Neal Shapiro: A Career Shaping Public Broadcasting

00:00:02
Speaker 1: This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing from iHeartRadio. My guest today is one of the most renowned executives in the history of American broadcast journalism. Neil Shapiro is the president and CEO of the public television organization WNET. With ten public media channels and one radio station, w NEET reaches nearly ten million viewers across the Tri state area. Prior to joining WNET, Shapiro served as the president of NBC News, where he oversaw MSNBC The Today Show, NBC Nightly News, Meet the Press, and Dateline. Shapiro also worked at ABC News for thirteen years and another eight years as the executive producer of Dateline, the show he inherited in Crisis. During his tenure at Dateline, he would transform the show into a primetime staple, eventually expanding it to five nights a week. Over the course of his career, Neil Shapiro has won thirty two Emmy Awards and thirty one Edward R. Murrow Awards. As the current Trump administration moved to dismantle the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and eliminate federal funding for public television. I wanted to understand what this means for w NET and whether public broadcasting can survive without government supports.

00:01:36
Speaker 2: The basic way to think about is this. Most PBS stations are all independently owned. Most are owned by the community, summer owned by university. They're part of the PBS, which the public broadcasting service, not even the public broadcasting system.

00:01:48
Speaker 1: That's part of the.

00:01:49
Speaker 2: Charm and the dysfunction of it. So we're not we all make our own decisions or we collectively make decisions.

00:01:54
Speaker 1: Same with NPR.

00:01:55
Speaker 2: Local stations are all part of NPR, but they make their own decisions and once on a time, for a long time, there was government funding that. It's a great story. So in nineteen sixty seven Linda Johnson said we need a public broadcasting system. He looked at with envy like what Britain had with the BBC and said we need that too, and was part of the Great Society, and there was a difference about how to fund it. Johnson said we should fund it like the BBC with a big endowment. There'll be immune from government pressure. And the Republicans said, let's fund it year by year so we can actually control what they do. So they compromised and they created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting with three Republicans and three Democrats on the board appointed by the President, and they would get money in a two year cycle and then they would distribute to the public overmed stations and public gradiestations. And the theory was that would keep us free from any kind of congressional pressure, and it kept it red from some But at the end of the day, as we sit here, there is no more Corporation for Public Broadcasting and there's no more federal funding. Why because in President Trump's plan, he was very clear that he doesn't believe in public broadcasting, and they set about systematically to make sure all fund they went away.

00:03:00
Speaker 1: Now, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting provided funds in two year cycles to the radio networks and the TV networks both exactly. And then that budget was like five hundred million dollars a year exactly that they distributed to everybody. Now, your description of the way a NEAT exists is the same for GBH and these other legacy public televisions. Everybody's independent. Why do you think some consortium of state arts funders didn't get together and let's say ten big states and pony up fifty million each to fill in that. Well, that's not a lot of money. Really, you know, it's fun.

00:03:35
Speaker 2: You should say that because while I was living through this, and you remember a long congressional battle, take a long time, some of my friends who are traveled in some of those circles, some wealthy connected, said this is going to be fine, because nobody at first they said this is never gonna happen because obviously it's a dollar thirty five for taxpayer. It's just going to be for the for the political joy of this, but they're not really going to happen. And if it does, don't worry because everybody values MPR and PBS, and you'll get foundations of people fill in the gap and it will be great. And that hasn't happened. It's happened a little bit, but not a lot. And part of the reason for that, I think is if we were the only thing that President Trump went after, that's the only target of his ire that might have happened. But there's so many and every foundation I talked to is like Kevin Lyne, every college, Yeah, everything we support, higher education, mental health, medical research is all under fire. So I think that's part of the reason that hasn't happened. It's happened a little bit, but not in the big numbers.

00:04:26
Speaker 1: I thought it might. As a tough slum described to me how this great career of yours in broadcast news and in public television was launched by the pinball scandal.

00:04:37
Speaker 2: Well, you really researched very well. This is a good example actually for all journalists out there, is that you have to have a story take you wherever the facts take you, and be to recognize your art, not always in this for the glory or for the appreciation. So I was a freshman at Tuts University and there was a story in the Boston Globe about how some of the neighborhoods it was in Medford and Somerville had a scandal involving pinball machine that the mob owned them and they would hit the owners of the bars for money, and these machines weren't licensed, and that's how well they needed to be.

00:05:07
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:05:08
Speaker 2: So I called them sin and said, hey, I'm just wondering, like, you know where our licenses are? And they go, what licensees? I go, You know, the licensees you need to have pinball machines, they go, we do. Hours later, big trucks pulled in and they took all the pinball machines off campus because they were unlicensed. And I was not the most popular guy, you know, because the pinball machines were both recreation and provided funding for those quarters added up for the buildings. But it's also a good example. But they were angry at me for a day. It turned out it took like a day to get the licenses. In two days and the machines came back, it was it over. So yeah, yeah, but you know, they said, why did you even print it?

00:05:38
Speaker 1: Right?

00:05:39
Speaker 2: So, because that's not you know, even as amateur journale, that's not my job is not to say I'm not going to enforce the law. My job is say here to the fact that you can say you don't want to support it. So that was a good training about how sometimes being journalism isn't isn't a road to popularity.

00:05:50
Speaker 1: So your career beyond toughts and writing for them and so forth, your career and television begins where at ABC News at ABC and you were there for how long? For thirteen years? And my recollection back then because I was a person who The only way I could communicate with my father and have any kind of emotional connection with him at all was to sit with him and watch the evening news every night since I was ten years old and tall.

00:06:13
Speaker 2: A funny story about that. Yeah, that's true. When I was a kid, we all watched the evening news together and we are not allowed to talk except during commercials, and if we did talk during commercials, my father would throw water at us because we had to watch the news.

00:06:25
Speaker 1: I was always under the impression that in terms of the three major networks back then, no Fox, that in all regards that the Leonard Goldberg launched ABC network was the redheaded step child of the three. Did you sense that when you went there to work it was it.

00:06:40
Speaker 2: Was clearly underfunded. That was I got there runarul to just move, moved from sports to news and sports, and was had a little bit of infusion. What year nineteen eighty, ABC News was the last of the least. I always had the least amount of resources, and as tot ABC, like you know, the big story was, if you wanted to end the Vietnam War, put it on ABC, you'd be canceled in thirteen weeks.

00:06:58
Speaker 1: So then everybody told story. I loved that, right.

00:07:01
Speaker 2: So we were underfunded and ABC News was so underfunded, and so that back in the day everybody had two fees of the evning news at six thirty and seven. ABC had won at six because they said to the stations, look, okay, we're never to the best, but the earliest, so you can put us on and get us over with. Then you can put local news on at six thirty and seven. And for a long time we had three fees and it was a sign that we actually were as we invested more and more, and they, you know, they changed the news that we had. We can get rid of that six o'clock feet and say we're going to be like the big boys. When I joined in eighteen eighty, ABC decided to change a couple things. They changed the evening news. They had three anchors, which nobody ever had before. Frank Reynolds in Washington, Peter Jennings in London, Max Rominson Chicago. Was a huge, big thing to try to make over the fact that we didn't have Walter Cronkite and we didn't have David Brinkley, so we had three people, but it was a faster, more you know, more satellites, more energy around the news. The other thing was that the Iron hostage crisis started America Health osage, which gave birth to Nightline, which was a huge, huge game changer for ABC News because suddenly it had a half hour news late night that nobody had. And Takappa became the.

00:08:06
Speaker 1: Dayline on the air before that, no after that, Dayline came after, so.

00:08:10
Speaker 2: So Nightline came first.

00:08:11
Speaker 1: Night Line was first.

00:08:12
Speaker 2: Yeah, So my jobs were I started out writing speeches and doing research for somebody. That was my first job. Then I got to write promos, which was a great job.

00:08:20
Speaker 1: I've read about that, yeah, because it's like eighteen and a half second promo.

00:08:23
Speaker 2: It's like a show for eighteen half seconds and it's got all the same ingredients for show. It's only eighteen a half seconds long. It has to be perfect eighteen and a half seconds. It has to be written, all the pictures have to match, it has the deadline. So it's a good way to learn. And then I worked for World News Tonight and then I worked for it was the anchor. Then by that point Peter Jennings was he.

00:08:40
Speaker 1: Came back from London. He was the anchor. I knew him. He used to host an event for the Bridgehampton Rec Center in on Long Island in Bridgeampton at his house there, and he was the loveliest guy. He had a skill.

00:08:50
Speaker 2: I think you'd be good at this too, but you'd appreciate how hard this is. One of the well, the hardest things that anchors have to do, especially when they're live right now, there's no prompter. It's you and things right is as you talk, people are talking in your ear piece, and it's incredibly hard.

00:09:03
Speaker 1: But it's hard.

00:09:04
Speaker 2: I've had to do it. When you try to talk to someone and they're talking, like, how do you quickly give them information?

00:09:08
Speaker 1: Right?

00:09:09
Speaker 2: Like you were going to Yale or something like that really quickly. But when the world's falling apart, you have to be on your game interviewing people, not then you melt down. That's right, that's right, that's side. But if you're Peter right, Peter was incredible at that and during break and all those all those guys are during breaking news to be able to have that skill to both talk to people listen and you're also kind of, you know, forming the story.

00:09:31
Speaker 1: And NBC.

00:09:32
Speaker 2: I was there nine to eleven and so watch that team work, right, the world's falling apart around you. You're talking to people, you're also having to piece together like America is being a taxier knowing the story we've ever seen before, and you're constantly getting hosting a show.

00:09:45
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:09:45
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's an incredible skill.

00:09:48
Speaker 1: So no local news for you ever, You went right to the network. Yeah, because I remember when I was younger, and I always try to tell people that the tabloid component of media back then was often like a dunce cap in a corner, right, and they were kind of ashamed of it. I remember. I always remember as a child, I watched Roger Grimsby and Bill You Tell Right, And whenever Rona Barrett would finish, they cut to Grimsby and he'd just stare at the camera like can you believe that he had shot on my show? He literally would take a count of three.

00:10:14
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was his charms.

00:10:16
Speaker 1: Charm was like you just would be like, you know, and now Rona Barrett And when they'd come back from her, they'd be dripping with sarcasm. Do you know?

00:10:23
Speaker 2: You know the great story of that Channel seven is a true story. Roseanne Scamradella, who was the model for Roseanne. Rosanna Dana right was doing her story and she and Grimsby are having some fight, right but just before they go on there and they cut to a wide shot. In the wide shot, she gives him the finger, right, and then Grimsey goes, I guess Roseanne saying we're number one.

00:10:42
Speaker 1: So you're there and nightline is berthed and you're there for how many years at ABC?

00:10:46
Speaker 2: So thirteen and so I went from there. Then I worked a Primetime Live and Primetime LIVEE was at that time, magazines were just you know, for a long time. Sixty Months was the only successful news magazine ABC started twenty twenty. That's kind of worked. MBC had never made at work and they wanted a second one. So Rune loved Diane, so I always want to get away from sixty minutes. He got our partner with Sam Donaldson and we started the show, and I was one of the senior producers on the show. And this is a good example. I'm sure you've had this new career when like the marketing people overhyped something before you've ever seen it. So literally, the ad before we went in the air was television news that you've never seen it before. And the copy is all about you'll never miss this show. It's the most incredible thing you've ever seen. And like all shows, we were still finding our rhythm. So it was a rocky start.

00:11:28
Speaker 1: So the show You Did, Diane came from CBS to ABC to do what show Primetime Live to do Private and that was on for how long?

00:11:36
Speaker 2: That was on for a long time, though it went through many different phases. I left after like four years. I left to go to NBC because NBC was like over seventeen in news magazines and yet they were making a lot of money, so there's a lot of pressure on them to like do something. So they were talking to me about starting a news magazine. And I liked ABC, but I sort of felt I was like, I felt like I was like the bullpen picture on the sixty one Yankees, Like I'm never going to get to do anything because the place is like so deep and I grew up there and I'm always going to be the kid who grew up.

00:12:02
Speaker 1: There and during that time that thirteen years are ready. So the Primetime Labe was inside of that thirteen years. So when you're there for thirteen years, you decided just I mean, everybody has an instinct when it's time to move on, and you had that instinct. Hy NBC.

00:12:14
Speaker 2: They needed you, they needed me, Yeah, and I might have stayed. I think actually was more about it was a really hard time to leave because it was the only place I'd ever worked, and I thought, you know, and at that time there was still point where people worked that networks their whole lives, and I thought so. And when I ultimately decided to leave, rune Oildge calls me into his office. So room's friendly, and he's got behind him all the NBC's won, just like one hundred mts right, and the sunlight hits the Emmys and there's this gold aura behind him as he says here and he goes Helo and he goes neil You're making the biggest mistake in your life. What do I know. I'm only Runinilich, But you know, godspeed.

00:12:47
Speaker 1: I did it soap opera for NBC back in the days of the Last of a Half Hours. I started in the fall of eighty I finished in the fall of eighty two. They asked me to stay till January. I said, no, I'm going to go to la And they were really mustling me. It was like a scene out of a bad movie where the producer Jerry Straub was standing with two other guys that were producers and I said, fellows, the answer is no, I'm not going to extend for three months. I gotta go. I'm gonna go. And as I walk away, he yells at me down the way, gays, what do you think you go out to the Hollywood and become.

00:13:14
Speaker 2: A big movie star.

00:13:16
Speaker 1: You're out of your mind. Come back here.

00:13:18
Speaker 2: You know.

00:13:19
Speaker 1: It's like he's shouting down this this kind of Citizen Kane esque. I'm so Foster Kane. You know. In that world, they were always like, you know you're done when I tell you you're done. You don't decide when you're done. But when you leave and go to NBC, NBC was down a bit in terms of the so.

00:13:37
Speaker 2: And so I I, here's what. I goes to NBC and they said, we want you to develop a new news magazine because we're right, and they had this, they had this magazine Dayline NBC, which was on the air. And while they're talking to me, Dayline NBC has perhaps the one of the biggest mistakes ever in the history of journalism. They're doing a story about GM pickup trucks, and the allegation was when these two pickup trucks collided, the gas tanks would explode. It was a dangerous truck. So they do this story. They have these two trucks collide, they need they do explode. It's a big story. It turns out that the best investigative reporting on this story is actually done by General Motors. General Motors finds the cars that they use in the collision, and in these cars they use sparking devices, which are not necessarily wrong. That's how the federal government does it. When the federal government runs these tests, they don't run cars together endlessly to see if they explode. They put together and they make them explode. Yeah, and they put on a spark to see, you know, to see if there's a potential to it. That's how they test it. That's the protocol to tests these things. But in the dayline story they never told people that. So when GM says, look what we found. They have this secret sparking device, it's a gigantic faux pas. The president NBC News leaves the Executiveridufser was fired. When the Prowser the piece and the right and you show up right then, well and I just about sign I just red sign it. And they said, listen, while you're thinking of this idea, we have this show, could you just like step in because we're like, we can't go to black, you can just like keep the show while and I said I'll start.

00:14:58
Speaker 1: It.

00:14:58
Speaker 2: Turns out a couple things. First, when you walk into a show and there's nothing there, they covered, hiss bear, you can do whatever you want. We'd get to rethink the model a little bit. And one of the things which I believed in but all trying to be true, is we could put news back in news magazine. Up at that point, every news magazine was like it was never on the news. It was like, you know, they spent weeks months in production they had it was like it was a Hollywood thing via a meeting, a pre meeting, a writing meeting, a post meeting, a write, a read through, you know, take the same months to get pieces on the here. I didn't have the time to do that, so let's just see what we could do around the news. So that was successful and also turned out people have no memory at all, like Dayline, night Line, like nobody remembered it, so there was no nobody really cared about the story. So this the show started to do pretty well. And then because we were a time when news magazines were incredibly popular, they said, listen, could you just do you know it?

00:15:44
Speaker 1: One night?

00:15:45
Speaker 2: Could you do two? Could you do Tuesday and Thursday night? That I can try? That did really well. They said, listen, you're doing two, could you do three? And at one point we're up to five nights a week.

00:15:55
Speaker 1: So this is when you get to what season of dateline are you win? You get to five? You were there from what year to what year? And one? Yeah?

00:16:03
Speaker 2: Yeah, So about about season two we start doing two, then season three we go to three, then season four, I guess it would be four and five. By season six we have like five shows a week.

00:16:13
Speaker 1: Did they Quinn tupple your salary?

00:16:15
Speaker 2: They did that?

00:16:16
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, but when you're doing that, I mean, whether's ever my concern would be is there enough content out there? Do we you stressed about that?

00:16:24
Speaker 2: Well? Not really, there are other issues. But it turned out, first of it was that we're living at the time. It's not true anymore because news magazines were so new, like everything in TV, like westerns, like variety shows a moment like this is your moment, right, So there was a lot of that, and there are also some stories. I mean, that was the O. J. Simpson story. That was that was the gift they kept on giving. It was every day there was something. When Diana died, two things emerging that for me. One is trying to be nimble and understanding that you have to understand what the audience is interested in. And after she died, I thought, well, that's like an hour, like we're gonna be done, but let's do a few more stories just to make sure. I was like totally wrong. People could not get enough of Diana, and not just Diana, but every part of that story about the publicity, about the royalty, about charity and how that were you know, are dying. Yeah, I could not get enough of it. So we did like two weeks of like, you know, ten shows about it. So I don't think we really ran out of stuff.

00:17:16
Speaker 1: When you're running a show, eventually you become in charge of NBC News. Were you in charge of NBC News during the transition from Yeah? Right? So when you're there, why does does i've assume those guys? You know, you have to peel that chair out of their cold dead hands. They never wanted he wanted to leave.

00:17:32
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean he was done broken and he's an active guy. You know, there's still mountains I want to climb, there are bike roads I want to do. Right, right, I've had a lot good long run.

00:17:39
Speaker 1: And his ratings were decent.

00:17:40
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, we were number one, right, Yeah, you're right. You know, Walter crank Kit had to be pushed out by Dan rather but but Tom's it was Tom's idea.

00:17:48
Speaker 1: He wanted to go. And when you're when you're looking at someone, do you always have a plan because you're not saying Tom's going to go, But while you're thinking if Tom goes, if you've already got the other guy lined up, he's in the bullpen getting ready.

00:17:58
Speaker 2: Yeah, well you knew, you knew it was yeah, yeah, And for a long time we sort of knew was Brian. The thing that we tried to do, especially in his keeps signaling to the audience like whenever Tom's not there, Brian not there. Because I remember, like three years before Tom left, we're always doing these surveys asking people what do you like about the show, etc. One of the questions was if Tom left, who should his replacement be? And I'm like, you know, no single answer emerged, Like you know, reporters they saw Tim Russer, you know that, you know, Brian gumble like just all no rhyme or rhythm to it in a part because we never really signaled to the audience, no, this is the person. So in his last year was always you know, Brian was always there and we did it again like obviously it should be Brian. So that and the two of them are really good about each other. They were very they appreciated each other, They were showed total respect to each They were both incredible pros and sort of doing that transformation.

00:18:48
Speaker 1: In what way did your career overlap with Zuckers? You were there together for how long?

00:18:52
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like seven years. Maybe he was when I came. He was the EPU of the Today Show. I was at Daylines, so we worked together a lot. Then he got promoted to the West Coast, so I still were I didn't work with quite as much, but he still had you know, Dayline was a primetime show, so I still saw him a little bit.

00:19:08
Speaker 1: Then were you involved in any decision making for the Today Show where they were completely independent, you're writing the news division went under the news division.

00:19:14
Speaker 2: It was, but by the time I got there, they'd done the transition to Matt and Katie were there like they were that they were the team gone. Yeah, you know, so the Tay Show was that was the family of the morning family. So I didn't have to really worry about it. They were all they were all doing incredibly well.

00:19:28
Speaker 1: It was Gemmen. Was Gumble ever considered too for Brian William's.

00:19:31
Speaker 2: Job when I was there, I think in a long time ago. By the time I got there, he had gone. He had filled in on you know, weekend news. I think he and.

00:19:38
Speaker 1: Want that job.

00:19:38
Speaker 2: I don't think so really, No, I mean I think what you know, I when I talked to him a little bit, and he's a really smart guy. I think part of sort of the the you know, we pitched, we tried to do some magazine stuff with him. He didn't know you liked doing that. I think he's really smart. And also I think he's tries to make sure the match is just right for him and if it's not, he's a sports show.

00:19:58
Speaker 1: Yeah you ran with that forever.

00:19:59
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that for a while, And I think that was actually a perfect thing for him, right, because it was he knew really well shut off his writing and interviewing skills, and also wasn't every day.

00:20:08
Speaker 1: Now. I'm not saying this to embarrass you, but I don't want to assume that you were an avid WNT public television viewer doing your network news career, or were you not much.

00:20:19
Speaker 2: I mean, I mean I watched it now and then first, when you have those jobs, you're pretty consumed, like with just your own job, right. And I remember when I was at how consumed I was. When I was at ABC. I was producing Primetime, proof of Primetime life, really busy doing a bunch of stuff, and I'm editing on something and we're talking about like Zoomy Anderson, something I wanted to do, and he goes say, oh, that's like just a knock off Ken Burns move, And I go, what are you talking about? And he goes, you know the Civil War thing? Like what Civil War thing?

00:20:45
Speaker 1: Right?

00:20:45
Speaker 2: And I'm I hadn't even seen it, right, So you live in that world a little bit. I do know that I am a big movie fan and I always watch the movies on Saturday Night. PBS had a lot of great movies, so I would watch that, and NBC didn't have you. So I'd watched that a lot of times, and I would watch the occasional doc but I didn't much want of it.

00:21:04
Speaker 1: President and CEO of w NET Neil Shapiro. If you enjoy conversations with public television producers, check out my episode with Judith Vecchioni on her PBS series Vietnam, A Television History.

00:21:22
Speaker 3: At the beginning of each of these projects, we sat down all the production staff and went to school together. We had lecturers, We watched films, we discussed the stories. We talked about what's a source and what's not a source?

00:21:36
Speaker 2: Who is a.

00:21:37
Speaker 3: Combination of film school and journalism. It meant that what we did was as unimpeachable as we could possibly make it, and for Vietnam, that was critical since we were working within the decade of the fall of Saigon.

00:21:55
Speaker 1: To hear more of my conversation with Judith Vecchioni, go to Here's the Dot Org. After the break, Neil Shapiro talks about inheriting Dateline NBC in the wake of one of the worst scandals in the news magazine's history, and how he turned the show around. I'm Alec Baldwin, and this is Here's the thing. By any measure, Neil Shapiro's career in television was flourishing. He had rescued Dateline from Scandal and turned it into a primetime institution. He was then handed the keys to all of NBC News, overseeing the Today Show, Meet the Press, NBC Nightly News, and more. I wanted to know why. At the height of his television career, Shapiro opted to trade NBC News for the mission driven world of public broadcasting.

00:22:56
Speaker 2: So at NBC a bunch of things happened. The whole network was in trouble, like we were suddenly number three, and when when networks are in trouble, bad things happened right, cutting happening right. And I didn't want to I'd already made a lot of cuts and News division. I didn't want to stay and have to do a lot more cuts. And I knew that, and I think they knew that. So my contract was up. I didn't want to stay, and I didn't want me to stay. So it worked out. It worked out fine, And then I started to look around. I got some offers from, like I would say, conventional broadcasting, things. They called me from an interview with Channel thirteen WNET and I don't know if you ever had this moment in your life. And he's like, I'm just going to say what I think. I'm not going to like study all night. I'm not gonna I'm just gonna tell you what I think.

00:23:33
Speaker 1: It.

00:23:33
Speaker 2: Yeah, so we called in. They said that what do you think about Channel thirteen? And I said, I think Chance thirteen is great, But to me, it's like visiting your grandparents in New York City. You come in, it's really exciting, but you go see the opera, it's time to go home. And I think there's so much more excitement in this city. It's such a vibrant city. That's why I live here. There should be more of that, right, And I thought they would say get out, and they said that's right. So then I started to think more seriously, do I want to do this? This is how long after you left MB see about seven months?

00:24:01
Speaker 1: So you ran the network. You were the head of the NEWSS for how many years?

00:24:04
Speaker 2: For five? And that ended what year two thousand and five?

00:24:08
Speaker 1: Because so nine to eleven had happened while you were running the network. Yeah, oh god, And so they come to you seven months later, they're offering you to consider this. What made you say yes?

00:24:18
Speaker 2: So the more I thought about it, you know, the part of the reason I got into TV, and I still believe it's an incredibly important medium and right, you can do great things with it, and I'm proud of a lot of it what I did in commercial TV. But it was always commercial TV. It was no mistaking that, you know what, we did some documentaries on like every award you could win. I got no calls about that. If we did a show and we fell off in the second half hour and women, you know, eighteen to sixty four of you like, what'd you do? Well? What happened here? Right, it was commercial television. I could count on one hand the number of calls I got about just great journalism that they were proud of me, and a lot more about what happened. What happened was the leading so bad by why.

00:24:54
Speaker 1: Did you do this?

00:24:55
Speaker 2: And so to go to a place where it just about you know where, Yeah, we care about who's watching, but the MISSI it's really about whose lives we can touch, either mentally emotionally. How can we be a part of the discussions and without necessarily that every fraction of a rating point counted was interesting to me. So that's part of why I got into it. And the other thing, which I was worried about but turned out to be easier, was raising money. I never really raised money before I'd raise money. Here's how I raised money in NBC. When the Second Goal War happened. We did not budget for the Second Golf War. So I had to go in and say, what, I need thirty million dollars to cover what I think is going to cost the Second goal for and I have to go from the g board. And I had two things I could say. I could say, you should give us this money because brave American boys and girls are going to fight and die in our name and it's the publicy in our public airways, and our responseibu to show what's happening to them and what they're doing right. Or I could say, look, we're the number one news network and if we don't do well, we're going to lose our commercial standing and every one of our shows will make less money. So I said the second thing, but I felt the first thing. Now I just say the first thing.

00:25:58
Speaker 1: But when you say go to the board, that's what was required to you as the president of the News Division, was to make presentations for budgets or things like that, a thing like huge amounts of money.

00:26:08
Speaker 2: You know, the normal budget thing is not like that, but for that huge amount of money unintended, you know, like unexpected.

00:26:13
Speaker 1: Yeah, when you do that, when you when you're talking to a ge board. Because of course on thirty Rock, we would make a lot of fun of the board. Cable Now then the then Comcast becomes cable Town, right, which was But my favorite thing, or among my favorite things on thirty Rock was Stacy Keach doing the commercials for Cable Town. Yes, he spits into the game whatever happened to Americans. But I love that. But but when you're there, you're speaking to a committee or somebody who's you're not in front of an entire board. There's a liaison for that.

00:26:42
Speaker 2: No, it was like it was the finance community. The board. It was a bunch of like big heavy hitters. It was like Jack Welch was there. It was it was a big thing because that was a big amount of money.

00:26:50
Speaker 1: Right. Did you think that they understood the needs and the the essentialities of the News division.

00:26:56
Speaker 2: Well, I think they gave you the money, even money, so there did that, and they valued having a good news division. They thought it was important to the network. It was stations cared about it, and it was a prestige about it.

00:27:05
Speaker 1: They liked that.

00:27:05
Speaker 2: You know, you could call Tim Russell.

00:27:06
Speaker 1: In first place.

00:27:07
Speaker 2: Then in first place.

00:27:07
Speaker 1: Now that's what I would have said. I was, so tell you if you don't give me the money, but we're not gonna be the first place.

00:27:11
Speaker 2: That's what I said. That's what's sold down.

00:27:14
Speaker 1: So you're going to go to any t super bright guy, very capable, very experienced guy. So I'm assuming you're sitting there going if I'm going to run this place, I better strike having like a crash course. And are you like watching and consuming all kinds of ant.

00:27:26
Speaker 2: Program kinds and stuff everything, Yeah, to get ready to go in there?

00:27:29
Speaker 1: Yea, yeah. And it was great. It was great.

00:27:30
Speaker 2: First there was a lot of great stuff which I hadn't seen before. It was great and it was there. There was a lot of things which I think having some commercial expertise or experience in the private sector was helpful because a lot of people I work with had were It's only in public telligence that's their only experience, and the mission part was great. But I would say to them, like they'd show me something and I say, you know, these I don't stands. Graphic is really muddle. I don't get it. Okay, so I think we should fix it, like what do you mean? And I think we should take this grabbing into it. No, but we did it, and there was a lot of that just because that's so I think sort of being wood and more urgent about that, about saying we need to be that was helpful to them, I think. But I learned the fun of saying, you know, I'm not sure how big a number this is going to get. I don't want to do if nobody's going to watch it, but I'm not sure. But it's okay. We did a great show and we only fifteen thousand people saw it. Twenty thousand people saw it. That's still a lot of people.

00:28:20
Speaker 1: But do you think do you believe somewhat that coming from the commercial world and you're running a news network that's number one, there's a lot of money on the table, it's NBC. Did you find that public television was less self critical and seeking to improve things because they didn't have the money. Really comparatively speaking.

00:28:36
Speaker 2: I think two things happened. I think they were very good about using the resources they had, probably better than anybody else, but just squeezing the last dime out of what they had. I think sometimes there were things like they just knew we can't do this, We're never gonna so you can't go there. Yeah, so we're going to live in a different one. And like a good example, I think part of what public TOAs is better at this nuanced conversation in depth stuff. They're less good at, you know, covering every breaking news around the world. They don't have the resources that, so they partnered with people, they partnered with the BBC. They go somewhere, but not everywhere. And I think the audience gets that that's you know that you're not going to get every single best video, but that's okay.

00:29:09
Speaker 1: Now, help me remember something because I'm ashamed to say, but all admitted for our purposes that McNeil larror is either one of them still alive, the one the one died, and who's alive. I think both think they're both. They've both gone. So you never bothered to replace that show, or did you?

00:29:24
Speaker 2: Well, so it evolved so it was the neil Leerror Report, then it was the PBS News Hour, So which is what it is now?

00:29:30
Speaker 1: That's what it is.

00:29:30
Speaker 2: Who's the host the two of them? Jeff Bennett. I'm in avas of the two hours now, but it's gone through Judy WOODRIF did it for a long time, so we had a bunch of different transitional anchors, so we still The point is, I guess there's always been an hour newscast and.

00:29:44
Speaker 1: Your marriage that you felt that was essential.

00:29:45
Speaker 2: Yeah, I still do. I still think yeah, because I think the newscast as genre is vanishing, just all of them.

00:29:51
Speaker 1: Right.

00:29:52
Speaker 2: That said, there's still millions of people who watch it, right, and there's still two or three million people every night who watch the news hour, and I hear from them, talk to them and to them. If you're a person who likes to sit down at six or seven and just you know, have somebody distill the events for you, having an hour that has more nuanced conversations better than that evening news on the networks, which is twenty three minutes without you know, once you get the commercials out of there, so there's more. I think they find a more fulfilling experience.

00:30:17
Speaker 1: You've been there? How long now at AN eighteen nineteen years, nineteen years so thirteen at ABC? How many in NBC thirteen thirteen and nineteen years here? And what do you want to do that you still haven't done well?

00:30:32
Speaker 2: I think the last part of my career is going to be coming out of federal funding, I think, and trying to you know, write the ship. We got to think about a new reality, which is sort of no federal funding. I think there's more that we can do, especially around sort of local arts and local culture, like I love, you know, you talk to Simpty space. There's so many wonderful things in New York, you know, And I would try and I would love to get more of those, capture them on video. And I've always thought about if there weren't other issues, and there are copyright issues and union issues and so forth, you know, but if when anyt started in nineteen sixty three, if they just said we're going to shoot off Broadway shows, we would have every major star in the world and the beginnings of their career doing like incredible stuff. And I think that, you know, we are still the place of the best actors, the best writers, the best comics. They're all here. I'd like to find a way to do more of that.

00:31:19
Speaker 1: My favorite moment my friend said to me, I'll never forget. This was years ago and we talked about what we loved about New York. That was essential. He said, what I love about New York is you can stand still for one moment, eight o'clock at night, just don't move. To sit there for one minutet eight o'clock at night and realize that the curtain is going up on the greatest performers in the world, the Nicks, the Ballet, the Yankees, Broadway, the Carlisle. He said, it's all here. They're all here in this one town. And it put a chill up my back.

00:31:50
Speaker 2: When he said, that's totally true.

00:31:52
Speaker 1: When you say this about local arts, that's one direction you want to go in.

00:31:57
Speaker 2: So I like to do more of that. And I think we also need to figure out everybody needs to figure out what public media does. The whole media world is changing. Like the days when we grew up and it was three or four channels and that was it. I like our long gone, and we have to make sure that and we are doing it. How do we make sure that the stuff we do is that everywhere you might want to see it. We're in streaming, we're online, and what different form does that take?

00:32:18
Speaker 1: You know?

00:32:18
Speaker 2: So like great performances, some of our shows, it turns out when you put them on YouTube, there's a totally different audience of watching them. So it's not our TV audience is older as you'd expect. You've put the same content on YouTube and it's twenty three years younger. It's the same thing, just the audience finds it where they are. So we've got to figure out how to make all that work within the world of still how to get people to support us.

00:32:43
Speaker 1: President and CEO of w NET Neil Shapiro. If you're enjoying this conversation, tell a friend and be sure to follow here's the thing on the iHeartRadio app, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back, Neil Shapiro shares his blunt take on the Barry Weiss situation at sixty minutes and why he thinks running a news operation is harder when you have opinions of your own. I'm Alec Baldwin and this is here's the thing The Tiffany Network has seen better days. The dismantling of CBS News has been ongoing for years, but the recent controversy surrounding Barry Weiss and sixty Minutes brought the question of editorial independence back to the front page. As someone who has run major news operations himself, I wanted to know what Neil Shapiro made of the current CBS situation.

00:33:53
Speaker 2: First, I think running a networking desision is really hard work, and I think it's harder if you have a a publicly known opinion because now everything you do is seen through that lens. And Barry became who she is because she's a She's a person with clear points of view. I think when you put some of the points of view in charge of editorial structure, that makes it much harder. That's one thing. The second thing is, I think is to run it. It helps if you're running, is to be a producer yourself, to understand the medium. There are two things that happen. First, the fact that I think you'd understand there are a bunch of screenings and you can't say at the very end, I'm we're not going to run it right. It's a finally delicate You look at things that you have cut after cut after, if you like in Hollywood, if he goes, you know, and after it's all done, let's.

00:34:34
Speaker 1: Just hold that we're not going to release the movie too late.

00:34:37
Speaker 2: You have chance early on Broadway exactly. So the point is you have your concerns and you express them early on, and so it might have been a different story. The other thing, which I which I think is alarming if it's true, is that to say you offer it someone a chance to respond and they don't take it right, and then you go back you say we're gonna wait and give them make sure you know at some point you get to you should journals should give people a chance to respond. It should be a not appropriate, but at some point that's it, and then you run the story. You don't keep waiting and waiting and waiting. And if it's true that she said back, I want to make sure the White House gets another pass at this. That's bad, right, And what we don't know is I don't know when the White House was asked. But my feeling is if you ask one for comment, you make sure you give them enough time, don't understand what you want to talk about, right, You don't ambush them But if they say no, that's it. They don't get to veto the story. You don't get to say you're not going to run because we choose not to talk to you, you're not going to run it. That's a dangerous precedent.

00:35:28
Speaker 1: I'm disappointed that I'm not this Congress because I view Mike Johnson is the greatest coward in American history, and he held down the country while the president raped the country. He was the co conspirator there. I mean, I can't say more ugly and more pejarative things about Mike Johnson and the way he's conducted himself. But with another Congress, with a more reasonable Congress. And again we're getting back to the public air wams. These people have made billions and billions of dollars over the years exploiting this free thing. Well they're like, hey, man, we invest all this money. But okay, I got it. But what I was hoping was there would be some corporate governance imposed on these companies. Well, you can't allow the content of the news to be influenced by business decisions. Now, I know your wife a famous TV journalist as well, And what's your guilty pleasure when you're laying there watching TV. What do you when you're getting away from from WAT and public television in the news, what do you? What's entertainment for you?

00:36:23
Speaker 2: So the sad thing is we're so far behind. So we started, but just when people say you should watch this series, it's like how many episodes are there? Because it takes us so long to get through it. Right, So Murders in the Building, I think we're one season behind.

00:36:35
Speaker 1: But you like that. I like that a lot.

00:36:36
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, yeah, the Diplomat I'm like two seasons behind with Kerrie. Yeah. So when people are you, can you leave this twist like no, no, no, no, no, right, I'm not even there yet.

00:36:46
Speaker 1: Well, recommendations from people, which I'm very wary of because they'll tell me and people I admire and people who are colleagues in the business. They know something about how to put it together a TV series or a movie and they'll say to me, oh, watch this show, and I'll go, okay, great, And this is a time saying I'm gonna go if there's a whole jungle of things out there and not enough time. So disclaimer comes on now Kevin kleimb doing a streaming series, I mean, that's an opportunity for me, and I love that show and it's one season in your rout. Yeah, so the guilty pleasure for you was streaming TV.

00:37:16
Speaker 2: Yeah, and well and the Yankees. Let me ask you, Ath, I'm curious because I've done so many stories about true crime stories. Right, they lighted a lot of Shore, so the moment pretty much into it. I kind of know how it's gonna end, because it's conventions, like you figure out like he's not talking, he's obviously in the slammer or whatever it is. Right, So it's hard for me to be surprised when you watch stuff, either from your discipline as an actor or as a writer, as a smart guy, do you feel like you're off in ahead of the audience or do you feel like you watch it like everybody else.

00:37:43
Speaker 1: It depends. There's a trope in which you do a shot of someone and if you do the shot a certain way, it's lit a certain way, the angle is a certain way. I know that's the killer. You tipped it off. You did something there that you were even unconscious about it. Am I ahead of everybody? I'm the guy that's sitting in a theater in Chicago, I was doing a film and I go see The Sixth Sense with Bruce Willis, and I had no idea what was going on. And when the movie was over, my friend with me goes, you didn't know what was going to happen. I don't know. I watched The Village from Shaymlan, and I had no idea she was going to jump over the fence. I love that movie. Bill Hurt running that colony of people. And when she hops over the fence, Ronnie Howard's daughter jumps over the fence and she's blind. It's perfect and she doesn't know where she is and the car pulls up. I went, oh my god. Because sometimes I'm just not I'm into the show. I want to enjoy it, so I don't. But if I'm going to go in there and pick it apart, if I go in there cynical, then I could probably kill it for myself. But those two cases were something where I just was so there with the movie. I loved it. But you it's the Yankees. Are your kids' sports fans or did you go to Yankee games with them?

00:38:51
Speaker 2: Oh? My god, they're huge.

00:38:52
Speaker 1: They're huge Yankee fans. Does your wife like the Yankees enough just to get buy it, just to get re upped her deal.

00:38:59
Speaker 2: We were dating. You really love the Anchus, you know, kids not so much.

00:39:03
Speaker 1: You guys have the same taste and what you watch on You don't like to go to the theater.

00:39:06
Speaker 2: No, we theater a lot when we can. I remember of everything, like round about all those things right right, But I often can't go, so I try to.

00:39:14
Speaker 1: Get about movie theaters. Very few movies in the theater.

00:39:17
Speaker 2: Well, we got a lot of screen. She gets a lot of previews, so we got a lot of that. And that's fun because you see something like you said, no setup, no idea, what it is? You don't you hear a great William Shatner story. I proposed thanks to William Shatner. So we're huge Star Trek fans, right, Judrenal I had been together for like seven years. I hadn't proposed, so I needed something good, so I asked him if I if he would help me do it. So I wrote this thing for him, and he said, you know, of all my years of saving the galaxy and boldly going where no man's going before, I never got to do one thing. I never got to marry two crew members in Love episode twenty six happened, but then they Klingon's attacked episode forty three. But recently a crew member, crewmember Wantab has come to me and asked my advice. And I knew that you don't have to be county the enterprise by picking the obvious choices. But I knew that I I didn't take the falcony scene from Roley and Juliet, or the Sons of Browning or the love proms over creat A four. Instead, mister Shapiro, here's what I recommend ship's censors. In the cat you found a beautiful, lovely and very patient woman. So get down on one knee, set your face on stun and fire when ready. And I said, when you marry me, So that works.

00:40:21
Speaker 1: My last question for you, in the doggy dog business of television news, what do you attribute to your longevity.

00:40:28
Speaker 2: I think it's I've been lucky enough to work with really great people, and I've tried to treat everybody pretty well because I think TV, especially TV news, is a team sport. You can only succeed when everybody around he succeeds, right, And you're the cameraman, the talent, the writer's producers. Everybody has to feel like a team and haves to feel appreciate it, and I find something really rewarding about that. When it all works, it's like this magical thing, like I had this like okay idea, and everybody else made it better and better and better, and I love that.

00:40:55
Speaker 1: My thanks to w ne ET's Neil Shapiro. This episode was recorded at CDM Studios in New York City. We're produced by Kathleen Brusso, Zach MacNeice, and Victoria de Martin. Our engineer is Isaac Kaplan Wilner. I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the Thing is brought to you by iHeart Radio