NPR's Kasell to retire as newscaster, keep his "Wait Wait" job
Memo to NPR employees
11/23/2009 10:22 AM

After 30 years of waking up at 1:05 a.m. to anchor the top of the hour newscast during Morning Edition, Carl Kasell has decided the time has come to sleep in. He will leave his newscast post at the end of this year... but happily for all of us he isn't going far. Carl will continue to be the Official Judge and Scorekeeper for Wait Wait.. Don't Tell Me!, the show that turned him from a newsman into a rock star! Carl will also continue his travels to stations around the country on NPR's behalf.

Carl has raised more than a generation of listeners with his calm and authoritative newscast and has been the first voice many people heard each day. He also has been a teacher and role model for NPR newscasters... not only because of his skill and experience, but also because of his kindness, integrity, and professionalism.

Carl has walked into the newscast booth tens of thousands of times during his tenure. He was there the day that Iranian students took over the American Embassy in 1979... he was there when the Berlin wall fell in 1989 and he was there again when two jetliners slammed into the World Trade Towers in 2001. And he's been there every week since.

Carl first walked through the doors of NPR in 1975 as a part-time newscaster ... and was on the air in November 1979 at the inception of Morning Edition. In 1995, he hosted Early Morning Edition, which eventually led to Morning Edition's early start time of 5 a.m. eastern. Carl is a proud member of the North Carolina Journalism Hall of Fame and a recipient of several major broadcast awards, including a Peabody which he shares with Morning Edition and another he shares with Wait Wait.

Please join us in congratulating Carl for his tremendous service. His last newscast will be on Wednesday, December 30th, and he looks forward to his time on the road visiting with you, your staff, and your audience!

As everyone knows former CBS newsman Walter Cronkite died on Friday. He really was a legend who could change the course of history through his news judgment. Here's yet one more example that I learned while reporting my book, Woodward and Bernstein: Life in the Shadow of Watergate

Most of the media credit for the revelations that led to President Nixon's resignation in 1974 falls to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of The Washington Post. But it was CBS's Walter Cronkite who made Watergate a national story in fall 1972.

Nixon campaign operatives broke into the Democratic headquarters inside the Watergate building on June 17, 1972. The Washington Post and others jumped on the story initially but it still didn't have much traction four months later. A Gallup poll in October 1972 showed that 48 percent of the country did not recognize the word Watergate.

But that all changed after Cronkite decided it was a story.

One reason other reporters didn't pick up the story was that it was complicated. It was difficult to follow a Woodward-Bernstein story because the reporters often relied on anonymous sources. And there were few documents to show viewers and few people to interview on camera -- with the exception of White House officials happily going on camera to disparage the young Post reporters.

But Cronkite sensed there was something more to the story than a third-rate burglary. He pleaded with the Post to share their documents as tangible proof.

"For the first time in a long time in major American journalism there were not documents," former Post managing editor Howard Simons said in an interview at the University of Texas in Austin, where the Woodward-Bernstein papers are held. "This was just gumshoeing, classic journalism. CBS wanted to photograph the documents for its stories. But there were none. What we decided was, we wouldn't tell CBS we didn't have documents. We'd let them think we had documents."

CBS went ahead with the story anyway. The ground-breaking, two-part special ran on Oct. 27 and 31, 1972. These two stories were a turning point for the saga that would grip the nation for most of the next two years.

Cronkite's first piece ran for nearly 15 minutes in a 22-minute broadcast -- the unprecedented equivalent of a newspaper turning two-thirds of its front page over to one story.

The second story was truncated to 9 minutes after the Nixon White House pressured CBS brass, claiming the first story wasn't fair -- especially in light of the November presidential election when Nixon was running against George McGovern.

Cronkite brought the story to a national audience -- even without documents. But having watched all 24 minutes in 2006, I can safely say that CBS would never run that story today. Frankly, it was far too complicated -- and even boring. It was difficult to figure out what Cronkite was talking about.

But it didn't matter. America's most trusted newsman said Watergate was a story the nation should be interested it -- and therefore it was.

In a world where there are fewer and fewer ombudsmen, good to see that ESPN has hired its third to replace Le Anne Schreiber, a former New York Times sports editor-turned-author. ACS

ESPN Hires an Ombudsman
Don Ohlmeyer, one of television's most successful and honored innovators as a producer and programmer in both sports and entertainment television, has been appointed as ESPN's third ombudsman.

Ohlmeyer will begin an 18-month term in August, offering independent examination, critique and analysis of ESPN.

"Few people on the planet could bring to the role of ESPN ombudsman more credentials, intelligence, a track record of success and the fearlessness to speak his mind than Don Ohlmeyer," John Walsh, ESPN executive vice president and executive editor, said in a statement. "He is a noted maverick in the industry with a vast understanding of media, and we look forward to his contributions."

Ohlmeyer will share his thoughts via a column on ESPN.com monthly. He succeeds Le Anne Schreiber, a former New York Times sports editor-turned-author whose term recently expired. George Solomon, former sports editor of the Washington Post for almost three decades, was ESPN's first ombudsman (2005-07).

Ohlmeyer has built one of the most distinguished careers in the history of television. He has served as an executive producer, producer, director and writer for entertainment and sports programming since 1967, culminating in his last network post as president, NBC West Coast prior to his retirement in 1999. Ohlmeyer twice worked at NBC; he first joined the network in 1977 as executive producer of sports. He returned as president in 1993, where he oversaw the activities of all the company's entertainment-related businesses, including NBC Entertainment, NBC Studios and NBC Enterprises.

Prior to his time at NBC, Ohlmeyer worked at ABC, where he had served as producer and director of three Olympic broadcasts, produced ABC's Monday Night Football, worked extensively on ABC's Wide World of Sports and developed The Superstars for television.

Over the next five years, he created the sports anthology series SportsWorld and served as executive producer of NBC coverage of the Super Bowl and the World Series as well as the prime-time series Games People Play and the made-for-television movie The Golden Moment: An Olympic Love Story. Ohlmeyer became well known for expanding the network's sports coverage and introducing innovative production techniques.

He installed Bryant Gumbel as the host of NBC's live NFL show, hired Bob Costas, Marv Albert, partnered Dick Enberg with Merlin Olsen in football and Enberg, Billy Packer and Al McGuire in what is widely regarded as the best basketball commentary team in history.

In his career, Ohlmeyer has been honored with 16 Emmys, including the Lifetime Achievement Award and two Peabody Awards, and has been inducted into the Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame.

A graduate of Notre Dame, Ohlmeyer is also an adjunct professor of communications at Pepperdine, where he teaches directing and documentary filmmaking.
Updated: July 14, 2009, 2:28 PM ET

The Ombudsman's office gets deluged with emails, comments, phone calls, and the perception here -- among a staffer, an intern and me -- is that the majority of them are critical of NPR for being too "mainstream" or for being too conservative.

But that doesn't gibe with recent NPR-commissioned scientific polling on how its audience views the coverage. A June 30 report says that 50 percent of the total audience sees NPR's news coverage as balanced; while more than 40 percent see NPR as liberal and only 4 percent thought it had a conservative slant.

When NPR is lined up against PBS, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, Fox News Channel and MSNBC, NPR is more likely than the commercial outlets to be perceived as "mostly fair" in its coverage, according to independent data from Roper. See Slide #3 below.

"Given the increasingly polarized nature of our political discourse, perceptions of media bias are inevitable these days," said Vince Lampone, NPR's research manager. "It's comforting that along with PBS, NPR is seen as at least somewhat more balanced than commercial news outlets in its news coverage."

Many of the people we hear from might disagree about how balanced or fair NPR is. In general, most listeners who contact us appear to fit into the liberal category, and many complain that NPR's reporting does not mirror their views. So I was expecting NPR's research to reflect that. But it didn't. Among those who self-identify as "very liberal," only 2 percent thought NPR was conservative.

It's important to point out that we are talking about two different audiences, though both are revealing. People who contact the Ombudsman are generally focused on a particular story or issue. People surveyed for this study in April and January were asked how they perceived NPR's overall news coverage.

Some aspects of NPR's listener survey research are predictable; some are surprising. It doesn't require polling to learn that there's a general public perception that NPR leans left -- whether it does or doesn't. Nor is it surprising that conservatives are more likely than moderates to believe that NPR has a political agenda.

But what is unexpected are findings among those who self-identify as "somewhat conservative" and "very conservative." In this group, the research shows a belief that NPR is slanted to the left and right. Among "very conservative" listeners, 57 percent thought NPR's news coverage was liberal but another 15 percent thought it was conservative. Take a look at slide #2.

Previous audience research has shown that NPR's listeners put themselves into three fairly neat categories: liberal, middle of the road, and conservative. That information describes the political outlook of the audience.

But NPR decided to do a year-long tracking study to determine how well the network is fulfilling its stated mission to "create a more informed public -- one challenged and invigorated by a deeper understanding and appreciation of events, ideas and culture."

"The research is hardly a defensive move on NPR's part -- on the contrary, we want to be aware of shifts in listener's perceptions over time," said Lampone. "Not just of perceived political bias, but of our overall success in achieving our public service mission."

The charts below provide more information on how the audience perceives NPR's news coverage: (At the bottom of each slide is who conducted the research, when and how many people were surveyed.)

While these findings may be reassuring to NPR, it shouldn't be a license to sit back. Perceptions of bias plague all news rooms and it's critical to credibility to work on improving the perception that NPR's coverage is balanced. The company will never get a "balanced" rating from 100 percent of its audience, but 50 percent is only half-way there.