Commercial television has changed since the days when I was hired as chief correspondent for CBS Reports, the documentary unit. A big part of the problem is ratings. It's not easy, as John Dewey said, to interest the public in the public interest. In fact, I'd say that apart from all the technology, the biggest change in my thirty years in broadcasting has been the shift of content from news about government to consumer-driven information and celebrity features. The Project for Excellence in Journalism conducted a study of the front pages of the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, the nightly news programs of ABC, CBS and NBC, and Time and Newsweek. They found that from 1977 to 1997 the number of stories about government dropped from one in three to one in five, while the number of stories about celebrities rose from one in every fifty stories to one in every fourteen.

Does it matter? Well, as we learned in the 1960s but seem to have forgotten, government is about who wins and who loses in the vast bazaar of democracy. Government can send us to war, pick our pockets, slap us in jail, run a highway through our garden, look the other way as polluters do their dirty work, take care of the people who are already well cared for at the expense of those who can't afford lawyers, lobbyists or time to be vigilant. It matters who's pulling the strings. It also matters who defines the news and decides what to cover. It matters whether we're over at the Puffy Combs trial, checking out what Jennifer Lopez was wearing the night she ditched him, or whether we're on the Hill, seeing who's writing the new bankruptcy law, or overturning workplace safety rules, or buying back standards for allowable levels of arsenic in our drinking water.

I need to declare a bias here. It's true that I worked for two Democratic Presidents, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. But I did so more for reasons of opportunity than ideology. My worldview was really shaped by Theodore Roosevelt, who got it right about power in America. Roosevelt thought the central fact of his era was that economic power had become so centralized and dominant it could chew up democracy and spit it out. The power of corporations, he said, had to be balanced in the interest of the general public. Otherwise, America would undergo a class war, the rich would win it, and we wouldn't recognize our country anymore. Shades of déjà vu. Big money and big business, corporations and commerce, are again the undisputed overlords of politics and government. The White House, the Congress and, increasingly, the judiciary reflect their interests. We appear to have a government run by remote control from the US Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and the American Petroleum Institute. To hell with everyone else.

What's the role of journalism in all this? The founders of our nation were pretty explicit on this point. The First Amendment is the first for a reason. It's needed to keep our leaders honest and to arm the powerless with the information they need to protect themselves against the tyranny of the powerful, whether that tyranny is political or commercial. At least that's my bias. A college student once asked the journalist Richard Reeves to define "real news." He answered: "The news you and I need to keep our freedoms." Senator John McCain echoed this in an interview I did with him a couple of years ago for a documentary called "Free Speech for Sale." It was about the Telecommunications Act of 1996, when some of America's most powerful corporations were picking the taxpayers' pocket of $70 billion. That's the estimated value of the digital spectrum that Congress was giving away to the big media giants.

Senator McCain said on the Senate floor during the debate, referring to the major media, "You will not see this story on any television or hear it on any radio broadcast because it directly affects them." And, in our interview, he added, "The average American does not know what digital spectrum is. They just don't know. But here in Washington their assets that they own were being given away, and the coverage was minuscule." Sure enough, the Telecommunications Act was introduced around May of 1995 and was finally passed in early February of 1996. During those nine months, the three major network news shows aired a sum total of only nineteen minutes on the legislation, and none of the nineteen minutes included a single mention of debate over whether the broadcasters should pay for use of the digital spectrum.

The Founders didn't count on the rise of mega-media. They didn't count on huge private corporations that would own not only the means of journalism but also vast swaths of the territory that journalism should be covering. According to a recent study done by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press for the Columbia Journalism Review, more than a quarter of journalists polled said they had avoided pursuing some newsworthy stories that might conflict with the financial interests of their news organizations or advertisers. And many thought that complexity or lack of audience appeal causes newsworthy stories not to be pursued in the first place.

I don't mean to suggest there was a Golden Age of journalism. I told you earlier about covering the Housewives' Rebellion in Marshall, Texas, fifty years ago. What I didn't tell you is that it was the white housewives who made news with their boycotts of Social Security, not the domestic workers themselves. They were black; I wasn't sent to interview them, and it didn't occur to me that I should have. Marshall was 50 percent black, 50 percent white, and the official view of reality was that only white people made news. I could kick myself for the half-blindness that has afflicted me through the years--from the times at the White House when I admonished journalists for going beyond the official view of reality in Vietnam to the times I have let the flickering yellow light turn red in my own mind on worthy journalistic projects.

I'm sure that growing up a Southerner and serving in the White House turned me into a fanatic--at least into a public nuisance--about what journalism should be doing in our democracy. In the South the truth about slavery was driven from our pulpits, our newsrooms and our classrooms, and it took the Civil War to bring the truth home. Then the truth about Jim Crow was censored, too, and it took another hundred years to produce the justice that should have followed Appomattox. In the White House we circled the wagons, grew intolerant of news that didn't comfort us and, if we could have, we would have declared illegal the sting of the bee. So I sympathize with my friends in commercial broadcasting who don't cover the ocean they're swimming in. But I don't envy them. Having all those resources--without the freedom to use them to do the kinds of stories that are begging to be done--seems to me more a curse than a blessing. It reminds me of Bruce Springsteen's great line, "It's like eating caviar and dirt."

But I am not here to hold myself up as some sort of beacon. I've made my own compromises and benefited from the special circumstances of my own good luck. But the fact that I have been so lucky shows that it can be done. All that is required is for journalists to act like journalists, and their sponsors--public or private--to back them up when the going gets a little rough. Because when you are dealing with powerful interests, be they in government or private industry, and bringing to light what has been hidden, the going does--inevitably--get a little rough.

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