NPC in History – birth of the Kalb Report

During the first Kalb Report, September 1994. From left, Moderator Marvin Kalb, Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala, U.S. Sen. Alan Simpson, and National Economic Council Director Robert Rubin.

 

This past week, The Kalb Report produced its 100th program in the 26 years since it was launched in September, 1994.  In addition, the program’s executive producer for all 100 programs, Mike Freedman, was elected 2020 National Press Club president on Friday.

 In honor of those two events, I want to recount how the program was launched.

When I ran to be the 1994 president, I said I wanted to create a regular television program that explored the news media.  The problem was that I had no idea how to do that. Some members, led by Patrick McGrath of Fox-5 News, had looked into it.  But there were two hang ups.  Where could we get the money to make this work? And where could we find a journalist with enough gravitas to serve as the moderator? It seemed like a challenging task for a group of volunteers. That’s when Club member Jan DuPlain introduced me to Marvin Kalb and Freedman.

Kalb was already a legendary international television correspondent. The last CBS correspondent hired by Edward R. Murrow, he served as Chief Diplomatic Correspondent for the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. He had covered the Cuban Missile Crisis from Moscow, he had gone with Nixon to China and he had been part of Henry Kissinger’s Mideast shuttle diplomacy. He later moderated NBC’s Meet the Press, and was the founding director of Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center for the Press, Politics and Public Policy.

 In 1994, he was a visiting scholar at George Washington University. GW President Stephen Joel Trachtenberg wanted Kalb to do a series of programs on the media, and he was willing to put up the money for it. He asked  Freedman, then a faculty and staff member, to make it happen. Freedman himself was an experienced broadcaster as managing editor for the broadcast division of United Press International, and he brought his energy and talent to get things done.

Freedman wanted a high-profile venue for the program.

It was, as they say, a match made in heaven.

On Sept. 29, 1994, the program debuted in what is now the Holeman Lounge. What an extravaganza! Kalb had chosen as his topic “Cynicism in America and the Role of the Media in Promoting It.”

 He had put together a panel of nine people, covering the whole range of media, government, politics and academia. Included were Sen. Alan Simpson, R-Wyo., Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala, civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, Washington Post columnist David Broder, National Economic Council Director Robert Rubin, Dallas Morning News columnist Carl Leubsdorf,  Susan Page of USA Today, GW President Trachtenberg, and GW Professor Amatai Etzioni.

Freedman had arranged for News Channel 8 to produce the programs the first year and to distribute them to other cable news stations. NPR taped it. 

That was the first of nine programs we produced in the 1994-1995 season. It was a good beginning, and it has been going ever since.

This is another in a series provided by Club historian Gil Klein.  Dig down anywhere in the Club’s 111-year history, and you will find some kind of significant event in the history of the world, the nation, Washington, journalism and the Club itself. These stories will be published as a book, “Tales from the National Press Club,” due out April 27, 2020.