REFLECTIONS ON A NEWS CAREER (NOT MINE)

BILL MCLAUGHLIN, FORMER CBS NEWS

CORRESPONDENT DIES AT 76

Bob Gibson, magnificent chronicler of all things broadcasting, caught me up on this release from CBS News, an obituary for a fine broadcast journalist.

I did not know Bill, but I remember his work from Vietnam and the Middle East.  He was  the very model of a television foreign correspondent, even down to looking great in a trench coat.  His reports looked even better.

But this is what in the obit caught me:   "McLaughlin joined CBS News as a reporter in 1966 in Paris.  His reporting from Europe, the Middle East, Cyprus and Athens earned him a promotion to correspondent and the title of bureau chief in Bonn, Germany in 1968.  He served there until being sent to cover the Vietnam War in 1969.   After leaving the Saigon Bureau in June 1970, he was sent back in 1972 to cover the North Vietnamese offensive and the battles for Hue and Kontum City. He returned once more in 1975 to report on the fall of Vietnam and Cambodia.

"In 1971, he was named bureau chief in Beirut, from which he covered conflicts in the Middle East, including the 1973 Arab-Israeli War.  He also reported from the Six-Day War in 1967, the conflict between India and Pakistan in 1971 and the aftermath of the attack by the Black September Group, the Palestinian terrorists who killed 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. The Olympic terror coverage won an Overseas Press Club award.

"McLaughlin was the reporter in the June 1974 CBS Reports: “The Palestinians,” which won the OPC’s award for Best TV Documentary on World Affairs that year.  The next year he landed an interview with Arabia’s King Faisal that turned out to be the king’s last filmed interview with a foreign journalist before his assassination. McLaughlin’s report became a central part of the CBS News Special Report, 'Death of a King: What Changes for the Arab World?'”  

Will there ever be careers like this again in television news?  Will correspondents ever gain the depth of knowledge and experience that allows them to capture both what is happening in a foreign location and why?

And, bottom line, I guess one could say, will the American people ever benefit from knowledge, experience and dedication to craft like that which Bill McLaughlin, over the years, developed? 

And notice, Bill didn't just report from just about everywhere, he did long-term investigative projects, like that into Black September, and in-depth interviews like that with Saudi King Faisal, and broadcast documentaries, like the one that pondered the possible consequences of the king's death.  Who at CBS News gets to do any of that anymore?  Who, anywhere in TV news can help Americans understand their world like Bill did?

Having said that, let me say that Simon Ostrovsky's reporting from Crimea for Vice News (check 'em out -- where else? --  on Youtube!!) seems to me up to that Hall of Fame standard, especially his longest, Dispatch #3.   

Below is CBS News' full obituary for McLaughlin.

Bill McLaughlin, an award-winning diplomatic and foreign correspondent who headed bureaus in Germany and Lebanon for CBS News in the late 1960s and ‘70s died early this morning (7).  He was 76 and lived in France.    McLaughlin died from cardiac arrest in a Waterbury, Conn., hospital.  He was visiting friends in the U.S.

McLaughlin’s television news career spanned 27 years, nearly all of it with CBS News; he left for two years in late 1979 to report for NBC News as its United Nations correspondent.

He spent a decade overseas on his CBS news assignments, including the Paris bureau, where he met his wife, the former Huguette Cord’homme, who survives him. He covered the gamut of overseas events, from the Vietnam War, to terrorism to the conflicts in the war-torn Middle East, appearing on the “CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite,” CBS Radio News  and other CBS News broadcasts, include “CBS Reports” documentaries.

From 1983 to 1993, when he left CBS news, he was a State Department correspondent, and general assignment reporter in the Washington Bureau.  This job, too, sent him overseas on a regular basis, covering the diplomatic travels of secretaries of state, including George Shultz.

McLaughlin joined CBS News as a reporter in 1966 in Paris.  His reporting from Europe, the Middle East, Cyprus and Athens earned him a promotion to correspondent and the title of bureau chief in Bonn, Germany in 1968.  He served there until being sent to cover the Vietnam War in 1969.   After leaving the Saigon Bureau in June 1970, he was sent back in 1972 to cover the North Vietnamese offensive and the battles for Hue and Kontum City. He returned once more in 1975 to report on the fall of Vietnam and Cambodia.

In 1971, he was named bureau chief in Beirut, from which he covered conflicts in the Middle East, including the 1973 Arab-Israeli War.  He also reported from the Six-Day War in 1967, the conflict between India and Pakistan in 1971 and the aftermath of the attack by the Black September Group, the Palestinian terrorists who killed 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. The Olympic terror coverage won an Overseas Press Club award.

McLaughlin was the reporter in the June 1974 CBS Reports: “The Palestinians,” which won the OPC’s award for Best TV Documentary on World Affairs that year.  The next year he landed an interview with Arabia’s King Faisal that turned out to be the king’s last filmed interview with a foreign journalist before his assassination. McLaughlin’s report became a central part of the CBS News Special Report, “Death of a King: What Changes for the Arab World?”

Before joining CBS News, he held several posts in Europe, including covering the Common Market from Brussels for various American business magazines and for Radio Press International. After leaving, he was an associate professor of Communication at Quinnipiac  University in Connecticut.

McLaughlin was born on April 21, 1937 in New York City, where he graduated from Fordham University with a bachelor in science degree in 1961. He also studied at the Sorbonne in Paris. He served in the U.S. Army from 1955 to ’56.

Besides his wife, he also leaves behind a son, Liam, and his wife Joslyn, of New York City; a granddaughter, Jolie, also of New York; and a stepson in Paris, Julien Bodard.

 

THE SECRET INGREDIENT: HYPOCRISY

If hypocrisy were oil, Washington would be Saudi Arabia.  But even by the standards of a town where disingenuousness and moral falsity frame also every public discussion, President Obama’s spokesman Jay Carney yesterday blew smoke fouler than the air in a Chinese coal mine.

“We oppose the current effort in the House to hastily dismantle one of our Intelligence Community’s counterterrorism tools,” said Carney, specifically ignoring the zeal in the Democrat’s house, the Senate, to demand changes, limits, and procedures that would certainly re-mantle the Federal Government’s universal surveillance system.

But here’s the Big Hoot:  “This blunt approach,” Carney went on, “is not the product of an informed, open or deliberative process.”

So true!  But whose fault is that?  Why, I believe it is no one other than the Press Secretary’s boss, President Barack Obama.

Until Edward Snowden spilled to Glen Greenwald in The Guardian, and later, the Washington Post, the extent of telephone, snail and email, cellphone, GPS record-keeping underway at the National Security Agency, President Obama was zealously protecting keeping all the secrets of that cuddly “Intelligence Community.”  (Anybody ever hear references to a Health and Welfare Community?  Even though they deal, literally, with community concerns.  Education community? Housing community?  Yes, it is common to invoke the Defense Community, because, it, too, like Intelligence, benefits from painted on warm and fuzzies.)

Before Snowden, all the American people were allowed to know came from some, dare I call them “cryptic” hints from a couple of well-briefed Senators, and important whistleblower coverage of phone-record-napping in the NY Times and elsewhere.  That should have alerted the public that traceable digital systems, not just phones, but computers, and GPS connectors could, and therefore were likely to be scanned for Big Data.

That the snoops are also clocking postal communications seems so “last century,” that it caught me by surprise. It shouldn’t have.  Surveillance covers all, or it’s almost nothing at all.    

That’s why turning off parts of the surveillance machine won’t work.

What will work is rule of law, covering the whole damn surveillance system, what the people’s representatives will legislate as limits, not on data collection – a blind eye sees no dangers, but on data selection: what triggers actually examining a person’s collected data, and who gets to do the examining? Is some form of warrant needed before selection can begin, and what level of cause will be required to obtain one?  Will anyone argue on behalf of privacy? What parts of a person’s data can be examined?  Who monitors the process to see that set limits are respected, that every search doesn’t simply strip-mine personal data? And who has oversight over the monitors, and how much are they allowed to share with the public?

These are all difficult, subtle, and vitally important questions.  A Congress which having taken its feet from their normal resting spot in their mouths, should not now use them to out-run their brains.  Carney and his boss are right about that. 

Information, deliberation and openness will all be required if Americans are to exercise any influence on perhaps the most important legal and political decisions of our time. But it ill behooves the man who has smothered all of them, either because he uncritically trusts the men and systems whose secrets he’s been hiding from voters, or because he mistrusts the wisdom of those citizens and finds it safer compulsively to cover his ass, to say so.

Let’s not forget that the most flagrant known examples of abuse of surveillance data come from the Obama Justice Department’s pursuit of phone records of journalists at Fox News, CBS News and the Associated Press who were working on revelations, not of strategic secrets, but of undisclosed CIA and State Department ineptitude and dishonesty.

You know the kind of thing, like that Attorney General Eric Holder was Bill Clinton’s end-of-term-pardon go-between (and might one guess, in the usually politically correct, indirect way, bagman?) with the convicted fugitive billionaire Marc Rich.  That was supposed to be a secret, too.

This of the embarrassment President Clinton and then Deputy AG Holder might have saved themselves with a little information, deliberation and openness, even at the cost of a crook’s Get Out of Jail Free card, and whatever it might have produced.