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Frank StantonFrank Stanton
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Session:         Page of 755

The quality of news, I think, will suffer. Why do I say that? Because I think the emphasis will be getting on the air with a picture and there'll be no editorial control, in the sense of quality. Today, if a foreign correspondent files a story for the New York Times, somebody on 43rd Street looks at that copy and says, “Well, this is sheer nonsense,” or, “We had this story yesterday. It's not going to play again today,” there's an editorial judgment applied against standards of journalism.

If you're a CNN-type television purveyor of news and you send a team into some remote place in the world, there's nothing guarantees that that team knows anything about the history of the part of the world or any of the political forces or the economic forces that can give you the interpretation of what's going on. That's a deficiency that will be with us for awhile, until we tool up with the kind of manpower that I think is necessary to provide a decent program service.

But I'm, you know, an old man, and there might be some twenty-year-olds right outside this building--or in this building--who don't see it this way at all and will see it differently. Maybe the in-depth treatment of the story is not important. Maybe the hard news is just the fact that something's going on and that you've got pictures showing that there's action--that that will satisfy the needs of the public receiving the service.

I'd like to think that, with the growth of education and the growth of technology, the quality of reporting will improve. Nothing that's happened in the last twenty years persuades me that that's going to happen, but I still have faith in the fact that once we get this bulge of technology into our system and digested, that then the emphasis will be on the quality of





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