Playboy Interview: MacNeil/Lehrer

A few decades ago, the network evening news was presided over by a single dignified anchor. This Spartan presentation of the day's pressing events was as elemental to the lives of millions of Americans as their morning newspaper. The "CBS Evening News" was particularly valued, due in large part to "the most trusted man in America," Walter Cronkite, who would eventually man the program for a formidable 19-year tenure. Emulated to varying degrees by his rivals at NBC and ABC, Cronkite's grave but avuncular manner exemplified the basic philosophy of the evening news show: that TV journalism was serious business.

But times--and anchors--have changed. The once subtle, genteel rivalry of network newscasts has developed into an outright free-for-all. Dogfighting for ratings and prime-time lead-ins, hyping their "exclusives" and glamourous anchors (who compete in star power with the likes of Stallone or Madonna), the networks have become near parodies of themselves--real-life incarnations of the institutions satirized in the films "Network" and "Broadcast News" and on TV's "WIOU." Meanwhile, illustrated dramatically during the Gulf war, CNN has proved cable TV to be a genuine player in the battle for the nightly news.

Yet just across the span of channels, one evening newscast marches to a different, quieter drumbeat. "The MacNeil/Lehrer News-Hour" has been, since its inception, a straightforward news show devoid of glitz, absent of hype and, according to some critics, even a bit staid. Yet the program clings to the concept that the news--especially those stories that directly affect the lives of American citizens--can and should be explored to exhaustion. Its format deliberately eschews the "sound bite" and the quick cut to video tape.

"MacNeil/Lehrer" strays from, the network-news format in other ways: Its two anchors--Canadian Robert "Robin" MacNeil and American Jim Lehrer--share their air time generously, a stark contrast to the solo bravura performances of Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings and Dan Rather. There are few satellite feeds from exotic locations, featuring breathless foreign correspondents in Banana Republic garb; and because the show airs on public television, there are no commercials. Yet, its devotees and even some of its critics insist that it is "MacNeil/Lehrer's" conceptual simplicity--its remarkable starkness--that has made the program a contender in the nosy, noisy world of broadcast journalism.

"MacNeil/Lehrer" first aired on public television in 1976. The original concept was modest: to explore the day's big story in depth. In 1983, the program expanded from the half-hour "The MacNeil/Lehrer Report" to the 60-minute "The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour," and interviews and panel discussions were added. Although the show has consistently booked an impressive roster of guests, some critics have taken swipes at the hosts' motives behind the line-ups. "Their idea of a balanced panel," cracked New York Newsday last December, when "MacNeil/Lehrer" was celebrating its 4000th edition, "is Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, with Brzezinski turning out to be the liberal."

Despite the debate over the show's political posture, "MacNeil/Lehrer" has gained credibility. Its influence can be seen on the commercial networks themselves, which have launched similar shows, such as ABC's "Nightline"and CBS' "America Tonight."All have rallied against the prevailing wisdom--not only of TV news but of commercial television in general--that the public's attention span is less than 30 seconds. In the case of Robin MacNeil and Jim Lehrer, it was precisely this refusal to dismiss their audience that ultimately brought them one.

The men behind the show are as unconventional as the program itself Despite their personal and professional successes, they have not succumbed to celebrity, nor do they envy the millions of dollars their network colleagues haul in. "I wouldn't for a moment trade what I have for what the anchors get," says MacNeil, insisting that the inflated network salaries bring with them a high-pressure, cutthroat existence--a lifestyle uncommon in public television. At the same time, both men are keenly aware that they are in the TV business and that to remain successful, they must remain popular. "To be noncompetitive in this business," says Lehrer, "is to be dead."

Robin MarNeil grew up with the idea that he would follow the career footsteps of his father and enter the Canadian, navy. But then he flunked the algebra section of the entrance exam to the Canadian naval academy. He tried his luck on Broadway--but "a voice came to me out of the blue that said, 'You'd make a lousy actor' "--so he left New York and hopscotched from job to job. He wrote plays in Europe and served in various capacities with Reuters News, NBC News and the British Broadcasting Corporation. Ultimately, he landed a job in public television, where his reportage earned him, along with colleague Sander Vanocur, the displeasure of President Nixon--an uncommon distinction for a public-TV reporter.

When television began broadcasting the Watergate hearings in 1973, MacNeil was teamed with reporter Jim Lehrer in Washing-ton, D.C., where, gavel to gavel (and "bun to bun," says Lehrer), the two developed their unique synergy.

If MarNeil in his early years epitomized the Canadian journeyman journalist, Jim Lehrer was the quintessential American. A native of Kansas, Lehrer graduated from the University of Missouri, then went on to serve as an officer in the Marine Corps (where his father had spent many years). After leaving the Service, he worked as a newspaper reporter for the Dallas Times Herald, specializing in murders, politics and three-alarm fires. He soon became a columnist for the paper and later moved up to city editor.

But what Lehrer really wanted to do was write, so he began work on an original story about a modern-day Mexican general bent on reclaiming the Alamo as a tourist attraction. When the novel was completed, he permitted a budding film producer to shop it on speculation as a film project. The gamble paid off: "Viva Max!" starring Peter Ustinov and Jonathan Winters, was released in 1969, earning Lehrer $45,000 and the opportunity to retire from the newspaper business.

But life as a free-lancer spooked Lehrer, and he switched to part-time work as a consulting editor of a local nightly news show for a public broadcasting station in Dallas. The experience eventually led him to Washington, D.C., the Watergate hearings, Robin MacNeil and, ultimately, "The MacNeil/Lehrer Report."

To talk with the men for whom talking has become a livelihood. Playboy called on Contributing Editor Morgan Strong, whose previous "Playboy Interview" subjects have included P.L.O. leader Yasir Arafat, physicist Stephen Hawking and CBS' "60 Minutes" team. Here is Strong's report:

"Considering the potential difficulty of coordinating my schedule with those of two very busy men, I was surprised at the ease with which MacNeil, Lehrer and I arranged our interview sessions: There was no evasion, no postponement; a date was set and that was it. Straightforward and simple.

"Our first meeting took place early one morning in MacNeil's New York City office--an unpretentious and pleasant workplace, nothing at all like the anchor suites at the networks. The first thing that struck me was their blatant genuineness. MacNeil greeted me himself, forgoing the usual phalanx of secretaries and functionaries. Lehrer, meanwhile, informed me that he had made the trip up from Washington--canceling his appearance on the show that evening--to do the interview.

"When I told them that I had set aside my usual four-hour block of time for our first session, they were startled; apparently, they had had no idea that so much time would be needed. I found this curious, since these two men are known for their own protracted interviews. But once our talk got under way, they became passionate.

"Of the two men, Lehrer seemed more down-home--often candid, sometimes profane and always animated. MacNeil, on the other hand, occasionally exhibited a bit of Canadian reserve--though not aloofness--and while he spoke with greater intensity than Lehrer, he was physically less demonstrative.

"But together, they are like the Siamese twins of broadcast news--matched by opposite personalities yet linked by remarkably similar views of their responsibilities as professional journalists. Their enthusiasm about what they do--and how they go about doing it--is the obvious common bond. They are committed to telling the American people all that they are capable of telling them and as fully as they think it should be told. But there is also a refreshing self-deprecation that surfaces on occasion. They don't lake themselves too seriously.

"And they are alike in another way: in the reverence they share for their fathers. Frankly, I have never witnessed that sort of respect in anyone else I've interviewed. It is, I suppose, a perfect demonstration of their devotion to elemental values--and the very reason so many people want to listen to them.

"We began our conversation by discussing the Gulf war, which, as we went to press, had culminated in the liberation of Kuwait."

[Q] Playboy: Let's begin with the most important news story in years: the war in the Persian Gulf. Given the networks'--especially CNN's--instant, on-location reportage of the war, does MacNeil/ Lehrer feel a detachment from the crisis?

[A] Lehrer: Quite the contrary. We feel we're right in the center of it all. I have never felt so involved in a story as in this one.

[Q] Playboy: In what way? After all, yours is probably the only news show that doesn't have a team of correspondents reporting from the eye of Desert Storm.

[A] MacNeil: Well, so far, I think this war has played to the strengths of this program. First of all, we are almost no worse off in terms of access to the Gulf than the networks--we share the network pools, and we do have a correspondent there, Charlayne Hunter-Gault. But most important, our strength is in analyzing what's going on, and what developments mean, and what the public response is. This war has been a field day for the tacticians, for weapons specialists, for people who observe political behavior in this country, for people who know Iraq--its spirit, its culture. It's been very much a talk war, and we feel very involved.

We've also noticed a steady increase in our audience--judging by the New York metropolitan market, which is by far the largest--from August second until war was declared. There were a few days when it dipped, because the audience was watching the outbreak of the war on CNN and the networks, but then it came back. I think we've come into our own again. I would think if our audience felt we were out of it, we would be. But clearly, our audience doesn't feel that way.

[Q] Playboy: CNN's Bernard Shaw said he felt uncomfortable about the celebrity heaped upon him as a result of CNN's coverage in the Gulf. Is there a place for personal heroics in TV journalism?

[A] Lehrer: Television journalism is no more a place for personal heroics than any other line of work. There are men and women in policework and other social work who regularly put their lives on the line. The only difference is that they don't do it on TV.

[Q] Playboy: Then perhaps heroics is the wrong word; maybe we should talk about star power and the ease with which anchor men and women can become overnight media darlings.

[A] MacNeil: But there's nothing new about that. Back in the days of the big press wars, guys were emblazoned all over the front pages and treated as heroes. That's been a standard of popular journalism for a long time. It's just that the power of the television age--and the hunger and competition among the networks--allows today's media people to dramatize themselves like never before.

Somebody pointed out recently that the correspondents in Riyadh are doing stand-ups in flak suits and gas masks, whereas their crews are in T-shirts. The ones you see on camera are the ones wearing the gear. I found that amusing.

[Q] Playboy: Overall, are the media going overboard reporting on the media?

[A] Lehrer: No. The media need to be covered because they are an important player in the public's business. The coverage should be as vigorous and direct as that of all other public institutions.

[A] MacNeil We did an entire program on this recently. I don't think the media are a sidebar to this war anymore; rather, they became a main news story as the event accelerated. Coverage of the media has even outpaced that of the peace movement. The battle for public opinion, both domestically and internationally, has become a major ingredient of this war from the first shot.

[Q] Playboy: To the point of overkill? CNN has launched a show called Gulf Talk, and all of the networks started leading into their war coverage with logos and opening music more reminiscent of a miniseries than of the news.

[A] MacNeil This is a very difficult point. There's nothing in the First Amendment or anywhere else that says that good taste shall govern. I don't know whether it's overkill. Obviously, the war is a story that is pre-eminent in the minds of the American people--they've stopped traveling, they've started worrying about their kids' futures, they are completely consuming the news. It's a story that Americans are really thirsting to have covered. So the media are going to cover it in their own way, and that's going to include a lot of bad taste--groundless speculation, sensationalism, false heroics. But those are all things that the popular media do in a democracy. So it's up to the viewers to choose which shows they like and which ones go too far--and that colors their attitude from then on. If you think channel X went overboard, that they're just a bunch of assholes, then you're not going to watch them anymore. If you think they're doing a great job, you're going to make them your favorite.

Also, remember that we're in a time when the networks are in serious trouble. All of them are competing with one another and trying to make themselves distinctive.

[Q] Playboy: Speaking of which, is there any specific network--or are there correspondents, for that matter--that deserves special mention for its coverage of the Gulf war?

[A] Lehrer: Yes. But I would not want to name them. There is too much attention already paid to individual journalists.

[Q] Playboy: OK, then with the caveat that you're not glorifying--rather, simply admiring--the coverage, who is doing a good job in the Gulf"?

[A] MacNeil Well, I don't want to get into personalities, either, but it's clear that [CNN's] Peter Arnett is now--and will be historically--a very significant player in this coverage. There will be a lot of seminars at universities about this someday. In my personal opinion, I think journalism is lucky to have as experienced a man in this position at this time. I don't see a point in singling out others.

[Q] Playboy: What about the Arnett bashing that has been going on--the charges by some media analysts that his reporting is so censored by the Iraqi government that it's pointless to listen to it?

[A] MacNeil: I'm upset about that. I asked some of those bashers, What are the media supposed to do, accept everything from the Pentagon as gospel truth, and everything from Iraq as lies? They didn't know what to say.

[Q] Playboy: What about our Government's censorship? Military security notwithstanding, is Government censorship of breaking news stories appropriate?

[A] Lehrer: Yes. Censorship is necessary to the conduct of a war. But I believe that among reasonable people, this doesn't have to be a problem.

[A] MacNeil: I agree with Jim. It's obvious in any war that it's appropriate for the military to withhold some information altogether, or in some cases take the press into its confidence, as was done in World War Two. There are some things that it's appropriate to withhold even from the freest of free presses. In this war, the Pentagon seems to have learned the wrong lesson from the war in Vietnam, saying, "We're not going to lose a war again through the press," then going as far as they can to hermetically seal it off. I think that's fair; they're trying to control it much more this time. But the press didn't lose the war in Vietnam.

The other thing is that the Pentagon has an adversarial relationship with the press that grew up two decades ago, when the fundamental trust between Government and press broke down. In the early Sixties, you believed what the Government said until it was proven to be a lie. After Vietnam, you believed that something was a lie until proven correct. There's an element of this that has carried over to the professionalism of the press. The Pentagon is still dealing with this as part of the Vietnam hangover.

[Q] Playboy: The censorship issue aside, is the public simply being fed too much information about the Gulf war?

[A] Lehrer: There is no such thing as too much information on such a story.

[Q] Playboy: Then let's move from content to form. Throughout the war coverage, the public has embraced TV's quick-cut coverage--with its sound bites, opinion polls and hourly updates. Is the industry going through a life change--with this MTV-style news on one end and Mac-Neil/Lehrer's round-table type of discourse on the other?

[A] Lehrer: There are a lot of people in this business who think the thirty-minute nightly newscast is the only way to do news on television. But they're wrong. In the new world of CNN, VCRs and public-affairs outlets, the network news programs are losing their audience. People want more news, not less.

[A] MacNeil: It's insulting to the people, really! There are millions and millions of well-educated, thoughtful, curious people in this country who want to get news on television. It's insulting to them to say you've got to turn it. into MTV to get their attention.

[Q] Playboy: Public television has a reputation of speaking mostly to a liberal audience. Is that true in your case?

[A] Lehrer: We've got both conservatives and liberals reacting to what we do. I don't think it's accurate to describe the public-television audience in general as liberal. But I can't prove or disprove that.

[Q] Playboy: We've seen demographics, provided by your publicity department, suggesting that your program is watched by the better educated, more affluent viewer. That smacks of elitism, doesn't it?

[A] MacNeil: We broadcast for the people who are interested in knowing how the system is working today. We try to clarify the issues that the system throws up.

[A] Lehrer: Look! The fact of the matter is that as long as I'm on this program, there's no way it can be elitist. I'm not from the elite; MacNeil isn't from the elite. Sure, the surveys will show that a lot of our viewers went to college, but we also have a lot of viewers who have only a high school education or below. Our program is very accessible. We do try to work through the complexities. We start with the A of an issue and work through the B, then the C. I think it's elitist to suggest that only people with college degrees care about war, peace and taxes.

[A] MacNeil: A lot of this springs from the old assumption that what everybody does on television should be appealing to everybody who watches television. I think that used to be the governing idea. "What? You guys can't be doing viable television, because you appeal to only a segment of the audience!" Well. I think that audience is now breaking up into many segments. We put on a quieter, more thoughtful----Well, I don't know how to put it; there is a more civilized atmosphere to what we do. Some people find it boring. But the people who find it boring don't watch, and the people who do watch don't find it boring.

[A] Lehrer: Right. If you care about arms control, then a story about arms control is not boring. If you don't give a shit about arms control, all stories about arms control are boring. People generally imply that MacNeil/Lehrer could have a wider audience if we would make some appeal to that wider audience. But, as I said, it's deliberately accessible.

[Q] Playboy: Still, you seem to be saying your program is directed at those who run the system--those with a compelling need for the information you provide.

[A] MacNeil: In a sense, yes. People who are college-educated are the people who run the country. But they certainly aren't the whole country. And that certainly doesn't mean that only college-educated people appear on our program.

[A] Lehrer: I have a point to make. There are thirty-seven million people who don't have health insurance in this country. Those thirty-seven million people probably do not watch MacNeil/Lehrer. But the people who can make it possible for them to have health insurance--the people able to effect change--may watch the program. We believe, as Jefferson said, that it's necessary to have an informed electorate. We try to inform our audience, whoever they are.

[Q] Playboy: What news shows do you watch--other than your own--to get the kind of information you need?

[A] MacNeil I watch almost no television besides CNN, which is on here in the office all day long; I use it as a tip service. I also watch 60 Minutes quite often. But I switch the TV off when I'm finished at work, so I don't see the morning and evening network news shows.

If you work in television, you never want to watch it. You could spend your whole clay watching television, but then you'd never read a book.

[Q] Playboy: Let's talk about the tone of your program. Some say that a postgraduate degree is required to understand it. With that kind of reputation, how can you reach the people?

[A] MacNeil: [Laughs] I don't know that that's true. That implies that because we're so highbrow, people are scared away. But even though the program may have a reputation among some groups that you need a Ph.D. to watch it, I believe what Jim says is true: It's deliberately accessible. It tries to make things as intellectually absorbable as possible. And another point is that the people who are uninterested in what's happening or who are outside the system don't watch Jennings, Brokaw or Rather, either. And they don't read Playboy.

[A] Lehrer: One of the most telling questions I was ever asked when I was a newspaperman was by a little fifth-grade girl in Texas. She asked, "When you sit down to write a story, who do you see reading it? Your mother? An old high school teacher?" It was a stunning question.

So, no, I sure as hell don't see somebody with a Ph.D. as my only audience when I write copy for MacNeil/Lehrer. When we do an interview on the show, we ask the questions that anybody would ask. If somebody says "the Fed," we say, "You mean the Federal Reserve."

[Q] Playboy: Step-by-step news analysis with a little Sesame Street thrown in.

[A] MacNeil: That's a point that can be made. But you can also make the argument that the networks, which are trying to be popular, are in a perverse way even more elitist.

[Q] Playboy: Explain.

[A] MacNeil: The network journalists are as sophisticated in what they do as we are in what we do. They're interchangeable, really, with any other network journalist. They don't have the time to ask the basic questions--What happens now? What happens after that?--so they have to compress everything into short periods of time. Consequently, a lot of what they do is in a sort of shorthand.

[A] Lehrer: My favorite example is the Dow Jones. Say you're sitting in Ada, Oklahoma, and you're watching the evening news show. The anchor says, "The Dow Jones closed down eighty-four points today," and you say, "What the hell does that mean? Is that something I should be worried about?" I mean, who except a very few people knows what the Dow Jones really means? [Laughs]

[Q] Playboy: You're making some good points, but----

[A] Lehrer: But you feel as if a dump truck just pulled up and unloaded on you.

[A] MacNeil You ask a damn-fool, simple question and gel a three-hour answer. [Laughs]

[A] Lehrer: We just hate to talk about ourselves. The truth of the matter is, if we were guests on our own show, we'd never be asked back, because our answers are too damn long.

[A] MacNeil Right. So could you keep your questions a little shorter? [Laughs]

[Q] Playboy: OK. Let's back up." How did you get to be The MacNeil/Lehrer News-Hour'?

[A] MacNeil Why don't you ask him? He's younger! He's got a shorter bio. [Laughs]

[Q] Playboy: All right. Jim?

[A] Lehrer: I made the decision when I was about sixteen or seventeen years old that I wanted to be a writer, a newspaperman--for all the wrong reasons, in some ways. I lived in Beaumont, Texas, down near the coast, and two things happened when I reached my sophomore year in high school: One, I discovered for sure that I was not going to be a major-league baseball player [laughs,] but at the same time, I noticed these incredibly neat guys who used to come around baseball practice--the sportswriters. I just loved them, and I decided that would be a terrific thing to be. Two, an English teacher of mine told me, "Hey, Jimmy, you can really write." So the two things, you know, kind of came together.

[Q] Playboy: So you began as a sportswriter?

[A] Lehrer: Well, no. I wanted to be a fiction writer, but I remembered Hemingway's dictum that if you want to be a writer, be a newspaperman first. It keeps bread on the table, forces you to deal with the English language every day, and if you pay attention, it may give you something to write about later. Hemingway also said you should spend only about two or three years being a journalist. So I'm way over. But that's how I started out.

[Q] Playboy: How did you get into public television?

[A] Lehrer: I was an investigative reporter for the Dallas Times Herald, then I was city editor. But I had written this story that was produced as a film. [Laughs] It was called Viva Max! Peter Ustinov and Jonathan Winters were in it. I was paid forty-live thousand dollars for it. I had been making eleven thousand a year at the Times Herald, but my wife and I figured we could live for five years on the movie money.

[Q] Playboy: So you left the paper. Was it easy adjusting to the life of a free-lancer?

[A] Lehrer: Well, the first day you don't have to go to work, you get scared. There's this typewriter with a blank page in it staring you right in the face. But before long, the local public-television station in Dallas asked me to consult with them one day a week. Finally, I began going full time.

[Q] Playboy: And now you relish your job.

[A] Lehrer: Oh, sure, it's terrific work. It's like eating candy, like a little kid's fantasy for me. I mean, the fire engines are going to go by here in a minute and Robin and I can go and find out what the hell is going on. We get to chase fires and, hell, I've been doing that for thirty years now.

[Q] Playboy: Your turn. Robin. Was yours a similar road to MacNeil/Lehrer?

[A] MacNeil: No, my history is totally different. I never wanted to be a journalist at all. All through my teenage years, I thought I would go into the Canadian navy. My dad had been in the navy during the war, and that's what I was going to do. We never discussed anything else. But to get into the navy, I had to pass an exam, and I flunked the algebra section, so I couldn't get into the naval college. I went off to school, hoping to get into the naval college later, but after about a year, I discovered that I didn't want to go into the navy after all. I had done some acting in high school and college and, as a result of that, I was hired by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation to do some radio plays. I did quite a lot of them.

After two years of college, I quit and went into radio. I was an all-night disc jockey for a year, and I continued to act in summer stock. Finally, I came to New York to try Broadway.

[Q] Playboy: The boulevard of broken dreams.?

[A] MacNeil [Langhs] Right. But, fortunately, I had a vision in Times Square. A voice came to me out of the blue that said, "You'd make a lousy actor."

[A] Lehrer: What it really said was, "Get the hell out of here." [Laughs]

[A] MacNeil Yeah. Like, "What are you doing here? You're supposed to be a writer. You're supposed to be the cool one behind the scenes--the writer, not the guy selling his ass out there, not the raw meat. And if you're going to do that, you'd better go back to college."

So I went back to Canada and spent three more years getting a degree, all the time working in radio and television for the CBC. I got my degree and got out of Canada as quickly as I could.

[Q] Playboy: Joining the likes of Peter Jennings, Morley Safer and so many other Canadians who'd eventually make a mad dash for American television.

[A] MacNeil: Well, it all seemed to be happening somewhere besides Canada. But I actually went to London to write plays.

[Q] Playboy: Did you have any success?

[A] MacNeil: Well, I wrote the plays, but they were never produced. [Laughs] I was getting married and needed a job. And I got a temporary position at Independent Television News in London, just as it was starting off. Then someone suggested I try Reuters News. So I started writing news there and stayed for five years. That was my real beginning as a journalist. After that, people offered me one job after another. Finally, I went to NBC; in 1965, I was co-anchor for a show called The Schorr-Mat-Neil Report.

[Q] Playboy: Why didn't yon stay with NBC?

[A] MacNeil: Because it wasn't reporting, it wasn't what I really wanted to do as a journalist. So I went back to London and worked for the British Broadcasting Corporation as a reporter for its weekly Panorama series, which dealt with in-depth stories. Then I returned to the States and began with the National Public Affairs Center for Television in Washington. That's where Jim and I met.

[Q] Playboy: Your first joint assignment in public television was coverage of the Watergate hearings.

[A] MacNeil: Right. Jim came in as the other correspondent on a series called America '73 in Washington.

[A] Lehrer: And we did the Watergate hearings together--gavel to gavel. Pretty soon, we discovered that we lived near each other in Bethesda and that we also had daughters in the same kindergarten class. As a result of the Watergate hearings, we ended up sitting next to each other, bun to bun, for four months--day in, day out. By the end of the hearings, we were close friends, both personally and professionally.

[Q] Playboy: And that led to fifteen years of nightly news broadcasts.

[A] Lehrer: We were lucky. We just happened to come along at the right time. What we wanted to do was what public television needed, and there was an audience for it at the time.

[Q] Playboy: Whose idea was the show?

[A] Lehrer: [John] jay Iselin, who was running WNET at the time, wanted Robin to do something nightly, so Robin started the program and brought me in. I'm not putting down my role, but it was his deal to begin with. He brought me into it and we developed the thing together.

We're very much in sync about what we wanted to do and what we've done. And what is so incredible about it is that we've been successful doing what we wanted to do, rather than what somebody else wanted us to do. I think that's the most remarkable thing of all.

[A] MacNeil: I was going to say the same thing.

[A] Lehrer: But the story of how all this happened is--well, it's a wonderful story. When the show started--and it was to be Robin's show--they had to think of a name. Something generic. So, at first, it was The Robert MacNeil Report. Then, when I came on in the joint deal, the name had to be changed.

[A] MacNeil: We spent days trying to think of a name: Night Beat, Night Watch, Night whatever.

[A] Lehrer: And they said no, no, no. Since Robin was going to be number one and I was going to be kind of a degree less--which I'm very comfortable with, by the way--they had to figure out what to call us. I told them it had better be something generic or they were going to create a monster. [Laughs]

[A] MacNeil: Two monsters. [Laughs]

[A] Lehrer: So they made it The MacNeil/ Lehrer Report. And they created a monster. I mean, they gave us power that they didn't have to give us. That's what it boils down to.

[Q] Playboy: How so?

[A] MacNeil: Because of the spin-oft benefit; the name became a commodity. I don't mean that there is a profit in that--there can't be a profit in public television, of course. Or in the NewsHour.

[A] Lehrer: But the name now means something. Which is really weird.

[Q] Playboy: Like the Good Housekeeping seal?

[A] MacNeil: In a sense. For instance, NBC recently wanted to do a series with C. Everett Koop, after he retired as Surgeon General. But Koop insisted that MacNeil/Lehrer produce it, because he had worked with us and found the spirit--or ethos--here agreeable. We eventually produced five one-hour prime-time shows for NBC.

[A] Lehrer: They were terrific.

[Q] Playboy: Let's get back to your show. How is MacNeil/Lehrer different from the network news shows?

[A] Lehrer: Robin's original idea was to do one story a night for thirty minutes; that was fifteen years ago. Now, that was kind of an unusual idea. I mean, everybody said, "What? People are not going to sit in front of their TVs for thirty minutes and listen to one story a night!"

[A] MacNeil: Right. They said, "Those are just a couple of talking heads and we don't need that." But eventually, a small majority agreed and we got the go-ahead. Still, we really had to fight for our survival, because many people disagreed with the concept. But in the end, we gave public television credibility and plausibility. We helped them define themselves, bring in an audience. Therefore, we've been given latitude to do essentially what we think is good journalism.

[Q] Playboy: And where does that leave the network news shows.?

[A] MacNeil: The networks are prisoners of their own system, in a way. All the good intentions they bring to their shows are ultimately shaped and molded by the imperatives of commercial television--which are ways to attract the maximum possible audience to every program in order to make it an efficient vehicle for commercials. So whatever you do as responsible journalism--or great entertainment--has to be secondary to that. It means you have to broadcast to the dummy and the well-informed at the same time; the person who is curious and the person who isn't.

[Q] Playboy: But don't you have to do that on your show?

[A] MacNeil: Well, yeah, you've got to get everybody into the tent at the same time. But the networks do that by formula; the programs are designed for short attention spans, lots of violent action, visual stimulation, one thing interrupting another. Anything that a Rather, a Jennings or a Brokaw does in terms of serious journalism is shaped by all of this. And in one corner of television, there should be a place where it can be tried differently.

[A] Lehrer: So everybody said that to do one story in depth for thirty minutes or so each night was crazy. Well, I'll be a son of a bitch, but people did want it!

[A] MacNeil: What public television did--and what it stands for--was to push the network imperatives aside. And we got away with it. I mean, if the idea had fallen on deaf ears--if the audience hadn't been there--we would have been out of business in six months.

[A] Lehrer: It's bullshit to think that television news has to follow the formula. Television shows can come in all forms. There can be the MTV type of television news and there can be our kind of television news.

[A] MacNeil: And we have stretched television journalism a bit at one end of the spectrum. We have increased the possibilities for journalism on TV. And we've had an influence on commercial television as well.

[Q] Playboy: How?

[A] Lehrer: By the emergence of network shows like Nightline, for instance. And Sunday Morning with David Brinkley.

[Q] Playboy: But in the long run, isn't it true that you can't do as much as the networks do because public television doesn't have the money?

[A] MacNeil: We use targets of opportunity--Government officials, Cabinet members, whoever's available and in a responsible position to answer questions. But, no, we don't have crews all over the world. For example, a few years ago, when the networks had all those crews in Beirut, we didn't have any. But I think our audience is well served despite that. We run some documentary types of reports; but even if we had the kind of money the networks have, it would be crazy for us to do what they do, because they do it brilliantly, and there's no need for a fourth one to come along.

[A] Lehrer: From our perspective, the purpose of really good film or tape coverage from abroad is to take people to that place so they'll better understand the story. That's where we hurt; it's sometimes diffcult to do that when we don't have that little piece of tape.

[Q] Playboy: But isn't relying on that little piece of tape the network approach--the use of showbiz to sell the news?

[A] Lehrer: There is absolutely nothing wrong with showbiz. I mean, we have an obligation as professionals to make the news interesting and accessible; and there's nothing wrong with using show-business techniques to do that.

[A] MacNeil: And what is showbiz, after all? Showbiz is entertaining people, holding on to them, keeping their attention. We're required to do that in our way, and we use techniques to do that. We run news tapes at the beginning of our program, but that isn't the central act and core of our being. We acquire them fairly cheaply, while commercial television has to spend most of its budget getting those pictures. We spend our money on the creative end--the thinking part, the ideas and the story part.

[Q] Playboy: How about sponsors? There have been accusations that sponsors can influence broadcasts. You, of course, have no sponsors, but you do have powerful corporate contributors. Is there ever any potential for influence by them?

[A] MacNeil: I think that the days of commercial networks' or commercial television's being directly influenced by advertisers are long gone. The days are over when Eastern Airlines could threaten, "If there's an air crash on the news tonight, drop our commercials." In commercial TV, the idea now is to make a show a better vehicle for commercials, for all kinds of advertisers.

[A] Lehrer: I don't think that in the past several years there has been one instance of undue influence in all of broadcast TV. It's sure not the case with us. The money we get is the cleanest money you could ever get. The underwriters of our program know what the rules are.

[Q] Playboy: Nobody has ever tried a little nudge with MacNeil/Lehrer?

[A] MacNeil: It's funny. The only one that ever tried was Mobil Oil. That was when they had a very aggressive vice-president of public relations--Herb Schmertz--who was trying to make Mobil into a much more controversial player in the media. He was doing op-ed pieces in the Times, and we invited him onto the program one night when an oil crunch was going on. After a lot of hemming and hawing, he said he wouldn't come on unless he appeared first. We said, "The hell with that" and didn't put him on.

[A] Lehrer: Another example: When we had that big AT&T breakdown a while back, we decided we wanted to have the chairman of the board of AT&T, Robert Allen, come onto the show. Somebody said, "AT&T is one of our underwriters. How would it look?" And I asked, "If AT&T weren't one of our underwriters, would we want to have him on?" Everybody said yes, so we did it as a news story.

I suppose it's really hard for people to understand that we wouldn't be influenced by underwriters, but you have to take it on faith. And if you watch our program, you realize that we're not influenced in any way.

[Q] Playboy: The network anchors reportedly make millions of dollars in salaries. You fellows don't make that kind of money. Does that bother you?

[A] Lehrer: I have no idea how much the network anchors make.

[A] MacNeil: I have no idea, either. All I know is that I see stories every now and then about what their salaries are supposed to be. I don't know specifically.

[Q] Playboy: And you don't feel even a little bit of envy?

[A] Lehrer: Not at all.

[A] MacNeil: Not a bit.

[Q] Playboy: Still, it would be nice to make a couple of million a year.

[A] MacNeil: We are looked after by public television. We both have opportunities to make other income through writing, and so on, and we are both very comfortable. Besides, I wouldn't for a moment trade what I have for what the anchors get, simply because of the other parts of the equation--the other things that go along with the kind of money they make.

[Q] Playboy: Such as the competitive, cutthroat atmosphere?

[A] MacNeil: Yes, and that's something that's common in any highly competitive business--on Wall Street, for instance, or in academia.

[A] Lehrer: But the way to success--the only way to success--in television is to be on air. So you've got to get more air time and make sure somebody else has less air time. It's like insurance salesmen competing, only it's just so damned personal.

[A] MacNeil: I can remember when I was with NBC and we were covering politics. My competitor at CBS was a guy I really liked--Bob Pierpoint, a wonderful guy. At the time, CBS had this thing they did after some politician won an election or something. There would be this group of reporters gathered around and throwing questions at him, and somebody from CBS would quietly come up behind him with a set of earphones. He'd whisper into the politician's ear, "Walter Cronkite wants to talk to you," and then plop the earphones onto the politician's head. [Laughs] In the middle of this gang of reporters--bang!--and Cronkite would have a live, exclusive interview. So I told Pierpoint that if they kept that up, the hell with it, I was going to pull the earphones off!

[A] Lehrer: Look, to be noncompetitive in this business is to be dead.

[A] MacNeil: Yeah, but you can be fair to the other guy at the same time.

[A] Lehrer: Right. Fairness is what it's all about. Just being a fair competitor.

[A] MacNeil: A fair competitor.

[Q] Playboy: Has either of you been offered a network job?

[A] MacNeil: I had the chance to be one of three anchors at ABC.

[A] Lehrer: Just for the history, his offer was to replace Barbara Walters and Harry Reasoner.

[Q] Playboy: Why didn't you accept?

[A] MacNeil: Because when I looked at what they did--how they divided up the available time to the anchors on a show, which was largely doing intros to reporters' pieces--I saw that it was actually a very short time. I imagined myself competing with two other guys for time and bargaining with executive producers for another six seconds. I didn't want to spend my life doing that. My talents don't lead in that direction. Here, it's much more fun.

I can remember years ago, when I was a kid--this was during World War Two--I was out sailing and some of my friends wanted me to go along for a ride on their big sailboat. But I preferred my own little boat. It's much more satisfying to sail your own boat on your own little pond. Then again, in the case of our show, the boat has gotten a lot bigger as we've sailed her.

[A] Lehrer: I cannot think of two other journalists who have a better deal than we do. We are truly the masters of our own screw-ups and un screw-ups. We created this organization to do what we wanted it to do. And it does.

[The telephone rings. MacNeil answers it, talks for a moment, hangs up and returns to the conversation.]

[A] MacNeil: That was Morley Safer from 60 Minutes. He said to tell you that we've lusted only in our hearts. [Laughs]

[Q] Playboy: We'll remember that, thanks. We were talking about competition in the news industry.

[A] MacNeil: The networks are in a bind because their audience is shrinking, and one of the ways the competition has become fiercer among the three of them is by battling one another for firsts. Which anchor was first at the big event? And the newspapers and news magazines connive in all this because they applaud the winner. They say, "NBC won because Brokaw got to the Wall first," or "CBS won because Rather got to Baghdad first," or "Jennings won because he was in South Africa with Mandela." And these new forms of competition are supposed to mark their journalism!

[A] Lehrer: Eric Sevareid makes the point that it's the print people who set the standard for the competition on TV. They publicize the fact that Rather was in Tiananmen Square and the other guys weren't, making a big deal out of it.

[Q] Playboy: Have the anchors become as important as the stories they cover?

[A] MacNeil: Yeah, and they all have their kind of clique in the press, too. There are some columnists who persistently love one network or one correspondent more than another, and they're there to cheer him whenever he opens his mouth. For instance, Tom Shales of The Washington Post loves Dan Rather's ass, you know?

[A] Lehrer: And he's lost a lot of credibility with me because of that. It's absolutely crazy.

[Q] Playboy: So the focus of newscasting is becoming somewhat lost.

[A] MacNeil: Right. The network anchors and principal reporters are now like the movie stars of the Thirties and Forties, only they're paid more than those stars earned. I once saw a survey that said Barbara Walters had a name identification of ninety-four percent. That's higher than politicians, even the President.

[A] Lehrer: And to think, some people never get over the first time they're recognized at the 7-Eleven! That sort of adulation makes grown men and women less than adults.

[Q] Playboy: Are you saying that the temperamental anchor person has, in effect, helped create a sort of star system in television news?

[A] MacNeil: In my experience, NBC was a kinder, gentler place to be when I worked there. But now there's a two-world feeling at the networks: There are the favored few who get put on the air and have all the fame and all the money, and then there are a lot of hard-working journalists who do the work but are not recognized. There is real tension there, and some executives manipulate that tension, play one off another.

[A] Lehrer: The other part is that since the executives feel that they are paying these people so damn much money, they've got the right to do anything they want with them. There's this kind of built-in contempt, so when someone takes a fall, nobody really cries very much.

[Q] Playboy: How does all of this affect the viewers?

[A] MacNeil: The viewers don't see it. They watch their favorite shows and don't switch around that much. Not long ago, the president of NBC News gave a very sensible speech and commented that there's a lot of very intense and very expensive competition among the networks that the viewers aren't the least bit aware of. The viewer doesn't know whether one network is ten seconds behind in reporting a story. Most people don't know which anchor belongs to what network! And so there's an awful lot of money being spent on useless forms of contrived competition.

[A] Lehrer: We are fortunate to have the time, the ability and the opportunity to do more than that. It's just wonderful.

[Q] Playboy: What do you mean? Are we supposed to believe that there's no cutthroat competition at MacNeil/Lehrer?

[A] MacNeil: In television, all the people behind the camera refer to the people in front of the camera as "the talent." That's a term of contempt--that is, when you're not kissing its ass. [Laughs] Behind the scenes, you can give yourself power by manipulating talent, by playing on jealousy and rivalry. Public television doesn't confer some kind of virginity on this sort of exercise--we're not purer or holier or less ambitious than anyone else in the business. But what I'm saying is that we--Jim and I--have a unique relationship and we value it, because it relieves us of that particular piece of professional anxiety. The hardest thing in this business is getting a straight answer from people, because they always have a motive and they put a little spin on it.

[A] Lehrer: That's what makes Robin and me stronger. Because when one of us gets into any kind of situation where we need advice, we can depend on each other to give an honest opinion. We're never alone. Ordinarily, being a TV correspondent can be a very isolating thing.

[A] MacNeil: There is a feeling among people who make the decisions in television that there's something a bit unfair about how you succeed in TV. You may succeed because you're a great journalist, but you also may succeed because you have a cute face. This business is awfully easy for some people; they get jumped up so fast. One day, somebody's at your door asking for your advice--and he's scared, and you give him a little compassion. You turn around six months later, and here's this arrogant son of a bitch earning a million and a half. Everybody knows who they are in this business. Male and female.

[Q] Playboy: For those who don't know whom you're talking about, do you care to name names?

[A] MacNeil: No.

[A] Lehrer: Basically, there's an animal-trainer aspect to it: Keep the stars happy.

[Q] Playboy: And what in your relationship--or at MacNeil/Lehrer: in general--is different?

[A] MacNeil: Who else in this business is going to give you the real gen--the truth? Working with Jim--because he's a good friend--I can be at peace with my soul. I don't have to go home at night worrying whether or not he's going to do something to further his career at my expense. I don't have to worry about someone's shooting me in the back here.

[A] Lehrer: Whom can you let your hair down with, if the guy you're competing with for air time is the only guy you can talk to? Look, if Robin says to me, "Hey, your opening is a little long tonight," or "Your copy on the budget is a little long," I know what he means. It's not him trying to get a little more air time; he just means it's too long. Do you realize how rare that is in this business? I mean, I have a colleague who has the power to diminish me but will not use it!

[Q] Playboy: In what other ways is your partnership different?

[A] MacNeil: Apart from the fact that we can be comfortable--not feel we're going to stab each other in the back--we try to make it clear throughout our organization that decisions on news are not made for the reasons of getting on air, getting exposure. And, also, that what is good for the program is good for everybody.

[A] Lehrer: Let's be honest about it, though. This is The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHonr, coproduced by MacNeil/Lehrer Productions. So we have to be eight-hundred-pound gorillas around here. There are not a lot of people walking into Robin's or my office saying, "By the way, I really thought you blew the show last night." The producers and staff here don't do that very much.

[A] MacNeil: Yet, we'd be so kind to them if they did that....

[A] Lehrer: As we kicked them out. [Laughs]

[Q] Playboy: But is that kind of criticism taken well anywhere?

[A] Lehrer: I don't think honesty is built into the process. That's what Robin is saying.

[A] MacNeil: But it's not built into any hierarchical process. I can't imagine someone at The New York Times walking into Scotty Reston's office and saying, "I thought your column stank yesterday."

[Q] Playboy: According to statistics, the great majority of Americans don't pay much attention to the news in any form, television or print. If that's the case, aren't you and the other journalists taking yourselves a little too seriously?

[A] MacNeil: But then look at the people who do take [the media] seriously--those who use them to get elected, to stay in office, to communicate to the people they're governing. They take it extremely seriously.

[A] Lehrer: There's a question that everybody in our business should ask himself all the time--at least if he's serious about what he does: If somebody did nothing but read my magazine, or my column, or whatever in the hell it is I do, could he have an informed opinion about all the key issues of our day? If the answer is no. then something's wrong.

[Q] Playboy: And do you think you're doing that job adequately?

[A] Lehrer: Well, that is one of the reasons we've expanded to an hour. When we did a half hour, we were a supplement to the newscasts. At an hour, we're an alternative to them. If you want to find out what's happened in the past twenty-four hours that's important, then you go to MacNeil/Lehrer. We believe strongly that it is the public's right to know, to be informed of the political decisions that affect their lives. We don't have a constitutional mandate to do that, but we have an obligation. I believe that with all my heart and soul. Da-da-da-da! Fanfare! Forgive me. I get carried away.

[Q] Playboy: But this gets back to the question of whether or not the news is important only to those who have an interest in maintaining power.

[A] MacNeil: You can't lay that at the networks' door. In any generation of American history, it's always been the media of the day that shape the political dialog and the way that discourse gets to the public. They decide which column to run, how long the sentences will be, all that kind of stuff. Television is just the latest in that line and it's extremely influential. I think the way TV presents the news has been helpful in shaping how political dialog gets across.

[Q] Playboy: In what way?

[A] MacNeil: It wasn't the politicians who invented the dreaded sound bite, after all. And it isn't the politicians who have made the sound bite shorter every year and every time there's an election. The pace and brevity are dictated by the requirements of commercial TV. So, yes, there is some connection between the way television news has evolved in the quick-hit mode and the way political dialog happens in this country now. And that distresses so many people.

[A] Lehrer: Politicians didn't create this atmosphere.

[Q] Playboy: Do you agree that they use it?

[A] MacNeil: Well, politicians have never been immune to exploiting--and quite rightly--whatever they thought the opportunities were at any particular time in order to get something across and sell themselves. Naturally, they use it.

[Q] Playboy: You don't run political commercials on public television, but what are your thoughts on them?

[A] MacNeil: Well, you see, that's not really for us to judge. I don't want to speak for us as an institution, or for Jim, but personally, I deplore the fact that so much of the political dialog is carried through commercial spots. I think they're bad for the public's health. I'd like to see them banned, but I don't have any say in that and, the way things work in this country, they won't be. I think it's kind of monstrous, but then, I think it's kind of monstrous that news programs are interrupted by commercials.

[A] Lehrer: But the other part of that is, if you're going to be President of the United States, you have to be able to communicate to the American people on television. That is as much of a qualification for the job as anything else. In fact, it may be at the top of the list.

[A] MacNeil: Mondale said that.

[Q] Playboy: Yet he did lose the election to "the great communicator."

[A] Lehrer: It wasn't commercials that got Reagan elected, it was the sound biles.

[A] MacNeil: The first time I ever heard a Ronald Reagan speech was during his 1966 gubernatorial campaign in California. I had thought, Well, he's only an actor. But that first speech I heard was fantastic. It didn't matter that he read it off cards and he was saying the same standard things he'd said before--he had that crowd. And he could have had a crowd like that a hundred years ago.

[Q] Playboy: How does George Bush measure up as a communicator?

[A] MacNeil: George Bush gave a speech on the budget some time ago; it was one of the few times he'd spoken directly to the American people. He wanted them to get out and do something, but they didn't pay any attention. That may be one of the most significant moments of the Bush Presidency. He had the bully pulpit to urge the people to support their Congressmen on the summit tax package, but nobody paid any attention. And if you can't do that....

[Q] Playboy: Does television ultimately tell the American people whom to vote for?

[A] Lehrer: Well, not exactly. We don't have that much power. I mean, we have fifteen hundred stories to do every day and we choose four or five. The big complaint is--and it may have some validity--that the people at the top in television are mainly while males, and most of them have gotten to the top by covering politics. That has always been the route to success in American journalism. Political stories may be overworked in this country, and some of the nittygrilty stories aren't covered as they should be.

[A] MacNeil: It's interesting how it's changing. The ladder of promotion in American journalism has always been via national politics and foreign affairs. But now the economic stories are just as important. I wouldn't be surprised if some of these guys who cover business start to go much faster on the promotion track.

[Q] Playboy: Do these journalists carry ideological baggage with them as they move along the promotion track?

[A] MacNeil: By and large, the media in this country are nonideological. The days of the partisan press are over. And I think broadcasting influenced that, because its reporting is more or less down the middle. But there's a new ideology creeping into vogue: that Government is dumb, and everything that has to do with Government is not relevant. It's no longer "the left" and "the right"; people simply think that Washington is not relevant.

[Q] Playboy: Can you deal with that?

[A] MacNeil: These days, there's this notion that if you're going to be a sharp media person and a disturber of the peace, you should be knocking Government all the time. Well, we don't buy that. It's not that we're here to praise the Government or its institutions, but I do think that it's part of our job to say, "This is the system that runs our country, and here's how it's working at this particular moment. Is it working well? Is it not working well?"

When one of the debates about the budget was going on, I heard NBC say in the opening lines of its news show something like, "In Washington today, it was like a fifth-grade schoolyard brawl." Well, I mean----

[A] Lehrer: Give me a break! What the hell do they think democracy is all about?

[A] MacNeil: That was the opening line of the NBC Nightly News! It was as though we should all say, "Aw! Boo, Government!" It is their Government, too. Well, MacNeil/Lehrer is one journalistic institution that takes it seriously. We don't genuflect before it, but we do take it seriously. These are the institutions that run the country. They're deciding on the kinds of taxes a person pays, whether our kids are going to war or not.

[A] Lehrer: That's really important stuff. I do not want it on my conscience, as a professional journalist, to one day hear, "I watch MacNeil/Lehrer every night, and suddenly, we went to war and they didn't warn me!"

[A] MacNeil: Or "I watch MacNeil/Lehrer every night and they acted like cheerleaders for 'the ugly American!' " I mean, we have raised as many difficult questions about the Middle East as could be raised. There has been no question unasked--no tough question--about whether George Bush did the dumb thing or the smart thing, and whether the options are easy or difficult. I do sense, however, that this new feeling--this trendy feeling that Government is full of shit--has crept into the media.

[Q] Playboy: So what do you do about it?

[A] Lehrer: There are thousands of tents in the desert over there in Saudi Arabia, and that's what we have to concern ourselves with. The people in Washington, for example, make the decisions as to whether or not you go bankrupt when you get sick, so I think it's a failure of American journalism not to have made the people out there aware that our Government is as important as it is. They're not a bunch of kids; it's not the fifth grade. It's real and very important.

[A] MacNeil: If you joke about it all the time--if you knock it and treat it as an object of ridicule all the time--then you're playing into the idea that Government isn't useful. The most frightening phenomenon in this democracy is that fewer and fewer people vote. And if you don't like the fact that all those blue suits in Washington often seem more interested in surviving in their jobs in Congress than in dealing with important, principled issues, then there's one way to get them out: with your vote.

[Q] Playboy: And you feel a responsibility to get that message out.

[A] Lehrer: Well, I'll tell you. I go back to Oklahoma, Kansas and Texas a lot, because that's where I write my books, and I've got a lot of family out there. There are a lot of folks there who don't give a shit about ninety percent of what we do on MacNeil/Lehrer, but there are also a lot of them who do care about what we do.

So I always think about what the guy in Okmulgee, Oklahoma, should hear on our show--not what he wants to hear but what's important to him. That's my job. He can say to me at the local coffee shop, "You know, I don't give a shit about that budget stuff," and I'll say, "Yeah, but let me tell you why you should. Let me tell you what these guys are doing with your taxes. Now, you damn well better pay attention!"

[A] MacNeil: We're not trying to beat somebody over the head and say, "You have to watch this." It's just that we figure there are a few million people out there who are curious about what we put on the air every night and depend on it. These are the people we're talking to; the ones who don't give a damn don't watch.

[Q] Playboy: So your job, as you see it, is to rattle people a little?

[A] Lehrer: Remember H. L. Mencken's theory that the job of a journalist is to be a disturber of the peace. Well, that's what we're here to do: disturb the peace. I am not the least bit bothered about disrupting somebody's peace of mind in Tulsa or anywhere else. Quite the contrary.

[A] MacNeil: We're here for those people who, every now and then, are thirsty for more. If we weren't here, there wouldn't be anyplace else for them to go. None quite like us.

[Q] Playboy: You both sound confident of your ability to get the word out.

[A] Lehrer: From a personal standpoint, you can't do what we do and not be optimists. If we believed the country was going to hell in a hand basket--that Government was incapable of solving the problems and that we couldn't bring people together to talk about those problems--then we couldn't do the program. The idea that most journalists are cynics is bullshit. We're optimists. We believe that the systems work--the system of government, the system of justice, the system of public debate.

[A] MacNeil: And if the system proves incapable of solving a problem, we're going to talk about it.

[Q] Playboy: How have you both maintained this almost boyish enthusiasm for your jobs over the years?

[A] MacNeil: I can't imagine a life that is more fun than this one. It's just wonderful. I have had incredibly good luck. I just kept getting better and better jobs. I mean, people have actually paid me money to travel around the world and stay in nice hotels and eat good food and be where exciting things were happening--and then broadcast about it.

[A] Lehrer: That's the most terrific thing about what both of us have done, about the lives we have led. For the past thirty years, we've been present for all these incredible events. Maybe not as participants, but we were there. I just realized the other day--and I'm not sure you'll agree with this, Robin--that there is no such thing as a cliché for people like us anymore.

[Q] Playboy: What do you mean?

[A] Lehrer: In other words, somebody says, "Oh, he's just one of those goddamn millionaires," or "He's one of those poor people," or "He's one of those"--you know, fill in the blanks. Well, these are people we know! We have interviewed these folks! There are very few kinds of people, nationally or internationally, whom I have not already eyeballed, not already talked to. We have gotten to know all kinds of people throughout the world. It's just an incredible thing to be able to sit here and say that.

[A] MacNeil: I've always thought of myself as a writer, and the lives we've led have given us an endless procession of characters and stories. I mean, we're at the margins of great writing here.

[Q] Playboy: Have you been writing about these adventures?

[A] MacNeil: Not as much as we used to.

[A] Lehrer: In my case, I'm writing a bunch of novels and I've suddenly realized that I have all of these things just popping out of my head all the time--little stories.

[A] MacNeil: He writes novels like a hen lays eggs! You reach under him in the morning and there's another one. [Laughs]

[Q] Playboy: Who was the best guest you ever had on your show? Or the worst?

[A] MacNeil: There are too many bests and worsts. People I have enjoyed interviewing most, though, have usually been nonpoliticians. Artur Rubinstein. Yevtushenko. People like that.

[Q] Playboy: Overall, are you both pleased with the way things have turned out?

[A] Lehrer: Absolutely. You know, my dad had an eighth-grade education, so that means that when I was in the ninth grade, I had already done better in that way than he had. He was a corporal in the Marine Corps, and my brother and I were both lieutenants. My father was so proud to have two sons who were officers in the Marine Corps; and now, to have a son on national television, with his last name on the credits! God, it would have been such a terrific thing for him to see that. Unfortunately, he died before all this happened.

[A] MacNeil: Jim and I just happened to notice a few years ago that we are both living out our fathers' fantasies in some ways. My brothers have lived some parts of Dad's fantasies, but it's very real how the unfulfilled yearnings of parents guide children throughout their lives--whether it happens consciously or not.

[A] Lehrer: My father started a bus company in 1946. It lasted for a year and then went broke. It was a little three-bus line in Kansas. I now own the bus that my dad wanted to buy but couldn't afford: a 1946 Flexible Clipper--23 passengers, in pristine condition. It even smells like 1946. I keep it in a barn in West Virginia and, when I can, I bring it out and take people for rides in it.

So it gives me extra pleasure to know that my dad would have been in heaven for my having done what I've done.

[A] MacNeil: My dad died long before he knew about any of the stuff I've been able to do. But he loved books and he loved traveling and writing. And I've been able to do so much more of those things. He was also a great sailor, and I've owned the yachts he couldn't afford. So when I set out in the boat--to go on a two-week cruise down East to Maine--my father is in my thoughts. If only he could be here, enjoying this.

"This war has been a field day for tacticians, weapons specialists, people who observe political behavior, people who know Iraq. We feel very involved

"There are millions of people in this country who want to get news on television. It's insulting to them to say you've got to turn it into MTV to get their attention."

"It's terrific work. It's like eating candy, like a little kid's fantasy. The fire engines go by here and [we] find out what is going on. We get to chase fires."

"The network are prisoners of their own system. The good intentions they bring to their shows are ultimately shaped by the imperatives of commercial television."

I once saw a survey that said Barbara Walters had a name identification of ninety-four percent. That's higher than politicians, even the President."

"These days, there's this notion that if you're going to be a sharp media person, you should be knocking Government all the time. Well, we don't buy that."

"The idea that most journalists are cynics is bullshit. We believe that the systems work--the system of government, of justice, of public debate."