Brian Kruger
Welcome to the podcast The Common Bridge with Richard Helppie. Rich is a successful entrepreneur in the technology, health and finance space. He and his wife, Leslie, are also philanthropists, with interest in civic and artistic endeavors, but with a primary focus on medically and educationally under-served children. My name is Brian Kruger, and from time to time I’ll be the moderator and host of this podcast.
Hello and welcome to The Common Bridge. Rich has a very special guest for us today. His name is Mort Crim. If you don’t know Mort’s story, he was a broadcast journalist and author who’s spent more than 40 years in both local and national radio and television news. He’s covered presidential summits, spaceflights, Mid-east war, and for five years he was legendary radio personality Paul Harvey’s regular vacation back up. Mort was a correspondent with ABC based in New York and for the Post Newsweek Television stations, and he’s been an anchor at KWY TV in Philadelphia, with BBM TV in Chicago. And for 20 years he was a senior anchor at WDIV in Detroit, where he also was a national correspondent for the parent company, Post Newsweek Television. Mort’s nationally syndicated radio, Siri’s Second Thoughts, was on the air for 15 years at its peak, and it was carried by more than 1300 radio stations, plus, it was always broadcast to the Armed Forces Radio Network. Mort holds a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University. He has four honorary doctorates and scores of news awards, including six Emmys. He was among the first honorees inducted into Northwestern University’s Hall of Achievement and is the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement award from the University of Nebraska Omaha, where he earned his bachelor’s degree. He’s been inducted into the Michigan Broadcast Hall of Fame, the Illinois Broadcasters Hall of Fame and the Philadelphia Broadcast Pioneers Hall of Fame. He’s an active churchman, serving currently as an elder at the Palm’s Presbyterian Church in Jacksonville Beach, Florida. He’s the author of seven books and has just completed his eighth, a memoir tracing both his professional and spiritual journey from small town southern Illinois preacher’s son to major market anchorman. Among his most illustrious credits are the two anchorman movie satires for which Will Ferrell credits Mort and co anchor Jessica Savage with providing the inspiration for those two characters in those films. Singer Jack White built a song around one of Mort’s radio commentaries and included Mort’s voice on his album Elephant, which sold over a 1,000,000 copies and went platinum. That album is one of Mort’s biggest claims to fame among the millennials. For two seasons in 2017 and 2018 he had an ongoing cameo role playing himself in the comedy central sitcom The Detroiters, and in one episode he was given the starring role. Mort is also an Air Force veteran and a civilian pilot who’s logged nearly 7,000 hours in everything from Piper Cubs to executive class twin Cessnas. He holds an airline transport rating, and in 2011 received a Wright Brothers Master Pilot award from the FAA. He also was a serious boat captain and in 2014 served as commodore of the Queen’s Harbour Yacht Club in Jacksonville, Florida, where he and his wife, Renee, now reside. We welcome Mort to The Common Bridge. Mort and Rich are in different states right now, so there are a few audio issues, but not many. So we’re just gonna throw you right into this, and we’ll join their conversation in progress.
Rich Helppie
All right, well, very good. Well, first of all, Mort, I’m sure you hear this from anybody that’s lived in Metro Detroit. I just always enjoyed your newscast and your tone and your demeanor. I’ve been involved in health care for a long time, and one of the things that we learned was that the second most trusted person after somebody’s personal doctor, was their local newscaster, their local anchor in terms of the trust levels. And I think that you really did the profession well. I’m out here in Chelsea, Michigan, by the way. And I was speaking with a mutual friend of ours this morning, Guy Sanville, and I’ve been a longtime supporter of the Purple Rose Theater and had the pleasure of seeing several of Carrie’s plays produced, in fact, absent this of quarantine, we’d be at the theater on Friday to see Paint Night, so God willing, we would would be there.
Mort Crim
Rich, our intent was to be there for, if not the opening, at least one of the show’s very shortly after that.
Rich Helppie
Well, listen, when you do come up when things resume, I’m taking you both to the Common Grill for dinner before the show, my wife and I’ll take you.
Mort Crim
One of our favorite places indeed.
Rich Helppie
There’s some really good people out there trying to do some good work. Devon Skillian in Detroit, Gino Lamont in Palm Springs. Gino, just by way of example, he does a summary on KMIR every day since the crisis has begun. He’s calm. He’s fact based. He really does work hard to try to get this story right. And when you think about couple guys like this, is that still the rule or more the exception these days?
Mort Crim
Well, I think you have to look at the entire media spectrum and make some delineations, particularly between local television news and 24 hour cable news. I think one of the reasons that this misperception about how journalists have become so biased in recent years is a direct result of 24 hour cable, where number one, they have 24 hours a day to fill, and number two, it’s become impossible to distinguish between opinion and news on these cable channels. And that’s because they really crossed it-not only crossed the line between news and entertainment, but they’ve erased that line. And news material, the stories themselves, have become merely fodder for entertainment shows, which is what these programs are. So people look at that and they see people like Andrea Mitchell and Brian Williams, and people that they’ve always identified as news people, and they see them taking opinion positions on issues including the White House. And they say, well all the newspeople are biased. Well, that’s not really true. And if you look at at some of the great newspapers The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the LA Times, the St. Louis Post Dispatch, the Louisville Courier Journal, there are so many great papers out there and local news operations in television, that are still playing-it’s free-trying to get to the facts, telling people the truth. But I really think the perception has been totally tainted by the 24 hour, seven day week news channels with Fox on the right, MSNBC on the left, CNN trying to to straddle a middle course and and still tell it straight, although a lot of people don’t think so. See, a lot of people think if you report something that goes against my bias or prejudice then you’re biased and prejudiced. We learned in journalism school-I remember a textbook we had on mass communication-and one very interesting chapter about how communication takes a transmitter and a receiver, and the static and the distortions can come in either end. And I think there’s a lot of static and distortion at the receiving end these days, too, as well as at the transmitting end, because we can hear and listen and see through biases and prejudices that distort the message every bit as much, and maybe more, than at the transmitting end. So that’s my that’s my comment today on the state of journalism.
Rich Helppie
I think that’s very true and that people seem to be on a hair trigger for something that doesn’t fit their ideology. It’s almost like if you’re not one of us, you must be one of them. One of the reasons that I established The Common Bridge is that we have a lot more in common. We can talk about what the policy should be. I’m of the mind that this partisan divide, fueled by this 24 hour news cycle, is driving us apart and making it very difficult, if not impossible, to get to solutions. It made me think a little bit about, the standards that that you learned in journalism school, that you practice in your profession about sourcing the story. How are things different today from an external point of view-not an expert on this-it seems that speed is more important than accuracy or thoroughness or nuance. Am I wrong about that?
Mort Crim
One of the greatest threats to accuracy and truth in journalism has been live coverage. Let me explain that. When I was doing television news in Detroit, I was responsible, and my team was responsible, for basically two newscasts a day: the early news, dinnertime news and the late news of 11 o’clock. And that meant all day long we had a system in place. We had a team in place where there were checks and backstops and double checks. So a reporter would bring a story in and it got viewed by a producer, perhaps it got viewed, maybe by an assignment editor. It got certainly viewed by the reporter, and reviewed multiple times and sometimes the assistant news director or the news director, depending on the weight of the story, would take a look. So there were checks and balances, and if something didn’t seem right, or if the fact looked like it needed to be double checked, it would be, there was a process. Now, for the most part, and particularly at the national level, you have all these reporters out on the street, out on the story reporting live. There is no editorial process. There is nobody looking over the shoulder to give a second opinion. There is nobody saying you better double check that, because they’re winging it. They have to wing it. And so there’s a tremendous amount of responsibility on the reporter on the scene that’s not spread around. It was a team effort before, and I think that, as you say, that desire to be first, that desire to be live, that desire to be on the scene, has short circuited the editorial process that was in place-and actually still is in place in many ways-in the local newsroom and in newspaper operations to a degree that it is not with this life 24 hour news cycle.
Rich Helppie
You know what I’m kind of inferring in this, and and maybe you could clarify, is that when we were in this hasty 24 hour news cycle, the emphasis on depth and the emphasis on on accuracy was prevalent. And in the 24 hour cycle, it’s all about speed. And I’m just wondering, and I’m gonna imagine that you had to review, and perhaps discipline reporters, and I would imagine those that weren’t accurate or didn’t get the depth, didn’t get to keep their job. And I’m wondering today if it’s more…a person’s job in the reporting world, might be more at risk for not being fast enough and less so with being inaccurate.
Mort Crim
Yeah, and every editor it needs an editor. I consider myself a decent writer, but when I would write a lead story or any story for the newscast, I wanted somebody to look at it. I wanted the producer of the show to take a look at my words. Or maybe a fellow reporter. Maybe have Carmen look at it. I wanted somebody else to give me an opinion. And if it looked like I was off base or didn’t have my facts exactly straight, I wanted that backstop. And you know, most of us who grew up in journalism, who went to journalism school, who trained for the profession, we wanted to be accurate. We wanted to be truthful. We wanted to tell it like it was. I think there is that same desire and that same drive, certainly among a great journalists like Devon, there is that same desire to do it right. But time constraints, live reporting, competition, all of these things have conspired in a way that makes it more difficult today to do it than it did. And of course, you’ve got the competition out from the internet and so many people going to unreliable sources to get their their so-called news. And a lot of times it’s not accurate, it’s not truth.
Rich Helppie
From a lay perspective, it seems that some of that disease has crept over into the areas and to the companies that should be the leaders in accuracy. I was looking into a Washington Post story earlier, and it was yet one more of, “according to sources” and unverified. My level of distrust for them not being able to pinpoint basic facts like a source, a timeline, and a quote cause me concern. And then also, in recent months, it seems that there’s a penalty if your news outlet is not appealing to its base. So the editor of The New York Times being recorded saying they’re not going to say anything good about this administration. They have been guilty of changing their headlines multiple times because their readers thought it wasn’t harsh enough. The owner of CNN’s declared that they’re not impartial. And I know that’s gotta have an impact on those true practitioners of journalism inside of those organizations, and I’m sure it happens in Fox and MSNBC and elsewhere. It’s just that you kind of know the brand you’re gonna get when you go to Fox, you’re gonna know the brand you’re going to get when you go to MSNBC. That’s what I’m troubled about it, the competitive pressures that you mentioned starting to drag people away from mission.
Mort Crim
Let me venture a little bit into the whole ideological area, because I think mostly what we’re dealing with today is more cultural than it is ideological. Trump has been a cultural phenomenon, and everybody knows-it’s well known that he spent most of his life is a Democrat, that he is not ideologically from the conservative side, although that’s where he’s drawn most of his base. But I want to talk about that ideological divide in our country. We have always made our most progress when the two sides could compromise and find common ground somewhere in the middle, and Bill Clinton, at the dedication of his library, made a really important statement, he said, “We need conservatives to hold to the lines that should be there, but we need liberals to erase the lines that never should have been drawn”. And I thought that was a pretty good analysis. Now I look at the liberal side of the spectrum as the village people, and it does take a village to get anything accomplished. I look at the Republican or the conservative side as the individual, and it does take individuals to get anything accomplished. I covered the space program. I was down at the Cape for every launch from Gemini 3 through Apollo 12, and I saw a great illustration of what I’m saying here. It took a village to build the rockets and create the systems and organize the teams that it took to put a person on the moon. But in the final analysis, it took the bravery and the skill and the dedication and the knowledge of a single individual or three individuals to get in that rocket in that Apollo ship and go to the moon. That’s the way our society works, it takes government. It takes business. It takes all the people working in concert. That’s the so called progressive or liberal part of our democracy in action. It takes that. But in the final analysis, it also takes individual leaders with their entrepreneurial skills, their strengths, their courage to make the whole thing work. And I think when people say we don’t need the liberals, we don’t need the progressives or they say we don’t want the conservatives, we don’t want the individualists, they’re missing the fact that it takes both to make our democracy work. And it’s when these two ideologies are working in tandem and the tension between them is producing good things in the middle. And we’re missing that because everybody’s retreated to their corner and they’re demonizing the other side instead of recognizing that both sides need each other.
Rich Helppie
Mort that is a wonderful description of the condition that were in, and I share your view, which is why I’m putting myself and my name out there on a limb to say there’s more that bridges us. I’d like to just mentioned President Clinton a little bit because I think three things really stood out that spoke to his character and something that we’ve lost. He said when he first got the office-and remember he ran on the third rail-he said, “You know, my party drug me so far to the left I didn’t recognize myself, and I vowed not to do that”. And I thought that was great-a great amount of insight. And I remember him reaching out to Speaker Gingrich. And they said, look, we come at this from different perspectives, we aren’t gonna agree, but let’s find a way to work together. And they forged a relationship around commonality of trying to work on welfare reform, as an example. Then the other thing, in sharp contrast to our president today, President Clinton was interviewed-either Forbes or Fortune-and he said, I was lucky to be president during the boom of internet one and the run up to Y2K because the economy was running on full cylinders. He didn’t try to take credit for the performance of the stock market. He said, yeah, I was there, and that was a fortunate thing that happened during my time in office. And that is one of the troubling things about this administration, that we have a president…let’s try to stay on the media today…that could be a longer…when we have dinner at the Common Grill, we’ll talk about that and I’ll be publishing some editorials. But let me come back on the media little bit. This a friend of mine. He’s a former college professor and really learned guy. In recent years, he told me that his view of the news coverage has been one of promoting a threat, and his reason says a threat is something you can’t divert your attention from. If your business model says we need eyeballs, clicks and subscriptions, then we’ve got to get fear mongering and hysteria because if the media can stoke or exaggerate threats, they were going to get more of that traffic. Is that on base or off base?
Mort Crim
I think it’s true. I think it’s true. And I sometimes feel about our free press the way Churchill felt about democracies. That it’s the worst form of government there is, except for all the others. I’ve been to Cuba. I’ve seen what happens. I was in Russia before the Iron Curtain fell. I know the the terribleness of having a government controlled or government sanctioned or a press that’s interfered with by the government. I know what that is, and as messy and as difficult as it is to put up with our free press and all the yelling and screaming, but it’s still the best system there is when you compare it to all the others. So I am totally in favor of free press in the First Amendment. I don’t want to put the muzzle on anybody. I think truth, when it’s let loose on the battlefield of ideas, will ultimately win. Maybe I’m a Pollyanna, but history tells me that ultimately the demagogues failed. Truth comes out. And even with all the noise of the internet these days, and the fact that there are so many false voices out there telling untruths and half truths and distortions, I just think that ultimately, on the field of ideas, truth-if we just hang in there and we keep telling it and we keep presenting the facts and we don’t compromise, if there are enough voices willing to do that in print, on the internet, in television and all the various social media-ultimately, truth is gonna win. I have to believe that.
Rich Helppie
I share your optimism. And yet I also know that if you bring out facts and it doesn’t fit someone’s ideology, you could often get an emotional reaction. Cancel culture goes into full bloom. I believe it’s got implications, but Mort you covered a lot of presidents. You covered the Nixon presidency and Watergate. Has the news reporting become more fair? Less fair? As it pertains to covering the presidency?
Mort Crim
Well, the only president that I covered personally because I was doing national news for ABC at the time Lyndon Johnson was president. The other presidents, I was in local TV news for that time, and yes, I covered them, but not close up. I covered them the way you do when you’re covering for a station. But certainly the way we cover presidents has changed, and I think the way we covered this president has dramatically changed because he’s a different kind of president than the country has ever had before, and his relationship with the media is different than it has ever been. Yes, John Kennedy canceled his subscription to The Washington Post, and Harry Truman got mad at the columnist who criticized his daughter’s singing. And we could go back and back and say there’s always been tension between the White House and the media. There should be, because our job is to keep these people accountable in all branches of government. But that’s different than having a chief executive who calls the press “the enemy of the people” and who refers to any coverage that he doesn’t like as fake news. So I think we’ve moved qualitatively into a whole different kind of relationship now, and if it seems that the press is taking this president on as an adversary, that’s a two way street. And I think it becomes more and more difficult for us as journalists to retain our objectivity and our fairness in the face of somebody who has said “you’re not just a critic of this administration, you are the enemy of the people”, that puts us into a whole different dynamic and dimension and it’s worrisome.
Rich Helppie
I concur. I saw the hostility between the president and the press, and I think that’s a topic. And I also remember President Obama’s first news conference, and the reporter from The New York Times asked him a four part question about you’ve been in office so many days and what have you found most surprising, most pleasant and what most enchanting, and President Obama, he almost couldn’t stifle a smile-like wait a minute. Let me write that down. You want to know what I found enchanting? I mean, it was the most softball of softball questions, and I remember sitting there as a citizen saying, All right, we got a new president. Let’s hope he does a phenomenal job. And yet I do want the press not to be fawning, but I want the press to be vigilant. So Mort, here’s something-suppose that President Trump would agree to sit down for an interview with you, without preconditions. What questions would you like to ask him?
Mort Crim
Boy, that is a…you have just given me a very tough…
Rich Helppie
So we can come back and record again next week if you want a little chance to think about it, too.
Mort Crim
I…boy, you know its…I’m gonna show, I guess, some bias here. But I have a problem with this president because I’m still trying to figure out his moral core. I’ve disagreed with policies of every president we’ve ever had. I disagreed with some of Obama’s policy, some of Bush’s policy, some of Clinton’s, Reagan’s-they go down the line. And on a policy basis I disagreed with all of them, Democrat or Republican. But I could think those things through and discuss and figure out a way to talk to each of them, if I had that opportunity, some of them I did have. But in this case, I feel like I’m dealing with somebody who is so inwardly focused that I find it difficult to find the man’s core to figure out rational questions because I don’t really know who he is or where he is, except that all the manifestations that I have seen indicate to me that he is totally self-focused, wants to take credit for everything, blamed for nothing. I look for qualities of leadership and I say, you know, he’s a great performer, he’s great television performer. He played a businessman on television and convinced a lot of people that that’s what we needed to run the country. But when I tried to get past that TV persona and that ability he has at rallies to stir people up, and say, Who is this man? What is at his core? What does he truly believe? Where can we tap in? I would not know what to ask. I suppose if I had the opportunity to interview him, I certainly would sit down and work out a list of questions. But that’s my initial problem. Is that with Bush, with Reagan, with Nixon, with Clinton, with Obama, I kind of knew where their center was. I kind of knew where their core was and that would have made it a lot easier to do an interview with them, that make any sense?
Rich Helppie
It makes a lot of sense. In the run up to the 2016 election I was at a meeting where Bill O’Reilly was the speaker and there’s a situation, no cameras, no recording. And he talked about interviewing Donald Trump. And he said, you’re going to defeat Isis. How you gonna do that? Trump’s answer was I’m not gonna tell you. He said, well, what about the trade agreements that you’re talking about re-doing? How you gonna approach that? Trump said, not gonna tell you, and O’Reilly said, you mention you’re gonna do something about the border. How are you gonna pull that off? Trump said, I’m not gonna tell you. So I wish I had a visual on this because, you know, Bill O’Reilly is a very big guy, too, by the way, he’s huge, just like him, tall, right? And O’Reilly just kind of slowly shakes his head, he said this was the strangest interview I’ve ever done. I got no answers to anything, they were not gotcha questions. They weren’t pointed questions. They were, what’s your game plan?
Mort Crim
What you would expect any president, or presidential candidate to be able to answer and willing to answer.
Rich Helppie
Precisely. And that we try to keep focus on the role of the media, which I do think the partisanship is the fuel that many of the media outlets have given to this partisan divide to try to profit from, I believe are the problems. What we’re trying to deal with on the Common Bridge, and as I tell my listeners and recently wrote a couple of editorials, I say prepare to come to the Common Bridge to find things that you don’t like, prepared to dislike some aspect. But they’re designed that way. If you want to go to a place that you’re going to agree with a particular ideology, you know where to go if you’re from the left, you know where to go if you’re from the right. We have real problems and there’s common sense solutions if we can back down from ideology. Mort, I’m gonna shift gears just a little bit, touch a little bit on the Corona virus. I want to talk about this from your view as a journalist. Clearly, it’s a threat to our health in every form. We’ve seen our public slow to respond. It was one of the things that I wrote about in 2016. That we’ve had an onslaught of reporting-and I really don’t know how to categorize it-but, oh, there’s gonna be a calamity. Then eventually I said, when we have a real crisis, people aren’t going to listen and they’re not going to take it seriously. I know I’m leaving some things out, but we spent a couple of years saying the Russian collusion story’s gonna collapse around the president. Then I saw headlines on major news outlets-the walls are closing on the president-and then we discovered what that was. We had lots of stories and scandals and things…oh now this person’s gonna bring down the president, and we culminated in an impeachment that we still haven’t seen this person that actually lit this, the whistleblower, if such a person exists. And my concern is, do people tune out or become numb when we’re faced with this-dare I say, existential health crisis that we need to be paying attention to-because they’ve been told to be alarmed so many times? Or is the Corona virus it different enough where maybe it’s the thing that unites us?
Mort Crim
Well 911 united us, it didn’t last, but it certainly brought the country together and recognizing there was a common threat. And I think this is doing that, it remains to be seen how long we will continue to think of ourselves as one country who have a common interest in defeating this. I can’t predict that. And I agree with your analysis. We’ve seen all of these things that we were quite sure was going to change the public perception of leadership. And you still have that core of people who will be unmoved. You have people on both sides of the Trump issue who seemingly are unmoved, and the more things seem to rein in on him, the more his core base…he made that famous statement, I could go out in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and my supporters would still be with me. Well, now we’re going to see several thousand dead. Who knows how many. The predictions range from 100,00 to 200,000, I don’t know what it’s ultimately going to be, but how much of that responsibility will come back to him in terms of delayed action. I know already they’re starting to make the spin. I heard Vice President Pence slipped in that news conference yesterday about how the president had been on this for several months. Well, the facts would say otherwise, but that’s gonna be the spin. I don’t know. I would like to think that through this crisis, we will-all of us, all of us on both sides of the spectrum-start to recognize that truth that you have stated a couple of times in this program, and that is, that there is more that unites us than divides us. But somehow we’re gonna have to work our way across the barriers. We’re gonna have to come to a middle ground and recognizing that we need both ideologies, we need the village approach. We need the individual approach. We need the conservatives to draw the lines that should never be crossed and the liberals to erase the lines that never should have been drawn. That’s how our society and our democracy functions best. And frankly, we’ve not been functioning very well for the last several years as the divide has gotten deeper and as the media has exacerbated, rather than ameliorated, this terrible division in our society.
Rich Helppie
Mort, that is well said and something that you said early on during our chat today, it comes down to the truth. Today, in the fog of war around this virus and decisions being made on the fly, there’s gonna be good moves made and bad moves made. But afterwards a great journalist would take-let’s distill what happened with the timeline, with facts, what occurred and what we can do better when faced with a threat again. That’s I think the best we can hope for. You’ve been very, very generous with your time, it is really great to hear the familiar voice of Mort Crim. I know that many of my listeners are very excited to know that you were going to be on The Common Bridge podcast. I offer to host in Chelsea when you come here, when we get to see the great shows that the Purple Rose Theatre, truly a treasure of Michigan and the region, thanks so much again more for being on The Common Bridge.
Mort Crim
Rich, it has been my pleasure. We certainly look forward to taking you up on that invitation. Give my very best regards to my good friend Guy Sanville and all the folks at Purple Rose, and you keep up the good work because building bridges is what it’s all about. I’m involved with the group at our church that has that exactly as its mission. And we started out trying to build bridges with the Muslim and the Jewish communities and other religious communities in our area. But now, of course, it has moved into trying to bridge this ideological split in our country. So I’m happy to participate. There’s so little, that particularly a retired journalist, but one who is under self imposed quarantine right now, as many of us are, there’s very little we can do. So if this has made even the smallest contribution to understanding, it’s been my pleasure. Thank you.
Brian Kruger
You have been listening to Richard Helppie’s Common Bridge podcast. Recording and postproduction provided by Stunt Three Multimedia. All rights are reserved by Richard Helppie. For more information, visit richardhelppie.com.
