Investigating Pressing Issues

The bookshelves were empty, the furniture new. Sitting in his Kennedy School office, Marvin Kalb, the new director of the Barone Center for Press, Politics and Public Policy, discussed his plans for the center after three days as a full-fledged academic.

It has been 30 years since the former NBC News Correspondent was at Harvard, as a candidate for a Ph.D. in Russian History. His academic career ended abruptly when he accepted Edward R. Murrow's offer to work as a foreign correspondent. His career since then has spanned all aspects of political journalism.

So when the Kennedy School of Government needed a director for a new research center which proposed to examine the role of the press in the political process, Kalb was a logical choice. His years of experience in the field, combined with his prior academic training, made him a top choice for the job.

Kalb's appointment was announced this May, and he officially crossed the threshhold from journalist to scholar on June 1. But his experiences in Washington as NBC's chief diplomatic correspondent figure prominently in his plans for the Center.

"Everything I have observed in Washington leads me to the conclusion that the interrelationship between the press and the government has become very close. Newsmen do not like to feel that they are a part of the governmental process. I respect that view and I hold to it, but if you widen the lens, you inevitably come to the conclusion that the interrelationship is close," he says.

And the big picture is what Kalb plans to focus on at the center. The task of the Barone Center is to formulate an academic program that will enable both graduate and undergraduate students to understand the unique relationship between the press and the political world, he says.

Changes in the way the government functions have thrust the press into a more influential political role, Kalb says. "No policy of this government--or any administration--can succeed in this democracy unless the people understand and support the policy, no matter how brilliantly conceived," he says.

"The press is the middleman. It is in effect the professor for the public," Kalb says, adding, "policy is the result of the policy maker and the public." But Kalb says that recent developments in the press have unsettled his faith in broadcast journalism. "Network news has undergone profound changes. I worry about the trend toward increasing shallowness, pretension and egomaniacal compulsion," he says. "We must stick to old-fashioned values."

The problem, as Kalb perceives it, is that journalism has become a business. Today journalism is not only a calling, it's a business, and business requires accountants and this bottom-line compulsion that has very little to do with my image of journalism," he says.