she has to say is sometimes provocative and always interesting.

We met on May 27 in her comfortable corner office at Dateline. For someone with such a successful career, Pauley's office is relatively uncluttered with the trappings of such. On a shelf behind her desk there are several Emmy awards; on the wall next to it a few photographs from her globetrotting days on the Today show. One of the pictures is of Jane meeting Pope John Paul II at the Vatican; another is of her and Gumbel smiling broadly after learning Today had just surpassed Good Morning America as the nation's leading morning show.

As significant, it seems, are the photos of her three children and husband, cartoonist/playwright Garry Trudeau. One of Garry's Doonesbury cartoons hangs nearby. Jane's balancing act between family and career is obvious.

What follows are excerpts from a two-hour conversation with Jane about herself, her career and her thoughts about where we're headed.

Cavender: When I told you we had selected you for the Paul White Award you were surprised. Even a little shocked.

Pauley: Surprised. Yes. I think I have a couple of decades left to go in my career and the effect of the Paul White Award on my reputation and my sense of self probably will explain more about what's to come than about what I've accomplished, if that makes sense. But I think it causes me to take myself a little more seriously, frankly. When your peers say you're worthy of a top award, you've got to pay more attention to what you do.

Cavender: You're in absolutely good company. The award is 42 years old and it has gone to Murrow, to Cronkite, to Brinkley and Chancellor.

Pauley: I am in enormously good company. The people you've named, particularly the more recent Paul White Award winners, are people who were well established in the industry the day I set foot here. And I don't think you ever grow out of the sense of where you are, where you have been. You're measuring your stature against the people who were giants in the business the day you started out. What it tells me is that my generation has been around long enough, perhaps, to have that same effect on the young people who are now just starting out. I think the fact that I have achieved a career with the perception of having had a balanced and happy family life is part of the luster on any award I'm given.

Cavender: A few months ago, an article in USA Weekend called you Ms. Perseverance, because you've lasted 25 years in a very fickle business.

Pauley: Isn't that extraordinary? Someone once applied this description to me: Wearability. I arrived in the '70s, survived the '80s, and really thrived in the '90s. I've been at NBC when NBC was in first, second, third and fourth place. You know, I've been here during those years when the buzz around the newsroom was that we were being prepped to be sold off. Now NBC News is the world's news leader. You do feel powerful sitting atop a news organization like NBC with my experience, with the opportunities of being in prime time television five nights a week. With Time & Again on MSNBC you really have to unplug the set to get rid of me. These are great times.

Cavender: The Paul White Award is given for career achievement. You started out at WISH-TV in Indianapolis right after college, and then moved to Chicago, where you sat alongside Mr. Chicago, WMAQ's Floyd Kalber, anchoring the news at age, what, 24?

Pauley: I was 24 then. And I was not the youngest person to anchor the news. Bob Jamieson was. Bob, a personal friend of mine, was 23, I think, and he was anchoring a newscast in Chicago, but I was the first woman to anchor a major evening newscast in a major news town. I've always been blessed and cursed by being a "first" of my generation.

Cavender: And you were at WMAQ for exactly a year?

Pauley: Yes, and then on to the Today Show.

Cavender: There are few programs with the cachet of the Today Show. Looking at the photographs on your wall, you've covered a lot of memorable stories, were part of a lot of memorable events. What one or two stand out?

Pauley: Meeting the Pope. I've met the Pope three times-- all in the space of 24 hours. Tim Russert pretty much caused that to happen. The Pope said Mass for us, which was unprecedented for American television. I remember I had learned how to say 'good morning' or 'hello' in Polish. And I had learned the Italian word for 'twins,' and showed him a picture of my twins, which he blessed.

Another highlight was seeing the Great Wall of China. I was sent all over the world on the Today Show, and traveled to Brazil and Argentina and Melbourne and Sydney and Tokyo and Seoul and London and Paris and Vienna and Munich and Mexico City. I was also at a dozen presidential nominating conventions. It was an extraordinary place to be. And I remember being at the White House with my foot in a cast and on crutches. President Carter and I discussed my tennis injury on the portico overlooking the South Lawn. I was the first member of my family to go to the White House, to dine at the White House.

Cavender: Much has been said and written about the Deborah Norville situation.

Pauley: Too much has been said. I couldn't agree more.

Cavender: Correct. But it was a defining moment in your career.

Pauley: It was. It definitely was. You know, the public interpretation of the private process was painful, ugly, and Deborah suffered a long time for that. In private, it was a protracted but very ladylike and gentlemanly discussion of how to move the Today Show into a new era and how to launch me on the rest of my career. Ultimately NBC and I came to a remarkable agreement and that was the start of the second phase of my NBC career. The next two years were the busiest and most exciting of my life.

Cavender: Real Life with Jane Pauley.

Pauley: You remember!

Cavender: Of course. Short lived but....

Pauley: Very. Real Life with Jane Pauley was a charming show. Sometimes it was a half-hour show; sometimes it was opposite 60 Minutes; sometimes it was, you know, who could find it? In those days I had younger children and my friends had younger children and nobody was watching TV on Sunday evening. Even now, the audience 60 Minutes pulls is a pretty old crowd. My generation wasn't at that time even watching newsmagazines. If they had, they would have loved Real Life with Jane Pauley. It was a wonderfully written show, and that was one of the things that made it distinctive. It was a big learning opportunity for me. I had come from a history of live television. I was very good at a five-minute interview with someone I had never met before. I was very good at a breaking news story. I hadn't had the luxury of sitting down with someone and just doing an extended interview, looking for interesting insights and developing an intimacy with a guest. And then, above all, to take that raw material into an edit room and put it together in a narrative.

Cavender: And then Dateline. No double entendre meant here but it was like a phoenix rising out of the ashes after the exploding truck incident. And there are those who credit you with being such a tremendous part of bringing that program back and making it the success that it is today.

Pauley: Thank you, thank you, thank you. Stone Phillips and I both felt perversely honored to have the opportunity to make a public apology--within 24 hours of GM's unveiling of that truck, the largest smoking gun in the history of smoking guns. We had the luxury of not having our fingerprints on that truck. I think that was part of the reason that we could hold our heads up as high as we could. But I feel strongly that along with the privilege of fronting a news program like Dateline comes the responsibility of being upfront when mistakes are made. I remember watching the GM news conference--I was home in my pajamas with the flu at the time--and I called in to say that we've got to establish what the facts are as quickly as possible and if we determine that we are, in fact, in error, we've got to say so right now. There were ongoing meetings with NBC lawyers and GM lawyers and intermediaries I wish I had been involved in. I was not. A process that could have lasted two years, three years, hemorrhaging money and reputations, was over and done in hours instead. We learned a lesson--that the Dateline crisis had to be resolved in real time, not lawyer time, which was good for journalism.

The sad part of that story was the degree to which viewers were not moved by what we in the industry regarded as an earthquake. And sadly, the reason they were not moved was because they recognized that it had been done before. I think for years that investigative reporters took for granted that because we're on the "side of the angels," for the little guy, that there were standards of journalism that rounded off the edges a bit. We got away with a lot.

Cavender: So in a rather ironic way the GM truck incident may have helped the profession, helped the business?

Pauley: Bingo. Big time. I really think so. The fact that the audience had such a jaded view served as a wake-up call for us. The good news is, this mistake isn't going to happen again. In fact, I'm concerned about how much time, effort and money goes to make sure our stories are "well-lawyered." I would like to see equivalent energy to make sure our stories are well-reported. I'm also concerned that the new generation of reporters may not be getting the training they need on liability issues and on the standards of journalism that would make the lawyering unnecessary. They need to know how to be sure they've got a story with four corners nailed down, not [with] one of them flapping in the breeze.

Cavender: After the truck incident, NBC went from considering whether to cancel the program, to today, where it's on four nights a week, soon to be five. Now it's all Jane, all the time.

Pauley: Thank Andy Lack for that. And Neal Shapiro. I have worked with very, very talented executive producers in my life and I want to work with very talented executive producers for the rest of my career. Neal is extraordinary. He and Jeff Zucker of the Today Show are the most important executive producers in television today. One exception, maybe, is Don Hewitt. Don created the format; it's a gold standard, but he only does it once a week and he doesn't want to do it more than once a week. Dateline has not only propelled itself into five nights of prime time but has pulled along 20/20, Primetime Live and maybe 60 Minutes. Multiple, multiple, multiple is the word. Now that doesn't mean that newsmagazines will always prevail. There will probably be some kind of critical mass reached, where something else will be more riveting in prime time. But I hope I'm a very old woman when Dateline ceases to be in prime time.

Cavender: You have said that newsmagazines are doing harder news, are getting better at that. There are those who clearly take the other side, saying that much of what we have in prime time is too soft, too feature-oriented.

Pauley: You can successfully argue both sides of that question. There is no doubt that some of what we do on Dateline isn't news. Likewise, 60 Minutes has made an art form of simply finding interesting people and persuading [the audience] to spend 20 minutes with them. Yet one year Dateline swept Emmy competition and we won in two categories for separate flood coverage-- the same coverage that you would have seen on World News Tonight or MacNeil-Lehrer. This was hard news. The hard newsheads will never be satisfied. The same people are completely miserable over the state of the evening news programs and they're probably completely unhappy about the state of morning television too. Never mind that the Today Show can leap on a news story as adroitly and probably more so than at any time in the history of the program. The fact is we can go more places quickly. We have more money. We can apply more newsgathering resources to any story we want to choose than ever in the history of television.

Cavender: Let's talk for a minute about news in general. We're in probably the most analyzed, most criticized business there is. And when the public isn't doing it, we're doing it ourselves. Are we that bad? Really?

Pauley: Sometimes. And sometimes we're worse. I think there's too much punditry. These days everyone is a pundit. Pundits by definition can be opinionated and they don't have to have their facts nailed down. They can speculate. They can pontificate. They're not accountable. It's entertaining to watch, but it's not a good thing, the degree to which television has become pundit-driven. Punditry is inappropriate in the newsroom.

Cavender: We've been criticized for how much time and emphasis we've given the Monica Lewinsky story. Do you agree that we should do more stories on the family, on education, on issues we deal with every day?

Pauley: If you package information properly, it's real interesting. You won't have any trouble getting people's attention. But even as I say that, you know, the reality is we are aiming for a mass audience that previous generations weren't aiming for. And the fact is, if you are doing news for a mass audience, you are making different decisions than if you were aiming for [a certain niche]. If you're looking for really meaty stuff to read and chew over and digest and look at, you only have to look. It's out there. And to think that only a few years ago newspapers were predicting their own demise. Well, the opposite is the case today and I think some of what we're complaining about is just excess. I'm a consumer of news-- I'm a huge consumer of news. I love news. You know, I get up in the morning and I've got The New York Times, USA Today and The Washington Post on my kitchen table with the Today Show on. I'm a huge consumer of news and I love it.

Cavender: Let me ask you specifically about journalism education. I know you have some passionate feelings about that.

Pauley: Well, I had been complaining about what was primarily anecdotally gathered data that said kids didn't know how to write, and that kids were aspiring to careers in news but didn't read newspapers. I'll never forget one of our young interns here at NBC was sorting the mail and there was a letter addressed to John Chancellor, who occupied an office near this one. She did not know who John Chancellor was. And I couldn't see where she and the others were going to suddenly acquire the habit of being news consumers. It's television--not news--that drew them to our business. So I started working with the Society of Professional Journalists. They set up a task force in my name-- and with my money--to study my notion that kids coming out of journalism schools are not being adequately prepared for jobs in news.

Cavender: And you've been working with RTNDF on this too.

Pauley: Yes. I was being honored by RTNDF in early 1997. I was not then on the Board of Trustees. They were honoring me in part for my role in mass communication, journalism, education, just stirring things up. In giving me this award they had to endure a speech from me. So I was kind of on a little tear and didn't understand why RTNDF, which gives a number of paid internships in broadcasting, required that recipients be majoring in communications to get one of these. By the time it was all over, I was funding an internship through RTNDF with the caveat that it goes to a non-communications or journalism major. Most RTNDF internships continue to go to declared majors, but the board has broadened the application to any college student trying to get into our business. I do think that as a result of our stirring up the pot, all the schools got better. Even so, I would like the parents to demand more of the students. To demand more of the schools. And I will continue to speak about that.

The other thing I'm not a fan of are TV studio classes in high schools. It attracts a student who's trying to avoid history, English, math. It attracts the wrong kid. It's expensive. It should be extracurricular, if at all. Speech and debate are better for the kid who has an interest in what I do--for newsgathering, communicating ideas, studying current events. It helps kids develop analytical thinking, develop a reading habit. And, if you're really good, you win; if you're not, you get better. But admittedly it's not as sexy as those mock TV newscasts. Taking speech and debate turned out to be the best preparation for doing a Today Show interview that I can think of.

Cavender: I read where your daughter aspires to a career in TV journalism. Do you want her in this business?

Pauley: Well, by watching the Today Show every morning she is acquainting herself with the daily events of the world. That's a good start. And she's already a very good writer. But the bottom line is that she's going to have to be a good student long before she becomes ambitious about her career. I'm going to make sure that if she does come into the business she's going to have a better education than I had. And she certainly will meet the bilingual test.

Cavender: Well, what's next for Jane Pauley?

Pauley: Oh boy. We are very busy here, and I love that. It's better to be with a winning show (Dateline). It makes the job a little easier. I'm particularly proud of Time & Again on MSNBC. I hear as much comment about Time & Again as I do about Dateline. We're reaching a lot of people and they like it. It's a show that everyone has ownership in because the minute you broadcast a news story, you've given it to the audience. Our archives are their archives. In a way our archives are my archives too, in the sense that I am beginning to see where I came from.

Take the civil rights movement, which started being a television news story in the late '50s, when I was a little girl. Watching the program, I realized that I was probably formed more by the specter of the civil rights struggle than I was Vietnam. Civil rights was happening when I was a very impressionable pre-teen and young adolescent. It touched me on a political and emotional level. I thought I perceived what justice was and what fairness was.

I recognized by watching television that I wasn't living in the real world. I must have seen the contrast between my neighborhood and what was happening on television. When Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and Bobby Kennedy made a famous speech in Indianapolis-- that must have impressed me profoundly. I think that's what it takes to get young people to connect to the news.

My parents "got hit" every time news happened. When the stock market crashed, my father was a little boy whose parents were small-town merchants, and they were wiped out, virtually wiped out by an event that happened on Wall Street. When World War II started, needless to say, he was called up. When Korea happened, guess what? At age 36, he's back in uniform during the "Korean mess," as he always called it. He couldn't afford to not know what was happening. His life depended on it. Staying on top of the news became a lifelong habit. Younger people haven't faced that kind of world event, where the news affected them personally.

Cavender: All of us are trying to find ways to bring younger people into the tent because those are the news viewers years down the road. I'm not sure we're doing it. What more can we do to bring them into the tent and what is the tent?

Pauley: Well, my husband would say, the comics. From my personal experience at home I see sports. Sports, and the sports pages, are bringing my children to newspapers. Business. These days we have a participatory stock market. A lot of people are watching the economy, planning on investing in houses, making plans that involve their economic well-being. Business news touches everything. I've become a big fan of CNBC. I watch that quite a lot.

I'm watching these very attractive, bright young women on CNBC and some men too. But I'm looking at the women and seeing how they are developing reportorial skills that will allow them to pivot any direction they want to go. If I were a young woman aspiring to a television career, I'd watch CNBC a lot. And I'd read the news magazines, I'd read the business pages.

Cavender: Any final thoughts?

Pauley: I used to bemoan the fact that by the time I arrived in television, television news had been invented several generations before. That it was a mature industry and there wasn't room for the visionaries anymore. But as we approach the turn of the century, I can see how it's going to be a very different beast than was invented. I feel very privileged that my career is going to span both sides of the millennium and that I'll have one foot in the 20th century and another in the 21st century. I feel very lucky to be able to say that.