Bill Kovach, a veteran journalist, author and former curator of the Nieman Journalism Foundation, is also  the founder of the Committee for Concerned Journalists, CCJ. Anthony Akaeze, principal staff writer, met  and spoke with him recently in Washington DC. Kovach spoke at length about the profession he loves so much as well as on other issues. Excerpts:

Newswatch: Walter Conkrite, the veteran American broadcast journalist, passed on recently. How would you rate his influence as a journalist?

Kovach: When  I was working in Tennesee, I used to get phone calls from him seeking information on certain issues. I knew him long time ago. He was a real journalist. He was not just the kind of  journalist that read what people put down for him. He did some reporting himself. He would call me and some other reporters and used some of the information.

Newswatch: How about you? When did you begin your journalism career?

Kovach: I began my journalism career in the mountains of  Eastern Tennessee down in the Southern part of the United States as a reporter on a small newspaper in the 1950s. The time I started, the early phases of the civil rights movement were just beginning to develop down south and the young blacks formed a group called the Students Non- Violent co-ordinating committee. John Luwas, who is now a member of Congress, was one of the leaders of that movement and they began having sittings and protesting the laws that forbid blacks from ordering Coca Cola out of food counters. I wanted to cover the stories but the little newspaper I worked for was not interested. They thought those were not stories that we should be paying attention to. So I quit that newspaper and went to work for another newspaper in Tennessee, in Neshville, the state capital called the Neshville Tennessean. The editor of that newpaper believed that we had an obligation to cover the civil rights movement. That was where I really began to develop as a reporter, along with some other reporters.

Newswatch: When was this?

Kovach: That was in the early 1960s. And so, I covered the civil rights movement stories. I covered poverty in the atlantic mountains and I covered  politics. Then I went to the New York Times as reporter in New York for a year and covered  state government. Nelson Rockefeller was governor and was planning to run for president. I covered politics, the anti war movement and continued to cover race issues and questions in the North over school control. There was a big fight in the black districts of New York City where all the schools were predominantly black and yet the black residents had virtually no control over the schools in their neighbourhood. I covered stories about that struggle to finally gain control and have the right to have black children educated. Then I came to Washington and covered the committee that was developing rules of impeachment for Richard Nixon, but he resigned before the impeachment came into force. Then I became an editor in the Washington bureau of the New York Times and eventually became chief of the bureau for eight years. In 1987, I was offered a job as executive editor of the Atlanta Journal Constitution and I had the chance to go back down south and create a great newspaper in the region I came from. So I went to Atlanta and the first year I was there, we won the first Pulitzer prize the newspaper had won in 20 years. We were nominated for seven awards that year. We had a great staff.

Newswatch: Which story won the Pulitzer?

Kovach: The story that won was called the red lining. It was a story that proved that every bank in Atlanta had drawn a red line around neighbourhoods that were predominantly black and anyone in those neighbourhoods had 10 times more difficulty getting a loan from the banks. The mayor of the county in which Atlanta is located was black, and to get a loan to buy a house, he  had to pay three times as much in fees as a whiteman with the same income and property that he wanted to buy. It  was discriminatory and we proved it. When my reporter took the story to the head of the biggest bank in Atlanta, he read the story and when he was asked to comment, he said, “Well, all I can tell you is that it is not because of race.” That’s all he could say. The story won the Pulitzer and also changed the way the federal banking officials investigated banks and checked their books and changed the way that loans were guaranteed to all citizens, not just white citizens.

Newswatch: So, I would be right to describe you as an activist of sort?

Kovach: Oh yes, absolutely. I mean, that’s what journalism is for; it’s for the people. The purpose of journalism is to serve the needs of the public. That’s what we are in business for. There’s no other reason to  be in journalism. You need to make money in order to do it but the purpose is not to make money. The purpose is to serve the needs of the people. They depend on us. If we don’t give them the information, no one will. I believe in this deeply that I only lasted two years as editor as the banks were so upset at what we were doing and we made a lot of important people very angry and the owners of the newspaper tried to make me pull back and I wouldn’t. I finally quit in protest of the way they were going about it.

Newswatch: Not that you were sacked?

Kovach: Oh no, I had so much public support. They were afraid to sack me but they kept taking money out of the budget, they wouldn’t let me hire people. Promises I had made to people, I couldn’t keep. But I wouldn’t let my reputation be destroyed by them, because I was doing the right thing and they were doing the wrong thing. So I quit and the next day, there was a big protest and people marched in the streets and made speeches  outside the newspaper house denouncing the owners. It was the first time in American history that the public had a protest march for a newspaper editor.

Newswatch: How did the solidarity march make you feel?

Kovach: I was proud. It was a proof that what I was doing was in the public interest, which is the reason why I’m in journalism. And the first phone call I got was from the president of Harvard University, asking me not to just take any job. He said Harvard would like to give me an emergency appointment as a Nieman fellow, to come up there for the next one year and think about what to do next. And so, I went to Harvard as a Nieman fellow. And while I was there, the New York Times offered me a job. NBC television offered me a job to create the Meet the Press programme. And the president of Harvard asked me to take over the Nieman programme, because the person running the programme was dying of cancer.

The owners of the Atlanta newspaper where I worked were two sisters who were the richest women in America, and I said to the president of Harvard: “Look, you better think about it because you have to raise money for the University and I know you’d have a campaign now for fund raising. I just made the two richest women in America very angry and I’m not sure you want me to run this programme.” And he said. “You don’t understand. In spite of the way you behaved, we want you because of what you believe in. And I said well, I can’t turn that job down. So I ran that programme for the next 10 years until 2001 when I created the Committee of Concerned Journalists so I can have something to do in my retirement.  

Newswatch: Overall, how many years did you spend in journalism?

Kovach: Since 1955, so that’s 54 years.

Newswatch: You’ve had a  fulfilling time, I guess.

Kovach: Oh, it’s been fascinating, it’s been unbelievable...it’s...I can’t imagine anything more exciting, more rewarding, more challenging, more fulfilling than this work.

Newswatch: What would you regard as the highest point of your career?

Kovach: There have been too many of them, too many of them.

Newswatch: Some observers tend to criticise western journalists for what they consider the nagative portrayal of  Africa. Is that an unfair assessment?

Kovach: Yeah, I think the western world, I don’t know about the rest of the world, but the western world has always thought of Africa as something they had to interprete through their eyes and I always thought that was wrong. Africa has its own history and culture, and these have been interfered with by the colonial powers from the first time they got there. If we think the right way is for the voice of  the people to rise up and it rises up because it’s informed, which is what journalism job is to make sure it’s informed, if we believe that’s the right way for the world to run, why don’t we help that? And why doesn’t the journalism that covers that region help out? Some journalists do though. I mean, there are columnists; there’s one in the New York Times who worries about Africa all the time and does  some pretty good reporting. One of the things I love about the Nieman programme is that back in the 1960s, the Nieman programme refused to take people from South Africa because South African authorities only wanted white. But Harvard told the South African government and  owners of the press  that whites would be taken only if every other year, we got a black South African. And so, we began to bring into the Nieman programme white South Africans. Every other year, and soon it was every year, more whites and blacks got their chances.

Newswatch: The American media is often described as  free and independent. From your experience, how truly free and independent is it?

Kovach: It depends on the news organisation. It has the possibility to be free. But just how free they are in their work is another question. The Atlanta paper was so fearful of the economic power that they chose not to cover some things because it would hurt their friends. The Nashville Tennessean was the only white-owned newspaper in the south that covered the civil rights movement everywhere. We covered it in Tennessee, we covered it in Alabama and Mississippi.

Newswatch: You are a veteran of the profession. What is your advice to young aspiring journalists seeking to succeed on the job?

Kovach: I think you only have one choice and that is if you believe in independent journalism that serves the public interest. You just have to find a way to do it. You may not make all the money you want. If your aim is to become famous or to make a lot of money, you are not going into journalism for the right reason. You should go into journalism only if you believe in the mission of the journalist. It’s the nearest thing I have to religion and I believe that’s the way to think about journalism, to do it right.