Washington Press Club Foundation

Carole Simpson: Interview #7

February 27, 1994 in Washington, D.C.

Donita Moorhus, Interviewer

Carole Simpson - February 27, 1994 tape 1 of 1

February 27th, 1994
Listen to audio
Page 127

[Begin Tape 1, Side A]

Moorhus: Let's talk about the documentaries you've done since you've been at ABC.

Simpson: Well, there were three of them that were part of public affairs programming for the corporation. Those were documentaries that we sent out to the affiliates, and they ran them typically at 6 a.m. on Sunday or 2 a.m. Saturday night or something like that. They were things to satisfy FCC regulations that we do a certain amount of public affairs programming. But they were very, very interesting documentaries, and I'm quite proud of them. Some of them won awards. One had to do with "The Changing American Family."

Moorhus: That was the title of it, right?

Simpson: That was the name of it. "Public Schools in Conflict," this whole issue of teaching values to children. We were working with religious groups that helped put up money for this kind of programming, so we dealt sometimes with values and that kind of thing. The third one was "Sex and Violence in the Media." They were really interesting. We went all over the country to do the documentaries.

Moorhus: Can you discuss the documentaries one at a time? The only one I have seen is "Sex and Violence in the Media," because it's located at the Museum of Television and Radio in New York City and I saw it there. You served in that one as the narrator, but were you also involved in designing and setting out the documentary?

Simpson: Yes, I worked with a producer, and with everything that I do with a producer, I like my input in what we do. So together we would work on the people we would talk to, how we'd go about doing it, where we'd get it, where we would shoot it, and then we'd have to turn it over to this committee of corporate people and this religious advisory group that was part of this for their okay on what we were doing.

Moorhus: So all three of these were part of the same series?

Simpson: Right. This was corporate; this wasn't part of the news division.

Moorhus: Can you explain the difference?

Simpson: There's the corporation, ABC, which includes everything. There are divisions that come out from under this umbrella of ABC. There's the news division, the entertainment division, the sports division, the video enterprises, the made-for-TV movies. There are all these subsidiaries that come under this corporate ABC. Corporate ABC has certain responsibilities in terms of running the corporation, but also to the community at large, and among the things that corporate does is Project Literacy U.S., which you've seen ABC a part of. We are now starting a new corporate initiative called Children First, which will be all of the affiliates. All of the

Page 128

network programming will be dealing with children's issues. So the corporation takes on these kinds of public affairs functions.

There was a religious show called "Directions" that had been run by the religious community, under the auspices of ABC, and they would come in and do their own programming. I came along when the corporation decided we didn't want to do it that way, we want to make them quality documentaries, not just a religious talk show where guests would be brought in. The religious groups still wanted to be involved and put their money in it so that their names would appear as being sponsors of these programs, so that's why we had this relationship with their being involved in signing off on the topics and subject matter that we did. I did three of them. There were other people that did others, so I wasn't the only person narrating those documentaries. But those were areas of my interest, so I was chosen to do those in particular. But then that ended some time ago, a long, long time ago.

But the only major documentary that I have participated in was the "Black in White America," in August of 1989. That was really—it was a breakthrough, ground-breaking, unbelievable opportunity that Roone Arledge gave us. When Max Robinson,* who became the first black anchor of a network news program, died, shortly after he died, Roone Arledge called George Strait, Ray Nunn, and me to New York, to come to his office, that he wanted to discuss something with us. We couldn't imagine what in the world—we had been having these ongoing relationships with him as part of our Minority Board. And I would have meetings with him on the women's kinds of issues. But this, he didn't give us a clue, but we just assumed it would have something to do with minority employees at ABC.

So we went into his office and sat down. He has this very opulent office in New York, filled with Emmys and awards. I mean, it's just the most intimidating office, because you see about fifty Emmys lining his wall, and it's kind of heady to go in and have a meeting in Roone Arledge's office with him. We sat down, and he said, "Well, I guess you're wondering why I called you in here."

"Yeah, we are."

And he went on to tell us that after Max's death, he had been reflecting about some of the things that he had had discussions with Max about. You may recall Max Robinson got into some difficulty when he gave a speech at Smith College and criticized ABC and the other networks, but he included ABC most prominently, in being racist, because he was not called upon to do the inauguration. They would give him lesser roles to perform. Of the three major anchors, Peter Jennings and Frank Reynolds, he would get whatever was the less important role. They would be anchoring the actual inauguration; he would be on the street talking to people in the crowd. Or when the hostages came back from Iran, when the American hostages were released, I don't think he was part of any of the coverage. He was talking about the same kinds of things that I've kind of alluded to you—we were still in this other category: you're still not seen.

He got into a lot of trouble for making that speech, not because it perhaps was not true, but because it reflected badly on his employer. In fact, I'm very careful when I criticize the networks. I criticize the networks, and I try not to, unless I'm representing the women of ABC or something

______________________ * Max Robinson (1939-1988) was hired by ABC News president Roone Arledge in 1978 to be anchor of "World News Tonight" with Frank Reynolds and Peter Jennings. After his death in December 1988, it was revealed that Robinson had died of AIDS.

Page 129

like that, and authorized to speak on their behalf. Typically I try to make the same points, but I talk generally about network television or the television industry in particular. His big mistake was nailing ABC and how he was treated at ABC in a public venue, apparently without ever having gone to them to complain ahead of time.

Moorhus: Do you know when that speech would have taken place?

Simpson: Let's see. When did Max leave? I came in '82. He must have left in '85. Somewhere in the early eighties, I would suspect. [Note: Robinson spoke at Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, in February 1981.]

Moorhus: So he was not part of ABC when you and George [Strait] had the first meeting?

Simpson: No. I think he had left. I think he had left.

Moorhus: And when the Minority Affairs—

Simpson: I think he had left, yes, because he obviously would have been a part of this, so he would have had to have been gone. That's when he went back to Chicago and started anchoring at one of the local stations. But I'm not even sure if I was here yet.

Moorhus: So it had been quite a while before '89 when Roone Arledge would have had these conversations with Robinson.

Simpson: Exactly. So he and Roone—I mean, we thought he [Robinson] was going to get fired. This was widely reported, because it was big news for this black anchorman to accuse the network he works for of being racist. So he had long discussions with Roone, and finally they ironed out whatever difficulty there was, but from those of us that knew him and watched, he never quite had the stature with ABC that he had had after that incident. I don't know if it was, "We'll punish you for a little while and pay you back, and you will be sorry for what you did." I don't know. But he never was up there in the way that he had been before.

At any rate, Max died of AIDS in 1988. Roone Arledge and everybody came to his funeral. It was a huge funeral here in Washington, D.C., and there were many tributes to him. It was after attending the funeral that apparently Roone started thinking about the discussions that he had had with Max over that other incident, and apparently Max had told him, "You'll never understand what it's like to be a black man in America. You'll never understand it."

And he [Roone] said that he realized he [Max] was probably right, and he said, "That gave me an idea. I'd like to turn over an hour of prime-time television on ABC to the black employees at ABC, to do a documentary on what it's like to be black in America today." And we were just dumbfounded. He said, "I want all editorial input to be yours. I will oversee it to make sure it's up to the production standards of ABC News, but you all will say whatever you want to say. You will decide to do it however you want to do it. You will be in charge of this project, and we're going to give you an hour of prime-time television to do it."

Well, this was just—I mean, we were awestruck. It was like, "What?" What an incredible opportunity to have and to turn it over to the black employees. As I say, it grew out of his thinking about Max and that it's true, probably white people do not realize how we see things and how we view things as black Americans.

Page 130

Moorhus: You had gone with George Strait up for that first meeting with Roone Arledge, but how did Ray Nunn get into this? I confess it's not a name that I recognize.

Simpson: Ray Nunn was the highest ranking black at the time at ABC in producing. He was a producer. He'd been producer in Beirut during the Lebanon civil war. He was Atlanta bureau chief. He was producer of long-form documentaries. He was the person that we thought was going to crack the corporate rank someday and become a vice president of ABC News, perhaps the first black vice president or the first executive producer of the show. But he [Roone] made him in charge as executive producer, with George and I having editorial input in working with him on it, because we were correspondents. But Ray would be the executive producer, and he was to pull together a staff, black employees from all over the company to work on this project. This was January of '89, and this show aired in August. What does it say up there? That's the documentary. Look at what that wall poster says. It was a great ad that appeared everywhere.

Moorhus: "Tuesday, August 29, for one hour the ABC television network will go black." That's a great ad.

Simpson: Wasn't that a wonderful ad?

Moorhus: Yes. And then on the bottom, pictures of you and—

Simpson: Charles Thomas.

Moorhus: Charles Thomas and George Strait.

Simpson: Right. We were the three anchors and, at that time, the only three black correspondents at ABC News.

This was like the most exciting thing that I had ever heard, that he was going to turn this over to us. So for the rest of that year, much of our work was spent in putting together this documentary, and it was broken into three parts. If I had done the documentary, this is not the way I would have done it, but it was a collaborative effort, and all kinds of people were involved. We had many arguments. I mean, this was not a pleasant experience to work with the black employees of ABC News, because we actually came from very many different backgrounds. You would think most of us were kind of educated black middle class that—for the most part, that's what we were—had come from similar backgrounds, but surprisingly, when we got into this project, we came from many vantage points—very black nationalistic, some integrationist, some separatist, so it was a very painful exercise to try to reach agreement on how we would present this program.

Among the things we did before we got started was to bring in experts. We brought Dr. James Comer from Yale University Medical School; we brought in—God, I can't remember, one of these rappers. I don't know if he's with Run DMC or something like that. We brought in Shelby Steele from San Francisco State University. We brought in sociologists, community activists, academics, to just talk about where black America was today, what they saw as the major problems confronting them. I'm saying they gave us quite a considerable budget to be able to do this and to do it right. So we really did our research to try to get at what were the major issues facing us.

The program was divided into three parts, first the underclass, the black underclass. I had what was called the black middle class, but it wasn't. It should have been actually the black upper

Page 131

class. That was one of my problems with the program. We were not dealing with the teachers and the mail carriers. I mean, the middle class is $25,000 to $50,000. I was interviewing a family in San Diego that together made close to $200,000, lived in a very beautiful home. To call that the black middle class, I thought was erroneous, and I thought we should have been dealing with the bulk of Americans which weren't underclass and weren't up there. It was the teachers and the blue-collar workers and those kinds of people. That was one of my arguments with the piece.

But we did that, and then we used the Tuskegee Airmen.* George did that segment on these great heroes, that we do have heroes. We've got our rich people and we've got our poor people and all of their problems, but we have true heroes.

Moorhus: American heroes.

Simpson: True American heroes, that's right, who brought glory and distinction and honor to their country in a segregated setting.

We also began the program with the famous University of Chicago study. Do you remember this study about the black dolls and the white dolls?

Moorhus: Yes.

Simpson: It turned out I had participated. My mother told me that I had participated in that original study as a child. I must have been six years old, but I don't remember it at all. But she told me that I picked the white dolls for the pretty dolls, for the good dolls, which I'm sad to admit, and I did admit in this program later, that I was one of the children that picked the white dolls. What we did was go to Atlanta where there was another academic who was working with pictures with children today, to show that blacks still have poor self-esteem. If you ask little children, "Who's the good boy and who's the bad boy?" and they look at pictures of white boys and black boys, the black boys are the bad boys. "Which is the pretty girl and which is the ugly girl?" And still too many children are picking the little black girl as the ugly girl and the bad girl.

So that work goes on. I participated in that study forty years ago, and here I am reporting on the same thing and it's still alive and well, this poor self-esteem. We were happy to see there are some children that get it, but most of them did not. So the piece opened with that. Among black Americans, we still feel— [Tape interruption.]

If you notice the date, we were very upset with the date assigned to air this. There are fewer people watching television the last week in August—

Moorhus: Than on any other time in the year.

Simpson: Right before the Labor Day weekend. We really wanted it to start in September with the prime-time season starting, and we lost that battle. I think the news division supported us and I think Roone did, but the entertainment division that lives or dies by the numbers did not want to put in what could potentially be a bad showing for a documentary. So it aired that week, and

______________________ * Tuskegee Airmen. The name given to African-American airmen who were trained at Tuskegee Army Air Field in Alabama for service in the segregated armed services during World War II. From the first ceremony on March 7, 1942, a total of 992 pilots were graduated into the 99th Fighter Squadron and the 332nd Fighter Group.

Page 132

we were not happy. Some people suggested, "See, it's racist again. At a chance, they're giving us a bad time slot." But I'm the kind of person—"Let's be happy with what we—we have something, okay? It ain't what we would necessarily choose for ourselves, but it's a program."

Moorhus: Did they only air it once?

Simpson: Uh-huh.

Moorhus: Don't they sometimes air documentaries more than once?

Simpson: Uh-huh. Yes.

Moorhus: I guess that answers the question.

Simpson: Yes, they do. But it got tremendous response. It is in libraries all across the country, because people could send for the video. It was incredible. So I think they probably had a good return on it, not only in terms of good PR, for having done something no other network has ever done, and everybody wrote about it. We were interviewed on "Entertainment Tonight," and it got a lot of publicity. CNN "Showbiz Today" interviewed us. We went around to the talk shows and talked about it. So it got a lot of attention.

But what was I trying to tell? I was telling you about the pictures. The documentary started with that, that we still have this low self-esteem. Then my particular portion that had to do with the black middle class showed you that a man who is an executive of Xerox still has women pass him on the street and clutch their bags. No matter how successful you are—I mean, it really brought home the color thing, the badge of color which does not go away. Here he is with this beautiful home, a lovely, intelligent wife, straight-A student daughter, living in a San Diego suburb with a swimming pool and driving a Mercedes, and yet when he gets on an elevator, he's another black man. Even though he's in his suit and his tie and everything else, he's a black man, and people are frightened of him.

That was one of the interesting things, that the color thing ran throughout, that we are not at the point where Martin Luther King asked that we not be judged by the color of our skin, but the content of our character. Our conclusion was that the color of the skin is still very, very important: To be black in America, you cannot get beyond that.

But it was an exciting program to be a part of and to be able to do that, to tell it as we saw it. It was anchored at the Lincoln Memorial. We did it at midnight, after the memorial was closed. We got permission, and we walked about the statue of Abraham Lincoln. It's a classy production. They really put on the money to make it a classy production, and I'm quite proud of what we did. Many people are saying, "Aren't you going to do another one?" I still get letters, you know. "Isn't it time to update that? Why don't you all do another one?" [Tape interruption.]

Moorhus: You talked earlier about some of the challenges of working with a lot of blacks at ABC who had very different perspectives. Was it an all-black cast and production crew?

Simpson: There was an editorial staff of twenty-three, and two were young white researchers, because we actually didn't have enough black employees to do all the work that was necessary. The camera crews were, of course, white. The editors were white. All the technical aspects of it.

Page 133

Moorhus: Because there just were no blacks in those positions?

Simpson: There just weren't. Right. So all of the technical post-production and production parts of it, the graphics, the person that directed us and all that, were white. But our point of view was all from the black employees.

Moorhus: Did you get any reaction from your white colleagues about having this very special opportunity?

Simpson: They were furious. They were absolutely furious, like, "Where's the Jewish documentary? Where is the Hispanic documentary?" They thought that, you know, Roone Arledge was bending over backwards to the black employees, and there was a lot of hard feelings about this whole thing. They thought it was segregationist. "Why are we doing, in this day and age, something that's an all-black production?" But he weathered it. [Laughter.] It was his assignment. What are they going to say to Roone Arledge? Roone Arledge wanted this done. So the grumbling was throughout the company and like, "How dare they do this?" and, "They're getting special treatment again. They always want special treatment." There was a lot of resentment. But then I had a lot of people say they really liked it, people that at first resented it, then thought how historic it was, and ours was the network that had done something like that.

Moorhus: What about the whites who worked on the crew—the technical production people? Did you get any reaction from them as to whether it might have changed any of their views?

Simpson: No, because I didn't work with enough of them. I went out and shot my stories and then they were edited by producers. Each of us had producers that we were assigned to that did the actual cutting. So whether the editors that were involved or the camera crews that were involved, I had different crews doing different things, I never got a sense that they had been touched by that, and haven't heard that they have been. It could be. I just was not involved in the production part of it that much.

Moorhus: Do you think it helped your career?

Simpson: [Pauses.] Well, I guess every time you're in prime-time television it's good. A lot of black people do not watch a lot of network television news. If you look at the numbers of the audience, it's very small, black people watching television news. They watch local news much more than Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw, or Dan Rather. It increased my visibility a great deal, I think all of our visibility, in the black community, because it was so widely publicized by all the black media, the newspapers, and Jet magazine and all those things all ran things saying that it was coming up. So in terms of increasing my visibility perhaps among black Americans that may not have watched the news and known me from the news, it probably did. In terms of helping my career, no, not necessarily.

Moorhus: Did it have any impact on George Strait?

Simpson: In terms of helping his career more? I don't think so. We were all pretty solid correspondents that got on the air pretty frequently, so, no, I don't think so.

Moorhus: Where is Charles Thomas now?

Page 134

Simpson: Charles Thomas left ABC. They closed the St. Louis bureau. He was in our St. Louis bureau, and they wanted to transfer him to Los Angeles, and he didn't want to move, so he's working for WLS in Chicago now. He left the network.

Moorhus: And what about Ray Nunn?

Simpson: Ray Nunn left the company. He had lots of friction with them on a variety of other kinds of things, and he ended up going to work for "Oprah" ["Oprah Winfrey Show"], and now he's running that Medical Whittle's medical service. Whittle Communications that has Channel One in the high schools now also has a medical service that goes into hospitals and doctors' offices, a daily medical program, fifteen minute. He's executive producer of that.

Moorhus: What was the critical response to the documentary?

Simpson: For the most part, extremely positive. I think there were a couple of negative things from places like the Washington Times, but the New York Times gave it good reviews. Again, I have all that stuff somewhere, and there's a whole bunch of clippings and things like that on it. But I think it was extremely well received.

Moorhus: The point that you were making that it is still the color of one's skin that is recognized, the black man who gets on the elevator and is ignored or gets an adverse reaction, those were points that were made most recently in a book by Ellis Cose, The Rage of the Privileged Class, which says, in a different form, still no progress, or not enough, at least. Is it time to do another documentary like that or to re-show it?

Simpson: We need to do it again, because clearly things for the underclass have gotten worse. While the black middle class is growing, it's not growing as fast as the underclass is growing. And as I say, we didn't deal with a program that I felt should address the lives of ordinary black folk, and that was one of my biggest problems with the program. We were not assessing that. Yes, of course it's time. We were hoping it might even be a continuous thing, once a year we could do something like that.

Moorhus: Is the Minority Affairs Board still active?

Simpson: It's like the Women's Board, ad hoc now. I mean, most of our work has been done, a lot of progress has been made. I just was interviewed by Judy Flander last week or something, and she's doing an update on women in TV. It's like from where we started to where we are now, we've come a really long way. There are minorities now on every show, more minority correspondents, more in executive capacities. We still have not broken through into the corporate suites yet. But the Minority Affairs Board and the Women's Board now act on an ad hoc basis. If something comes up, we will deal with that issue. The people will come to us and say, "There is this problem," and we will take it to management. So it's kind of like that rather than our formal meetings that we used to have all the time, because our work—I mean, we got them to pay attention, and it changed things and they are sensitive to these issues and looking very hard for qualified minorities in all kinds of job categories. When these new shows have started, they've gone out and made sure that these shows are diverse.

So we think we've made a lot of progress, plus who has the time? We don't have the time, most of us, just to do our jobs. Because we're correspondents and producers, that was the core of our women's group and our minority group, and we're busy. And we're in different cities at different times, so the logistics of trying to continue to meet and that kind of thing is virtually

Page 135

impossible, impossible now. But as I say, when we're called upon, and we are called upon, if someone thinks they've been discriminated against or, "How many minorities have you hired?" And they'll call us. They'll let us know that they've hired two more producers for this show. Management will keep us informed. But we've got a lot of people in the pipeline. We've got a lot more young people, and that was important to get them into the pipeline. We'd like to see more progress with those of us that are already in the pipeline and have been in the pipeline to reach these higher positions, but at least we're building and they're hiring top-quality folks that some day, I hope, will reach the top echelons.

Moorhus: Another question about this as a documentary. Apparently it was very unusual for you to be called into Roone Arledge's office and have him make this assignment. But how do documentaries generally get created—by Roone Arledge or by a producer?

Simpson: We have what's called—well, it doesn't exist anymore now because there are so many news magazines shows, but we used to have what was a documentary unit that would do these long-form, hour-long programs, but now those people are now spread across what—

Moorhus: "20/20."

Simpson: "20/20."

Moorhus: "PrimeTime Live."

Simpson: "PrimeTime Live."

Moorhus: "Day One."

Simpson: "Day One."

Moorhus: "Turning Point."

Simpson: "Turning Point," yes. So now we don't have what's just a documentary unit anymore, because the documentaries have not been as successful as these prime-time programs have been, these prime-time news magazines. Before, when there was a documentary unit, these producers would come up with their own ideas for documentaries. Peter still does his "Peter Jennings Reports," and Ted Koppel will from time to time still do his hour long, but those grow out of "Nightline" and his staff, and Peter's stuff grows out of "World News" and the staff he works with. So they could come from all kinds of sources.

Moorhus: When you were working on "Black in White America," did you work within the construct of the documentary unit?

Simpson: No, it was completely self-contained. Drawn together from throughout the country, a series of people from desk assistants all the way up.

Moorhus: So organizationally speaking, it was quite an innovation as well.

Simpson: Exactly. A documentary unit was created to produce this program, and it was 99 percent black.

Moorhus: And it worked.

Page 136

Simpson: It worked. People loved it. And as I say, many schools—we know that many schools have used it to talk about issues of race and things like that. It's shown during Black Awareness Month, February, and it's still being drawn upon as a resource.

Moorhus: That's good. I have a couple of other topics to discuss. How are you doing on time now?

Simpson: I think I'd better go.

Moorhus: And your throat is not good.

Simpson: Yes.

Moorhus: Okay. Then we'll pick up on "20/20" and "Nightline" next time.