Molinari blasted for leaving Congress for TV journalism

0 Comments | Insight on the News, June 30, 1997 | by Susan Crabtree

The imperious denouncements from the Fourth Estate were quick and caustic. Susan Molinari is not one of "us," the critics declared vitriolically, she is one of the "reported." Despite the media's poor public-approval ratings, deep within most scribes and scribblers is a proud sense of independence, and CBS and Molinari had offended that.

When the effusive keynote speaker of the 1996 Republican National Convention announced in early June that she would resign from Congress to accept a job as Saturday-morning news anchor at CBS, she may have expected an icy response from her future colleagues but not the intensity of the attacks. "I suppose after being in politics -- New York City politics, in particular -- for 12 years, nothing really comes as a surprise to me," she says. "However ... I am entertained by the level of frenzy that this seems to have whipped up."

She was entertained, and perhaps annoyed and disheartened, although she never would say so directly. If the public punishment has taught the unpretentious Republican anything that would benefit CBS, it is cautious restraint. After telling CNN's Larry King that what she most about being a member of Congress was the media, and quickly realizing her gaffe, she was determined to regain her footing. "Every article that is written and every analysis that is produced deepens my resolve to work as hard as I can to prove them all wrong," she declared.

Most of the attacks were wrapped in lofty themes of objectivity and journalistic integrity, but veterans of the Sunday talking-heads circuit say the open snubbing of Molinari was more akin to school-yard jealousy. After all, they posited, which journalist not already a media star would turn down such a plum opportunity?

Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman vice-candidate turned talking head, says the sound and fury Molinari's resignation produced says less about the so-called revolving door than it does about journalists themselves. "I am always struck by the media's arrogance," she says. "Nobody asks the journalist, `What's your experience in government,' `What's your experience in foreign policy?'" she says, noting that the revoling doors spins the other way -- that more often journalists use their careers covering government as an avenue into politics.

Pat Buchanan is the poster boy for this trend with his repeated vacillations from editorial writer and talk-show commentator to political candidate. "Some of these folks are political figures who turn to journalism, but I was a journalist who turned to politics," he tells Insight proudly.

Buchanan is the first to admit that hopscotching across the political and journalistic divide can be expensive. The populist crusader had 200 newspapers carrying his column in 1991, and many of them dropped it when he returned from the 1992 Republican presidential primaries in defeat. But he doesn't allow it to discourage him. "My view is that I'm a journalist by profession whose hobby is running for office," he says with a hearty guffaw. For those who say his appearances on Crossfire only serve to rise his political profile, he responds with a ready quip, "I don't think that Ted Tarner and Jane Fonda really want to perpetuate my presidential career."

Fertaro displays little sympathy for disgruntled journalists who have spent years in the field only to be slighted in favor of a politician for a coveted anchor slot. "That's life," she says. "Do you think politicians like to see Sonny Bono get elected, or Alan Cranston, who was a journalist? Do you think people who have licked stamps for an election and stuffed a million envelopes appreciate it?"

Hand-picking commentators from the political field is not new for CBS. One of the first to enter the journalistic arena from the political stage was Bir Moyers, a press secretary for Lyndon Johnson, who became alienated by the Vietnam War and accepted a position as publisher of Newsday. From there Moyers shifted between positions in public television and CBS, eventually providing nightly commentary for the network before he left in 1986 to form his own production company. Diane Sawyer, another veteran of Washington politics, was one of several reporters on the CBS fast track during the late seventies. The Wellesley-educated Sawyer had worked in the Nixon White House and left with him to) help with his memoirs. Her partisan background outraged some of her journalist colleagues who had on the Watergate story but she soon earned their respect for her conscientious, fair-minded reporting on the CBS morning show and 60 Minutes. Since then, a considerable number of politicians, including top White House aide George Stephanopoulos, have marched across the divide to appear as commentators/reporters on several networks and talk shows without receiving the scrutiny Molinari has encountered.

Perhaps it was Molinari's appointment as an anchor rather than a commentator that unleashed the chattering class, or it may have erupted from resentment of the Saturday morning "infotainment" theme. The casual interview formal and lighter fare, now a staple of morning news and newsmagazine shows, has been a bone of contention with hard-hitting journalists since its inception. Edward R. Murrow originally was reluctant to divert his energy from his famed See it Now program to host CBS' Person to Person, where with cigarette in hand he gently probed the 500 guests the show hosted until it ended in 1959. Murrow's distaste for the show-business aspects of television previously had strained relations with CBS executives. In 1960, greatly disappointed about the commercial nature of television and signs that television news would be locked into the ratings scramble, Murrow resigned to take charge of the U.S. Information Agency.