Av Westin



April 21, 2001



BOB GARFIELD: As part of the research for a handbook for television journalists more than a hundred television executives, reporters and producers sat down with TV news veteran Av Westin. Because of Westin's good reputation after nearly 50 years in the news business and because the participants were all off the record, they said some amazing things, specifically on the topic of race. An article in the April issue of Brill's Content magazine documents his findings. Av Westin, welcome to On the Media.

AV WESTIN: Delighted to be here.

BOB GARFIELD: When a black face is about to be photographed does everything change in the making of television news?

AV WESTIN: I think steps are taken so that black faces aren't photographed at all, and therefore you don't have to make that decision in terms of whether the piece gets changed or not. Now mind you, when I talk to the management of these programs and to the management of the news divisions themselves, they deny fervently that race is a factor. They're adamant about it. And yet in interviewing 137 people av--at all ranks, as soon as you got down below the senior producer level and started talking to the troops, they would tell me story after story about how Blacks were rejected either as the grist for a story or essentially rejected as being part of the cast of the story -- that is, who is the expert that you get to comment; who is the family that you get to be the-- the exemplar of whatever story you're doing.

BOB GARFIELD:All right let me see if I got this right. Let's say I'm a producer for a news magazine and I'm producing a piece about arsenic in drinking water, and I find a family in a town where there's a high level of arsenic in drinking water and they happen to be black, what happens?

AV WESTIN: It will be suggested to you that since Whites also are drinking the, the arsenic-laden water that go find a white family. Example: one young woman told me that a network -- and I'm going to preserve their anonymity so I'm going to - I'm not going to mention which network, and I, and, and - nor am I going to be specific enough so that retribution could land upon the shoulders of this person. She told me that she, that they, that this network was going to do a one hour special about a pediatric disease and she was told to go out and find a family-- and a child and all of the component parts; and she did. And when she revealed, however, that the family was black, she was told look, other people have this disease, white people have this disease; go back and find a white family. And she did!

BOB GARFIELD:Now let us presume and let us hope to God that this isn't because the executive producer of whatever this news magazine is is so nakedly racist that he just doesn't want to have black faces on his air, there's-- [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]

AV WESTIN: No. None of them are. I know them all.

BOB GARFIELD: All right. So what's behind this?

AV WESTIN: In the past ten years, minute by minute ratings became available to producers and they were never available before, and there has been a, a direct interpretation on the part of some of these people that, that Blacks don't get us the ratings! And so if Blacks don't get us the ratings, the word gets passed. Now it doesn't get passed explicitly.

BOB GARFIELD: No memos, no paper trail.

AV WESTIN:No, what happens is this: it, it's much more subtle; as, as somebody said who, as an observer of it from the inside, look a story involving Blacks is unlikely to get approved. If it does get approved, it's going to get done and it's going to sit on the shelf and will have much more difficult time getting broadcast. Now I asked a lot of the young people why it mattered to them -- why didn't they continue to suggest stories, and they said look, our jobs or I should say our performance ratings and therefore our jobs depend on the degree to which the stories we suggest are accepted and are produced and are broadcast.

BOB GARFIELD: Do you know Neil Shapiro [sp?] from Dateline and Don Hewitt from 60 Minutes?

AV WESTIN: Oh, yeah!

BOB GARFIELD: All right. They have claimed up and down that it's simply not true.

AV WESTIN: That's right. [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]

BOB GARFIELD:But have any of these people kind of taken you aside, winked at you, and said look, you know, what am I gonna do? I've got to make my number.

AV WESTIN: No, it didn't come that way. I had a conversation with somebody and not, not with -not in Neil's shop but somewhere else. Oh, by the way I told Neil that I found this problem in his shop as well as 20/20 as well as -- the only place I didn't find it by the way was 60 Minutes.

BOB GARFIELD:Mr. Hewitt says he never looks at the minute by minute ratings. Why is he insulated from the necessity to do that when the other news magazines feel that they must.

AV WESTIN: 60 Minutes essentially is -- faces no competition. It does not have to worry about a cop show on one side, a hospital show on the other, it essentially is the dominant factor at 7 to 8 for that audience.

BOB GARFIELD:It's been a dozen years since you were executive producer of 20/20 on ABC. Put yourself though in that job in the year 2001, and now you're facing the ratings pressures and the bottom line pressures that were much less severe in your day. What do you do?

AV WESTIN: It would be easy to say that based on all of those years of experience and the gray hairs and, and the heritage that presumably I brought from starting out working for Murrow that I would stand up and say no way is this going to happen. And you can do it to a degree. But-- the truth is that the business has become THE BUSINESS. Eventually it's - it gets you.

BOB GARFIELD: Av Westin, thank you very much. Appreciate you joining us.

AV WESTIN:A pleasure to be here. I hope what I've had to say will be provocative and maybe some responses will occur at television stations and maybe there'll even be a, a ripple at one of the news magazines, who knows? 33:00

BOB GARFIELD: Av Westin, 6 time Emmy, 4 time Peabody Award winner and author of The Best Practices for Television Journalism.