Sam Donaldson Interview (page: 7 / 9) ABC News Correspondent	Print Interview

You mentioned Edward R. Murrow, Howard K. Smith, Frank Reynolds, Ted Koppel and David Brinkley as some of the people in your field you've admired. What are the qualities you particularly admire in these people?

Sam Donaldson: One of the qualities I admire is that they are aggressive people. Now, there's no one more courtly and gentlemanly than David Brinkley. Why would I say he's an aggressive person? Edward R. Murrow was not given to shouting, and yelling, and running down streets chasing people but, like the others, he was an aggressive person in that he was inquisitive and wanted to find out things.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. To find out things, you do not sit in the back of the press room waiting to be called on. If you do, you'll sit there with cobwebs around you. You'll never get called on. You have to go forward. You don't have to do it in my style. Ted Koppel's style is completely different, but Ted is an aggressive person. He probes, he goes in. He doesn't let his guests get away with silly answers. And you have to be willing to do that. Not only fail, but make a fool of yourself. Now, you say, that's silly. Why would you go out and consciously try to make a fool of yourself? Well, you don't consciously try to do it, but if you ask a question in public, let's say, on television, every question can't be brilliant. Every question can't make you out to be one of the most articulate spokespersons in the western world. Some of the questions are going to be dumb. Because later you say, "Why did I ask that?" Or they may be technical, in the sense that, yeah, you're trying to get a little piece of information, but to an audience they don't seem to be profound at all. If you're not willing to say, "But that's my job and I don't care if I fall on my face once in a while, stub my toe, make a fool of myself in trying to do that job," then -- then you aggressively move forward.

[ Key to Success ] Courage

We all try to be perfect. Obviously, none of us ever achieves that. But if you try to be so perfect on television, I don't think you can do the job right. Because you take all of the spontaneity out of it, you take all of the whoof, and the push and the pull out of it. It becomes a homogenized package. It may look beautiful, but there's no oomph there. As Gertrude Stein said, "There is no there there."

So, in live television, which I love, on the Brinkley panel where we argue issues, I'd rather swing by my heels from the chandelier than be absolutely perfect and speak only when I know that I have a perfect sentence that has a perfect thought. I think perfection is an enemy of real understanding in this world.

What qualities do you try to exemplify in your reporting? What are some of the things that you try to accomplish in your daily work?

Sam Donaldson: Well, integrity is everything, honesty is everything.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. What you're saying to an audience, whether it's a print audience as a print reporter, or in my business, a television audience is, "Folks, I've looked into this to the best of my ability, and to the best of my knowledge what I'm telling you is accurate." And if I'm not certain, I will tell you that. I will say, "it's reported," or "there are reports of this, but we can't confirm them." If the audience doesn't believe that, then they're not going to watch me, and why should they? If they think I'm making it up, if they think I would distort it for some private agenda, if they think I'm so sloppy in my work that -- even though I don't mean any harm -- I'm always getting it wrong, they're going to watch somebody else. And indeed, they should. Now, that doesn't mean that I won't make a mistake, or that I won't occasionally tell them things which prove not to be true, but they will understand that. As long as they believe that I didn't know it at the time, and I honestly believed that what I was giving them was professionally accomplished, because I knew how to do the news business and that I believed to be the truth.

[ Key to Success ] Integrity

So that's integrity and that's honesty. Now, of course, you want to be complete. You want to be unbiased. But I think many people have a misconception of what being unbiased is.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. If you send me out to cover a story, or look into an issue, and I have come back, having done a lot of work, looked into it pretty thoroughly, talked to a lot of people about it, I ought to know something about, what's the right of it and what's the wrong? If I come back and say, "Well, I looked into the issue and it's six of this and it's six of the other they say, and I don't know," I haven't done my job as a reporter. I'm not talking about a political dispute in which your view is just as good as the other person's view, and I report both views. I'm talking about factual information. If we're going to argue over welfare reform, we ought to start first with looking at the true statistics of what the program is today, not ones that people think are there. "Oh, we're spending all this money on all these people and it's a waste." Let's look and see. How much money? On what people? Under what circumstances? What's the return? Now we compile all of that. If I've done my job as a reporter, then I don't have to say to the audience, "Yes, but the people over here say it's the other way, and I've got to give equal weight." No, no. I've looked into it. I honestly believe that it's this way.

Objectivity does not mean that everybody's point of view on factual questions -- note, I say factual questions -- is as good as everyone else's. If you've done your job as a reporter, the audience wants you to say, "I've looked into it, and here are the facts. Now, you make up your mind, ladies and gentlemen of the audience, what you want to do with them. That's your job, but here are the facts."

I don't have to say, "Hey, I don't know what the facts are, so I'll give you the eight guys who have eight different views of the facts. Can you make up your mind, ladies and gentlemen?" No, they're busy. They've been selling insurance in Des Moines all day, they've been taking care of their families, they've been running a day care center in Dallas, Texas. They depend on me to have looked it over. Objectivity does not mean that everybody's point of view when it comes to factual questions is as good as everyone else's. Not for a moment.

You mentioned the importance of integrity in your work, and I wanted to find out, how does one achieve that reputation in your field? What advice would you have for people in your business who aspire to your position? How does one gain that reputation?

Sam Donaldson: Well, you know, babies are not born with a sense of morality, or integrity, or anything else. It's something you learn. It's something you learn from society. You learn from your family, if you're lucky enough to do that. You learn from your church, or your synagogue. You learn from your teacher at school, you learn from your classmates, you learn from mentors in the business.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. You understand in the news business what you can do and what you can't do: the corners you should not cut. At first it may not seem to you that there's any reason why you shouldn't cut them, and then you learn that you shouldn't, and therefore then, you don't. And I say to people, "Don't take a chance." Let's say that morality or ethics have nothing to do with it. I do think they do have something to do with it. Let's pretend though for a moment they don't. I said, pragmatically, don't take a chance of destroying your reputation because you can get a story this way. Don't go through the desks when that's actually not your property to go through. Even though you learned something and you might beat the competition, it will come back and bite you. It will bite the news organization you work for, and you will destroy the very success that you were hoping for.

[ Key to Success ] Integrity

Play it straight, play it very straight. The audience will sense this over a period of time. They won't know on any given night, on a given report perhaps, but remember, there's no just one news source, there's not just one individual. They're reading newspapers, and they're watching other people. And after a while, if you're always out of step, or if you always do something which the others don't do, the audience will understand there's something wrong with you, and at that point you've lost it.

Once you lose a reputation for integrity, a reputation for honesty, you can't get it back. You can't say, "Sorry. I'll never do it again." When you're seven years of age you can, but not when you're 27, or 57, or 67. By that point, a slip like that and you're dead.

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