Doug Cooper interviewed John Chancellor, anchor of the NBC nightly news, at the network newsman's office in New York.
The Interview
I was interested in Chancellor’s assessment of the performance of the press in recent reportage. When I met with Chancellor, the country was past the Agnew and Eagleton scandals and still mired in Watergate. I asked, "Does the conduct of coverage on those three headlines put a positive face on news coverage?" Chancellor answered that he thought it reaffirmed journalism's strengths.
"What effect does news have on the public's behavior? You've said it's part of the essence that the populace can act on reportage?"
"I often quote Walter Lippman who said, "It gives people a picture of the news on which they can act," said Chancellor.
"Then how do you account for apathy, at the ballot box, for example?"
"I don't think you can blame the press for that. There's a journal called Foreign Affairs that has excellent writers. It has a disproportionate influence because of its writers and the particular people it reaches. I don't think you can say the bigger the numbers, the more important the observations".
Behind The Scenes
Two weeks later, I returned to my office at Iona College, New Rochelle early one afternoon after lunch. An associate was frantic. The manager of one of our "huge listenership” stations had called and threatened to take us off the air. His was an MOR (middle-of-the-road) music station, with an older audience, and a signal covering the Catskill Mountains to Manhattan.
What had happened was that the week prior, he ran my conversation with the outspoken artist, Thomas Hart Benton. Benton had used the word 'nookie' in our conversation, and I'd gotten chewed out, and had assured the manager it would never happen again.
What never entered my mind at that time, was that I had edited the Chancellor interview and mailed it to his station. He ran the program and discovered I'd said that, "people see John Chancellor on the street and say, 'he's a great guy, or there goes that son of a bitch'.
Fortunately, the station's top man didn't simply hang up on me. He allowed me to explain that that interview had been "put to bed"
by the time we'd had the Benton discussion. More importantly, my words were an exact quote of Chancellor himself, that was carried in TV Guide. Ultimately, the station dropped the matter.
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The Douglas P. Cooper Distinguished Contemporaries Collection (1967-1974) contains rare interviews with influential writers, statesmen, artists, songwriters, journalists and others who have left their mark on our culture.
The Origins of The Cooper Collection