February 26, 2001 — Tom Brokaw, anchor of the NBC Nightly News since 1983, delivered the 11th Theodore H. White Lecture on Press and Politics tonight. The journalist’s subject was “So Much Information, So Little Time.”
Speaking to a Forum crowd of 800 people, Brokaw discussed the pressures on broadcast journalists today, commenting pointedly that network Election 2000 coverage was less than perfect: “It wasn’t egg on our faces. We were draped in omelette.”
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- Watch the Video
Brokaw has covered every presidential campaign since 1968, conducted the first one-on-one interview with Mikhail Gorbachev and was the only U.S. anchorman to report from the Berlin Wall as it fell. News has changed considerably since Brokaw began his career, both in substance and volume. For Brokaw, it was the fact that Elvis’s death made it to the top item on all news media that was the turning point — modern news reflects society more accurately, for him an improvement over the “eat your spinach” forerunner.
The event was sponsored by the Joan Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy.
The above text includes material from a Harvard Kennedy School Communications article and the Harvard Business School Harbus.
