Terry Moran, ’82, has become one of America's leading journalists by asking the essential questions that Lawrence helped him learn.
By Rick Moser, ’83
Lawrence
Today magazine, Spring 2006
Terry Moran started his rise to the top of the journalistic food chain by editing The Lawrentian and now, after six years as ABC’s chief White House correspondent, he recently was named as one of three new anchors replacing Ted Koppel as hosts of ABC’s highly respected news program “Nightline.” Rick Moser, ’83, a Lawrentian colleague, spoke with Moran for Lawrence Today shortly before he began broadcasting under the “Nightline” banner with a week of reports from Iraq. Pictured: Moran (left) with Bill Clinton in the "Nightline" studio before his interview with the former president.
So, Terry, not bad — from White House correspondent to “Nightline.” What
are your thoughts on the new gig?
It’s a dream job. It’s a challenge, because when “Nightline” started,
there were not the kind of corporate ownership of the media and the competitive
pressures to turn a buck that there are today. I think we’ll do good
work. The question is, “Will that be enough?”
I’m going to Baghdad, and I’m happy about it. It’s nerve-wracking
there, of course, but after being cooped up in the White House booth, being
able to point yourself in one direction and go and find the story is incredibly
liberating.
Everybody in television wants essentially the same thing: they want to do what
they want to do. In other words, they want the opportunity to have an audience
of some size — it doesn’t have to be a huge size — and be
able to tell the stories they want to tell. This, right now, is something like
that for me, so I’m pretty happy.
How do you define that story? What’s a good story to you?
Well, I love, excessively, hard moral questions — the “ought” questions.
I covered four trials of Jack
Kevorkian, each one more interesting than the
last. Putting the man himself aside, the stories have at their center a question
of “What should we do?”
That’s what I look for: the stories that have something to say about
who we are, and those come in all shapes and sizes.
In a trial, that question comes down to “What do we do with a defendant
who has allegedly done this thing?” I’m drawn to that aspect of
the story. I like there to be a kind of visceral question at the heart of it.
What are the other big stories you’ve covered that have raised
that kind of question?
When I was reporting for Court TV, I was the third Menendez brother, according
to an article that Al Goldstein published. That trial was a really good story,
though. It was an incredible, melodramatic domestic murder, so it had all the
tabloid elements you can imagine.
Yet, there also was a very genuine, important moral question right in the middle
of it, which was: do claims of prior abuse mitigate one’s responsibility
for a murder? In addition, there was an evidentiary question of whether that’s
what happened. So there was an interesting debate in the middle of this soaring,
operatic tabloid murder trial. That extra dimension really makes a story.
And how did you feel about that question — where did you come
down on the case, given their circumstances?
Well, I think the answer’s been in our tradition for a long time: it’s
grounds for mercy. And the fact that the prosecutor out there sought the death
penalty on these two young men who, I think, had some facts behind their claims
of abuse, when he didn’t with O.J.
Simpson — I thought that was
just disgraceful.
The O.J. story was another big one for you.
Yeah, but I was less interested in that case — partly because I wasn’t
there on the ground (I was anchoring Court TV’s nightly coverage) and
partly because I just thought it was a no-brainer. It wasn’t a whodunit,
that’s for sure. I didn’t find as much of a moral question to be
decided. It was just more of a spectacle.
Court TV covered more than 600 cases while I was there. I personally covered
50 or so, and there was only one case I ever saw where the camera made an impact
on the outcome of the trial, and that was the one in Los Angeles with the celebrity
right in the middle of it.
Those are both U.S. stories, but you’ve reported around the world.
What international experiences stand out?
Iraq, of course, is the biggest story of our time. I was there before, a couple
of years ago. That was an interesting experience. I went north, south, into
Kurdistan. I was in Ramadi and Fallujah, I was down in Nasiriyah. You could
drive around then.
Places like these force a unique kind of camaraderie on the itinerant community — aid
workers, journalists, and the like — and that makes for some of the most
memorable aspects of the experience, because they’re the people you’re
living it with.
I remember being in the courtyard of our little hotel — we don’t
stay in big hotels; we were in a tiny motel in a quiet neighborhood. You’d
really have to want to kill the crew from ABC to find us. My cameraman was
an Irishman, one of the engineers was a Dutchman, and my producer was an ex-marine,
now dead. Somebody pulled out a guitar and started singing songs that I knew
when I was growing up, like the old Irish songs. The Dutchman was singing “Jug
of Punch” and all of those. That was weird, because those songs had very
powerful memories for me of my childhood, and there I was, in Baghdad with
this motley crew of people having this bonding experience under the Baghdad
sky by night. That was trippy.
I remember a similar experience during the war in Kosovo. It was in the bar
in the Grand Hotel in Pristina, which was not very grand. It had been used
as a barracks by the Serbs for the last couple of weeks of the bombing. The
water had been shut down, so it was basically an open latrine. But there was
liquor there, so that’s where people gathered, the locals and others — the
Serbs kind of nervous, wondering who we Americans were. There were a couple
of Kosovar Albanians there, as well.
Somebody put on a [Rolling] Stones tune I’d never heard, “Slipping
Away,” and under those circumstances, it just sounded great. It was a
visit from another world, and it was one of those experiences you look for
in this business. The reason you get in this business is that you want to go
around the world, meet people, and tell stories about them. Meeting some Serb
paramilitary types in the bar of the Pristina hotel was one of those moments.
Another great traveling experience was not reporting, but when I was doing
a Watson Fellowship, right after graduating from Lawrence. I was studying the
economic development of the rural communities on the west coast of Ireland.
It was very badly timed, because I arrived at the moment of the last great
economic depression in Ireland before it took off into this Emerald Tiger thing
that they have now. I got there as the economy really was grinding to a halt.
Still, it was a great year. I loved living there. I’ve been back recently,
and it’s like a different country. Irish Americans can be very nostalgic
about Olde Ireland, which was really just damp and drafty and poor. It’s
a better place now. But, in the poorer Ireland, you seemed to have access to
a deeper, unbroken history.
I remember meeting a guy on the road to the Dingle Peninsula, and he was a
genuine believer in ghosts; the spirit world and the holy saint world were
very immediately present to him.
I remember going to some grotto on the side of the road in Cork, near Kildare,
where thousands of people were gathering every night because they saw a statue
of the Virgin Mary crying tears of blood. I sat next to them and…I didn’t
see it. I’m not saying it didn’t happen.
It was as if you had access into a more ancient world, and I’m not sure
how much of that Ireland is left.
If “Nightline” is the “dream job,” what’s
been your worst assignment?
In some ways, the White House. Some people are cut out for it. They just love
it. You get in there, you’re in the bubble, and you have proximity to
power. You travel with the President of the United States, you see these amazing
things, the flow of information is pretty well channeled, the issues are fascinating — I
liked all of that.
At the same time, it’s very confining if what you want to do is travel
around the world, meet people, and tell stories about them. You don’t
do that. One person is your subject — and that’s kind of interesting
for a while. You’re trying to plumb the depths of one person in this
very artificial environment, but it’s intellectually confining, even
though you’re covering the waterfront of national issues.
It’s been fascinating. It’s been a thrill, but I haven’t
been out there doing what everyone in the journalistic community wants to do,
which is experience the issues, not just talk about them. In some ways, going
to work at the White House was hard, because I knew I’d be lied to, and
that’s no fun.
Were you covering the White House on 9/11?
Actually, it was one of the few times I wasn’t with the President. I’d
given a speech the night before. I wasn’t doing much speechmaking, so
I asked, “Can I miss this trip? He’s just going down there for
some education thing.”
So, I’m in the White House on 9/11. There’s only a few of us, because
Bush isn’t there. All of a sudden the Secret Service comes running in
and says, “Get out. Run.” They’re literally pushing us out
the door, because they believe the White House is a target. A plane is coming — it’s
the one that hit the Pentagon.
The White House was incredibly locked down before 9/11 — it’s got
two strong gates, you’ve got to have your secret code, people are looking
at you, there’s a magnetometer — but this time, they’ve thrown
open the gates and they’re screaming at women to take their heels off
and run.
I was running with some people I know, senior officials on the Domestic Policy
Council. We ran down the street for a block, and then we stopped and asked, “Where
do we go?” We turned around, and that’s when we saw the smoke coming
up across the river.
The ideas that run through everything you’ve said here are finding stories
that matter and telling them well and thoroughly. That sounds very Lawrentian
to me. How would you say Lawrence helped ready you for the career you’ve
had?
A lot of people go to college these days for the connections, for the name. It
seems to me a brutally competitive world, in a way, with pressures that I never
really felt as a kid from the Midwest. I almost feel bad for kids these days
who seem to be so much more careerist about their college choice.
I feel, genuinely, that I was very lucky in the experience I had. Lawrence was
always very earnest about learning, and that really worked for me. Great teachers.
Great conversations about The Great Conversation that our culture has had for
the past several thousand years about how we live and how we live together — that
was the essence of the liberal arts and of the experience we got at Lawrence.
As I meet people who went to different kinds of colleges, I don’t think
most of them had as rich an educational experience as I did. It seems to me that
they were not as engaged in that Great Conversation.
Because of that grounding and the breadth of ideas we were encouraged to explore,
I annoy my colleagues to no end because I’m not bashful about sending e-mails
to the entire company — all of ABC News. Some people find them interesting,
I think a lot of people find them annoying, but they’re never dull, and
in part that’s because whatever the news of the day is, I try to bring
a little perspective to it. I’ve even been known to drop some poetry into
them. At a very mature, established organization like ABC News, that’s
seen as a little odd, but I think it helps keep things a little bit lively.
That comfort level with our culture and our traditions sets me apart a bit,
and I don’t think a lot of other people I know in this business have that.
I attribute a lot of that to Lawrence, which is a great environment for the love
of learning and the enrichment it provides. The older I get, the more valuable
that is.
Given the remarkable career you’ve had, what advice would you give
to collegiate journalists today as they do their job and, perhaps, move toward
careers in the
profession?
I’ll tell you one thing we can learn from college journalists. I think
they have it naturally, I think we had it, and I think it’s rare in the
mainstream because people lose it — they give a damn.
It’s amazing how many newsrooms you can walk into and there’s a kind
of jaded, cynical pseudo-sophistication. You don’t find that in college
newsrooms. They do give a damn.
That’s incredibly valuable, so my advice to college journalists is: don’t
lose it.
The thing that comes with age that’s good is not being so sure you’re
right. The more you report a story, hopefully, the closer you can get and the
more facets you’ll see, so you can recognize there’s another side
there.