Transcript: The Media Can Learn from the Civil Rights-Era Black Press

Journalism professor Kathy Roberts Forde argues that journalists should lean into values such as promoting democracy instead of hiding between claims of neutrality.

This is a lightly edited transcript of the June 9 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Perry Bacon: I’m Perry Bacon, the host of Right Now on The New Republic. Great guest today. Kathy Roberts Ford is a professor of journalism at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and she’s been a frequent guest. We’re going to talk about some of the questions about—she writes about journalism and its connection to democracy, and we’re going to talk about that and a few things that happened in the news the last few weeks. Kathy, welcome. Thanks for joining me again.

Kathy Roberts Ford: Oh, so great to be here, Perry. Appreciate it.

Bacon: So I want us to talk first about the 60 Minutes story, which has become personalized in a certain way—it’s Bari Weiss versus Scott Pelley, and those are important people in the journalism world. But what I want to ask you is: what should we think of 60 Minutes, this venerated news program, having its top producers and three correspondents leave in the same week, a new person put in charge who doesn’t seem to know much about television news?

How should we think about that in the democracy context, as opposed to the Bari Weiss versus Scott Pelley framing?

Roberts Ford: Yeah, I really like the way you’re framing that, Perry. I think it’s really easy for those of us observing to fall into the personnel drama—

And not just Scott Pelley, but all of the employees and producers and folks at 60 Minutes. It’s really personal, and it’s incredibly hard, and there is all that drama and deep personal experience. But at the end of the day, what matters most here is that CBS News and 60 Minutes are being recruited into the federal administration’s authoritarian project. And that’s really a huge problem for the news today and the press writ large.

60 Minutes has incredible symbolic value among journalists in this country and among the older generation of news consumers, because it has such a very old lineage and an incredible reputation for doing really hard-hitting, elite public affairs journalism with a focus on politics—and not just politics, but a strong focus on and access to some of the most powerful political operators and players and leaders in the country’s history.

So when you have these mergers and the ownership being used by the federal administration as a way to control CBS News and 60 Minutes—with Bari Weiss installed there, and the new executive producer, I’ve forgotten his name—

Roberts Ford: Yeah, that’s it. This is a recruitment and an attempt to capture independent, hard-hitting, truth-telling journalism that holds power to account—for the service of what I view, and maybe many of your audience does too, as an authoritarian project.

Bacon: Let me—you said CBS is being used in service of the authoritarian project. Connect the dots here a little bit. Donald Trump is not calling CBS and saying, Air this and not this. And if you listen to Scott Pelley, what he seemed to be saying was that Bari Weiss interjects to make programming a little bit more pro-Trump than it would otherwise be. So talk about how exactly Trump connects to what CBS does each day.

Roberts Ford: Yeah. I think certainly in the 60 Minutes context, what we’re understanding—or at least what we think we know from the witnesses and those who are in the middle of it, reporting it out—and I think the most recent revelations in the New York Times daily podcast interview with Scott Pelley—by his account, what we have learned or think we know is that Bari Weiss was asking 60 Minutes to change its coverage of the ICE raid in Minneapolis.

And that in fact Bari Weiss asked 60 Minutes to make the protesters look more violent—make the point that Renee Good’s car was driving directly at the ICE officer, which, based on the evidence that many of us have seen, does not seem to be accurate. So there was an attempt to match the narrative coming out of the federal administration—that the Minnesota protesters, and Renee Good and Alex Pretti, were in fact being terrorists, in their words.

Roberts Ford: That may not have been Bari Weiss’s point—the terrorist thing, exactly—but there did seem to be, according to Scott Pelley, an effort to change the narrative and shape it so it fit the Trump administration’s narrative more closely.

Bacon: You said 60 Minutes has a lot of respect among the older audience particularly. I think that’s correct. So talk about network news in this era, because I think one thing I do want to emphasize is: why is network news important?

My guess is a lot of people, particularly under 40, do not consume 60 Minutes this week, any of the Sunday shows, any of that stuff. Does that stuff—do we in the media think—are we in the media and people who are over 40 thinking about 60 Minutes too much, one? And do these shows still matter at all, two?

Roberts Ford: Number one, they’re incredibly symbolic to the older generation, and they matter in the political sphere.

Because no matter what the reality is about viewership, it does matter to politicos and policy circles—being on these shows and having public discourse happen through the mediation of broadcast news, and in particular 60 Minutes, and cable news, of course. I do think also that our information ecosystem—it may not be that we have viewers tuning in to 60 Minutes, but we do have clips that are circulating broadly all over social media.

And it may be that the outrage algorithms feed them into certain audiences’ feeds more readily, but this is still a really powerful way in which these broadcast news programs get circulated. They still have—I think—and we don’t have a really great way of measuring yet how they circulate—

Bacon: They have impact. They set the agenda. The pure ratings are not a good way to think about these shows.

Roberts Ford: I agree.

Bacon: Let me ask—I wrote last week after this happened that she’s very wisely trying to turn CBS into a polite version of Fox News. And then I read another piece saying what the real goal is to make it anodyne—the political pieces less hard-hitting—turn 60 Minutes into CBS This Morning, which is a very good program but is not as hard-hitting and not as investigative.

So what is your sense of what she’s trying to do with CBS? Do you have any assessment of that? Because I think Fox News, but lighter—there are elements of that, but that’s probably not exactly right.

Roberts Ford: I am really not sure. I think it’s still too early to tell. I think the fact that you’re having this framing disagreement with someone else who’s a really close watcher of the news is indicative that we’re not quite sure exactly what’s playing out and how, and what the outcomes are going to be. But the stakes are high—I think we know that much.

And when you have the independence of news organizations and a program and journalists like 60 Minutes being dismantled in this way, it’s not a good sign and is in fact something that we should be concerned with.

I’m very interested in—I think we in America, as news consumers, do not have a very good understanding of the U.S. experience with authoritarianism in this country. We have long experience with it. It just wasn’t at the federal level—it was at the state level. And this is what happened across the U.S. Southern states after Reconstruction.

You had overthrows of legitimate, elected state governments. You had violent overthrows in many states by the party of white supremacists—Democrats, et cetera. But what you got at the end of the day was racial authoritarianism and these Jim Crow orders, one-party rule. You had authoritarian governance at the state level.

And the press—the white Southern newspapers that were aligned with the Democratic project—they were part of building that. They were active political players.

Bacon: Some of these same states from before, in some ways. Yes.

Roberts Ford: Yeah. And when we think about the authoritarian project today happening at the federal level and some states, we have to understand: the press is not simply a referee. The press is not a neutral bystander. The press is not simply a chronicler. It’s not just calling balls and strikes. It is a political player.

Even those press institutions that don’t want to be connected to a project of any kind—either a MAGA project or a pro-democracy project—they want to somehow stand apart from it. But none do, at the end of the day. The press has First Amendment protections so it can be that fourth estate—it can play its role in public discourse and in public life.

And so it’s a dream—it’s an absolute fantasy to imagine that the press isn’t itself a political player. It’s something we need to account for and think really carefully about: in what ways can certain norms and professional standards of the press be inadvertently not up to the charge of the moment? Which........

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