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Frank StantonFrank Stanton
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today, most of them are in the field of ideas not in the field of pictures. In other words, what goes on in the halls of Congress, that's largely in the field of ideas and a lot of the news is in the idea world, so this is one of the reasons why I think radio news is, in many ways, superior to television news.

No question that seeing the pitiful pictures of the trouble with the Kurds, no question that that has moved a lot of people to demanding that something be done to help these people. Thirty or forty years ago, whenever the Kurds had a commitment out of the superpowers at that time to set up their own state, Britain and France, I guess, reneged on the commitment - - if there had been television at that time, I don't know whether they could have reneged on it because the plight of the Kurds would have been so dramatic on that end of the tube that I think politicians would have responded to the public's concern about it. But, out of sight, out of mind, so to speak. And there wasn't that much talk on radio about it, and there wasn't any television reporting on it at all, so that was a period of history when the public reaction didn't push the political leaders to do something. Bush would never have reversed his field if it hadn't been for the fact that every night from the first ten minutes of the evening news, you saw all the suffering of little babies and widows and everybody else, in northern Iraq. It was moving and --

But that was the story. If you're talking about legislation -- or a UN resolution having to do with the problem of the Kurds, and you're having a serious exchange between two legislators, to cut away from the discussion and show those pictures again, I think, is poor television.

But there is, as I say, a vast majority of producers and directors in the news media and I should say the news medium who want moving pictures.





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