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Frank StantonFrank Stanton
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Session:         Page of 755

audio circuits are easier to manipulate now. But what I did -- I had an assistant, a woman who did nothing but watch. Watch -- in the sense of getting the material; not watching in the sense of television. Every month we sampled certain hours of the day and certain days of the week, never the same. We received from the station a tape, in those days it was a disk, a recording of what the station carried in the way of news. And Isabel Goldthwaite was her name.

Q:

Gold--?

Stanton:

Goldthwaite. G.O.L.D.T.H.W.A.I.T.E. And Isabel would listen to these records and if she found anything that was an infraction of policy, in terms of objectivity or editorializing or things of that kind, she would call it to my attention. And I would listen, and if I thought it was something that suggested to me that we were doing something that was off-limits as far as the handling of news, I would talk to the station manager about it and so forth.

Q:

What was the CBS policy during that time? I know the Mayflower Doctrine had been passed in '41.

Stanton:

Well, we worked very hard to be as objective as possible, not to editorialize within the framework of a news broadcast, to report fairly, give both sides or as many sides as there were to an issue. I guess fairness and balance were the guiding policies. We tried to be fair in covering all parts of the community, not just focusing on the business community, or the sports oriented part of the community. To do what any good editor does in putting out a newspaper, to cover everything that's going on, and to do it as fairly as possible.





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