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| Billie Silvey |
| News Personalities |
| Here are half a dozen news people who have enriched my life and been examples of good journalism. |
| April 2006 |
| Bill Moyers. Bill Moyers was born in Oklahoma and raised in Texas. He began his journalism career at age 16 as a cub reporter on the Marshall News Messenger. Deputy Director of the Peace Corps in the Kennedy administration, Moyers served as special assistant to President Johnson from 1963-1967. He established an independent production company, producing more than 300 hours of public affairs television programming. His books include Moyers on America: A Journalist and His Times, A World of Ideas: Conversations with Thoughtful Men and Women about American Life Today and the Ideas Shaping Our Future, and Genesis: A Living Conversation. Always interested and interesting, always learning, he said, “When I learn something new--and it happens every day--I feel a little more at home in this universe, a little more comfortable in the nest.” Moyers has received numerous awards for excellence during his 30 years in the media, including the “Gold Baton” from Columbia University and more than 30 Emmys. Perhaps the most important thing he’s done for me was to host an interview show just after the September 11 terrorist attacks. On it, people talked about good and evil, heroism and humanity in quiet tones that made me consider what I believe and how the actions of others can’t shake the deep roots of my faith. At a time of so much talk of hatred and violence, it was comforting and refreshing. |
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| Katharine Graham. Katharine Meyer was born in 1917. Her father, a multimillionaire, bought the bankrupt Washington Post in 1933. Katharine began working for the Post in 1938. She married in 1940, leaving in 1945 to raise her family. After her father’s death, control passed to her husband. When he committed suicide in 1963, Katharine assumed control of the company. In her 1998 memoir, she wrote: “I had very little idea of what I was supposed to be doing, so I set out to learn. What I essentially did was to put one foot in front of the other, shut my eyes, and step off the edge.” When we moved to the Washington, D.C., area in the spring of 1969, the Washington Post, with Katharine Graham as publisher and Ben Bradlee as managing editor, became our daily newspaper. I was again impressed with the importance of words--especially in articles interpreting the words used in agreements between the State Department and foreign governments. But the most important time for Graham and the Post came two years later, when the Post fought for the right to publish excerpts from the Pentagon Papers about U.S. involvement in Vietnam. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Post. The next year, Graham supported her two reporters, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, who exposed the Watergate break-in, ultimately leading to Nixon’s resignation. Katharine Graham died in 2001, but she left an example as a fearless woman standing for truth. |
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| Jim Lehrer. Born in Wichita, Kansas, in 1934, Jim Lehrer graduated from Victoria College in Texas and the University of Missouri, the top journalism school of the time. Following military service in the Marines, he worked for a Dallas newspaper for ten years, then hosted a local experimental program on public television. Transferring to Washington with PBS in 1972, he teamed up with Robert MacNeil in 1973. In 1975, they started The MacNeil/Lehrer Report, which became the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, the first 60-minute evening news program on television. When MacNeil retired in 1995, the program was renamed The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Lehrer received a presidential National Humanities Medal in 1999, and has moderated nationally televised candidate debates for the last five presidential elections. The author of 15 novels, two memoirs and three plays, he is married to a novelist. That’s another family that must love words. |
| Charlayne Hunter-Gault. Charlayne Hunter-Gault was born in 1942 in Due West, South Carolina. She was the first African-American woman to graduate from the University of Georgia in 1962. A “Talk of the Town” reporter for the New Yorker, she was on the staff of Trans-Action magazine before joining the investigative news team at WRC-TV in Washington, D.C., and anchoring the local evening news. In 1968, she became a metropolitan reporter for the New York Times, specializing in the urban African-American community. She received many awards during her ten years on the paper, including the National Urban Coalition Award for Distinguished Urban Reporting. She also wrote for The New York Times Magazine, Saturday Review, The New York Times Book Review, Essence and Vogue. Joining The MacNeil/Lehrer Report in 1978 as a correspondent, she became the NewsHour’s national correspondent in 1983. There she won two Emmys, and a Peabody for excellence in broadcast journalism for "Apartheid’s People," a series on South Africa. Other awards include the 1986 Journalist of the Year Award from the National Association of Black Journalists; the 1990 Sidney Hillman Award; the Good Housekeeping Broadcast Personality of the Year Award; the American Women in Radio and Television Award; and two awards from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for excellence in local programming. Author of In My Place, a personal memoir, she has received more than two dozen honorary degrees. After twenty years with the NewsHour, she resigned in 1997 to move to Johannesburg, South Africa, where her husband, Ron Gault, is managing director of J. P. Morgan, S.A. My most vivid memory of Charlayne is the strength and humanity of her coverage of the first Gulf War. She managed to shed a lot of light on what was happening in a part of the globe I knew little about, while being the kind of reporter--and woman--I had only dreamed of being. |
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| Otis Chandler. Otis Chandler was born in 1927 in Los Angeles, the only son of Los Angeles Times publisher Norman Chandler and arts supporter Dorothy Buffum Chandler. He attended Stanford, where he became a nationally ranked shot-putter. His father put him through a seven-year executive training program on the paper--beginning as an apprentice pressman on the late night shift, then serving as a general assignment reporter and junior executive in circulation. In 1960, Chandler was appointed publisher of The Times. Surprised by the announcement, he said, “Wow! If someone were to hand me a shot-put right now, I think I could put it 70 feet!” The newspaper was considered one of the worst major dailies in the country when Otis Chandler took over, but he vowed to raise its stature. In 1965, the Times won a Pulizer Prize for its coverage of the Watts Riots. The newspaper had 34 bureaus in the United States and abroad, and by the 70s was considered among the best in the country. Retiring in 1980, he returned to object to a secret deal to devote an edition of the Times magazine to the Staples Center in exchange for advertising. In a public letter to Times employees, Chandler called the behavior “unbelievably stupid and unprofessional.” When he died this February, I mourned him as a man who recognized the future of Los Angeles and worked to give it a first-rate newspaper. |
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| Molly Ivins. Molly Ivins is an institution in my home state of Texas, a nationally syndicated political columnist with a knack for bringing out the humor in both the state and national governments. A native of Houston, she graduated from Smith College in 1966, attended Columbia University’s School of Journalism, and studied for a year at the Institute of Political Science in Paris. Her biography, an example of her humor, reads as follows: “Her first newspaper job was at the complaint department of the Houston Chronicle. She rapidly worked her way up to the position of sewer editor, where she wrote a number of gripping articles about street closings. She went on to the Minneapolis Tribune and was the first woman police reporter in that city. In the late 1960s, she was assigned to a beat called “Movements for Social Change,” covering angry blacks, radical students, uppity women and a motley assortment of other misfits and troublemakers.” Except for a stint on the New York Times, she has spent the rest of her career as a Texas journalist, serving as co-editor of the Texas Observer magazine, a columnist for the Dallas Times-Herald and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. She became an independent journalist in 2001, writing a column distributed by Creators Syndicate. The author of six best-selling books, she has won numerous prizes; has published articles in Esquire, Harper’s, and Atlantic; and appears on National Public Radio. I appreciate her for championing the first amendment and proving that Texas doesn’t just breed fools. |
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