Quote by Jeff Schmidt

“It was 1984, and journalist Bernard Kalb had been on the State Department beat for eight years. As a veteran of the New York Times, CBS News and NBC News, Kalb knew the frustrations of trying to squeeze information out of tight-lipped government officials like State Department spokesman John Hughes, whom Kalb faced almost daily. In his 38 years of reporting. Kalb had dealt with countless government spokespeople, and so when Hughes decided to leave the department and move back home to Cape Cod, Kalb at first anticipated just another routine change of faces. But the change was to be unlike any in Kalb’s experience. On 28 November 1984 Secretary of State George Shultz announced that he had recruited someone to replace Hughes as his assistant secretary of state for public affairs. State’s new mouthpiece would be—that’s right— Bernard Kalb. And so for the next two years Kalb’s former colleagues struggled to squeeze information out of him—with no greater success, of course, even though they addressed him at press conferences as “Bernie.” How did the Reagan administration know that Kalb, seemingly a longtime adversary as a journalist, could be trusted to speak for its side and routinely tell journalists less than he knew? The answer, put simply, is that Kalb was a professional. At one level, journalism and public relations are conflicting professions, yet the hack and the flack have the same essential qualifying attribute. The administration expects its spokespeople to answer questions at contentious press conferences without making even the slightest ideological slip. Kalb, with his decades of experience maintaining the very strict ideological discipline that is required of New York Times and network television news reporters, had the essential skill for the new job. The administration knew that his transition would be an easy one and that they could train him to be a public relations professional in a matter of days; to train a nonprofessional for such a job would take years. Politically, professionals are interchangeable parts.”

Quote by Jeff Schmidt