How is it that “Washington Week in Review,” one of public television’s most sedate, long-running and honored reporters’ roundtables, got itself into the kind of embarrassing public mess that is more common in the punch-and-run world of cable television?
Enough time has passed since the media flap of Feb. 23 — when a Washington Post story announced that Northwestern University journalism dean Ken Bode was being dumped as moderator of “Washington Week” — to measure the smoldering remains of the conflict.
It seems to amount to this:
Either Bode has been greatly dissed by public television station WETA in Washington in its quest to heat up the program by adding hype and talk-TV level conflict (the pro-Bode assessment of the situation); or Bode failed to sense the winds of change sweeping across public television until it was too late, misread the situation, got caught in a contract dispute and went public (the argument from the station).
The third possibility is that it is a little bit of both.
The whole mess is now in the hands of lawyers.
But the dispute has left an unpleasant sense about public TV: Behind the scenes, it is just like most other television, obsessed about ratings and eager to draw a younger audience. Because of that, traditional values as represented by “Washington Week in Review,” with more than three decades on the air, are in jeopardy.
The two people talking the most about the scuffle are Bode and WETA’s CEO Sharon Percy Rockefeller.
They agree on one thing: This was not well handled.
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As dean of Northwestern’s Medill school, Bode has one of the best jobs in journalism. He is a rare character, a certified scholar-reporter who has duked it out on the battlelines of big stories for much of his career.
Bode, 59, has written for The New Republic, rambled all over the federal bureaucracy and national politics, worked as a correspondent for NBC and CNN and ran the contemporary media department at DePauw University in Greencastle, Ind.
He joined “Washington Week in Review” as moderator four years ago, filling the huge shoes of Paul Duke, who had been host for two decades before his retirement.
Bode’s contract was coming up this year, he said. At the same time, there was talk at the station of a need for change on “Washington Week.”
At the end of January, Bode said, he was told by Dalton Delan, the station’s new vice president for programming, that he would have a new contract in a week.
But Bode also said Delan had been pushing for a complete makeover of “Washington Week,” with its guests displaying more attitude and argument, more liberal and conservative back and forth, and with visits from high school journalists and surprise guests.
“They told me they wanted an early contract settlement,” Bode said.
Bode said he disagreed with any suggestion that the show change its tone or abandon its quiet attitude toward discussing news events.
Then everything became complicated.
Bode said the day after Delan told him he would be getting a new contract, Delan offered the moderator’s job to NBC correspondent Gwen Ifill. That, along with the rumblings about the need for change in a show that was recognized as an island of calm in the cacaphonous world of talk TV, led to the disagreement, which was widely covered.
It is still not clear whether Bode was actually fired.
A WETA spokesman said Ifill was not offered a job, but Bode said Ifill had actually taken the offer to her NBC bureau chief, something she would not have done if the situation were not clear.
The upside of getting fired (if that is what happened) from “Washington Week in Review” is that every good friend Bode has ever made rushed to his defense.
The downside is, well, the sense he has been fired.
He clearly does not like the feeling. He is well armed with all of the documents he needs to show that he did well over four years as host and that he was worth the $160,000 a year the job paid.
“I don’t want a jihad with public television,” Bode said. He has left every job he had, from NBC to CNN to DePauw University, in good standing. And he wanted to leave “Washington Week” that way too.
Why did this happen?
“There are a bunch of, I guess, new ideas about what we do in journalism, and one of them is that instead of just being reporters, we also have to be commentators and pundits and analysts and cute — mostly it is important to be cute and entertaining,” he said.
This is most apparent on cable television shows in which a liberal shows up with a buddy and a conservative shows up with a buddy and they shout and bloviate at one another for a half-hour.
“There are also certain programming rules in effect and those rules say you have got to give people on television the faces and personalities and personae that they are used to so they know what to expect,” Bode said.
That is why “McLaughlin Group” backers eagerly await the arrival each week of its ideological combatants, with the acerbic, hyperactive John McLaughlin in the role of moderator with a whip.
“Washington Week in Review” didn’t do any of that. It paid a rotating group of perhaps 50 reporters $300 for each appearance they made on the show. No one ever broke any chairs or poked fingers at each other.
Some weeks, Bode found himself surrounded by Pulitzer Prize winners, all of them full of information about the beats they covered in Washington every day.
“I had one of the original creators of CNN call me the other day, and he told me that we ran counter to every rule in programming on `Washington Week,’ ” Bode said, a little proudly.
Bode presented ratings charts and studies that showed his show was in fifth place among general programs on public TV for September 1998, tied with “Magnificent Journeys” and following “Patti Labelle Live!” “Lewis & Clark,” “Nova” and “This Old House.”
He said he had no plans to construct a lifetime career as “Washington Week” host. Being dean of the Medill School is enough for anyone, he said, and he wants to spend more time with his wife. Jetting to Washington every week got in the way of that.
He had intended to make this his last year on the show.
Bode said he doesn’t know what his contract status is these days. There were signs two weeks ago that the situation was softening. The station asked him to come back as host of the show despite the disagreement.
And then, after he had flown to Washington to prepare, station managers asked him not to show up, which only added fuel to the fire. His executive producer at the station was fired too.
There has been talk around Chicago in the last few weeks that Bode would be the ideal candidate to replace John Callaway when he retires from “Chicago Tonight” on WTTW-Ch. 11. But it seems unlikely that Bode would do that. He knows the person who follows Callaway is going to need deep Chicago roots, and he doesn’t have them.
As for “Washington Week,” he doubts he will ever be asked to return. “People don’t admit their mistakes,” he said.
But he believes he accomplished his goal in absentia, because the heat that came from the battle over “Washington Week” was so intense that WETA will think many times before it dabbles with the format in the future.
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In the first week after the Feb. 23 Washington Post story that announced Bode’s dismissal from “Washington Week,” WETA just about closed the door on comment. Program chief Delan had been quoted in some stories, but many of the accounts of what had happened came from Bode and his allies.
WETA CEO Sharon Percy Rockefeller, who has sterling political and social credentials in Washington, was eager to deliver her version. It is not the same as Bode’s version, but close enough to help cast some light on events.
“In hindsight,” she said, “I barely understand it myself. Ken’s contract was up at the end of February. And we had just gone through a year of strategic planning so that we could reconstruct the station along the lines of a business.”
In the process, she said, WETA decided to have a single national production department.
“Ken missed some of the signals that all of this was going on,” Rockefeller said. “He was here a day and a half a week. He was working on the program.”
Powerful currents have been sweeping over public broadcasting for the last five years, she said. It no longer is one of four big national TV media outlets with CBS, NBC and ABC. There are now hundreds of viewing options. Strategy at PBS and the station had to change to respond to that reality.
“Over the last five years, the ratings (were) down for `Washington Week in Review.’ But we are not just paying attention to that,” she said. “It was all happening in the context of everything else that was going on. We had a new chief programming officer (Delan) and he was looking just as hard at all 50 of our programs.”
The timing of Delan’s review became a problem because some of it coincided with Bode’s contract expiration, she said.
“Bode took personally the conversations Dalton was having internally and took them to be an assault on the direction of the show and maybe on himself,” Rockefeller said. “But they were neither. We had no discussion about future plans for the show, but we were under pressure from the Public Broadcasting Service and from the stations to refresh the program.”
She offers a different characterization of what was happening at the station and presents it as “much more a part of a greater context. It was something PBS had asked us to look into.”
In any event, she said, there was a confrontation in her office on Feb. 11.
“Ken came to my office . . . and demanded a contract that day,” Rockefeller said. “I said it is not going to be the contract you want. We had not decided in any way what we were going to do. . . . We offered a month-to-month extension, a three-month basis, or more than three months. But we said it was not going to be a three-year contract. We simply were not ready to do that.
“Then he stood up and said, `My lawyer will call your lawyer.’ “
Rockefeller said she is saddened by the break, noting that her relationship with Bode stretched back to the early 1970s in West Virginia, when he covered her husband (now U.S. Sen.) John D. Rockefeller IV, who was then governor.
“Management has responsibilities and moderators have theirs too,” she said. “But they aren’t always the same thing. I was doing my job. Dalton was doing his job. But by saying we could only communicate through lawyers, and by his going to the press, it reduced the options.”
Why was Bode invited back as host of the show and then turned away at the last minute?
“He told the Associated Press on Wednesday that he was going to use the Friday night program to open a national dialogue on the future of `Washington Week,’ ” she said. At that point, she added, a substitute was called in as host for the show.
“This is a news program,” Rockefeller said. “It is always going to be more or less what it is, but refreshed. `Meet the Press’ has been refreshed. `Face the Nation’ has been refreshed. That is only what we were going to do with `Washington Week in Review.’ “
She said the station never offered Gwen Ifill a job, although, Rockefeller added, “I think she thinks she was offered a job. Her agent represents a lot of people in public television. He knows our news executives. They had some talks. But they were only exploring a possible future and thinking about possible things.”
Rockefeller said she didn’t know Bode was only interested in one more year until she heard that for the first time two weeks ago.
“I wish he had told me. But we never had a discussion about his plans, beyond the fact that he wanted a new contract,” she said.
Rockefeller wants the story to die down now, if not disappear completely. She believes the whole flap should be put into a different perspective.
“It is a misunderstanding,” she said. “A genuine, heartfelt, heartwrenching misunderstanding. We have never had an incident like this before and we never want to have another one like it. But we didn’t put it in the public arena.”
