A Conversation with CBS This Morning: Saturday’s Anthony Mason – HuffPost 7.28.14

Mike Ragogna: Good This Morning, Anthony!

Anthony Mason: [laughs]

MR: You’ve been in journalism for over thirty years. When did you start focusing on interviews?

AM: Well, it was kind of an accidental transition. What happened really was I saw a colleague of mine, a cameraman named Ron Dean who was out shooting a story one day on 25th street. I asked him what he was doing and he told me he was shooting some B-roll for a piece on Patti Scialfa who is Bruce Springsteen’s wife, who I’ve been a huge fan of. I said, “Oh really? That’s really cool, who’s doing it?” and he told me that Jim Axelrod was doing it and I was like, “Damn,” because I really would’ve loved to do that story because I know all about her music and I went through a divorce, frankly, with her album. If you know Patti’s first album Rumble Doll, it’s basically a conversation with Bruce’s album Tunnel Of Love. They’re two sides of the same event, his divorce, her trying to get him to jump when he won’t, it’s a conversation which if you full know know what went on is very interesting. My now wife’s favorite album during my divorce was Rumble Doll and mine was Tunnel Of Love. That’s why I was particularly interested when Ron was shooting this stuff, and why I was lioke, “Well damn.” So I went to the guy at Sunday Morning who was kind of in charge of doing that stuff and I said, “What’s the deal?” and he said, “We’re doing this piece on Patti and ultimately, we hope to do a piece on Bruce, too.” I said, “Well who’s doing that?” and he said, “We don’t have anybody yet,” so my hand shot up right away and I said, “I’ll take that.” That was actually the first music profile that I did. Way to start at the very top, right? That was kind of terrifying because when you’re in the news business–I had never wanted to do celebrity profiles, I just hadn’t been interested, and I certainly hadn’t been interested in doing stories on actors and actresses because I found them sort of impenetrable the few times I’d done them, but music was a different thing for me. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a DJ. Up in my attic somewhere, I have hours and hours and hours and hours of tapes I made of me being a DJ in my imaginary radio station.

MR: You should broadcast them someday!

AM: I don’t know, I haven’t heard them in literally twenty-five or thirty years. That is, if the tape hasn’t disintegrated, because it’s literally on cassette. But I had a really good time doing the Bruce piece as terrified as I was of it. Then they said, “We’ve got this other piece, are you interested in doing something on Neil Diamond?” and I was like, “God, yeah, sure,” because it’s not something some people like to admit but I’ve always been a big Neil Diamond fan, too. So those were the first two that I did and I was like, “This is really interesting. It actually played into a whole side of me that I’d never really gotten to in terms of basic journalism. That’s what kicked the whole thing off. I started looking for more to do and it took on a life of its own. I’m not really quite sure how, but it did.

MR: What age were you when you made this transition?

AM: The Bruce piece was 2005, so I was forty-nine.

MR: Journalism’s been your career all along, right?

AM: I started pretty much right out of college, my first job was in Tulsa at a station called KJRH. I’ve been doing it for almost thirty-four years, now, thirty two of them with CBS.

MR: What got you into journalism?

AM: My father kicked me out of the house. [laughs] I’d always been interested in it, I had a lot of interests as a kid. I literally volunteered for my first political campaign when I was eight years old in 1964. LBJ FOR THE USA was this enormous sign across from the bus stop I used to get off at from school. For some reason, it just fascinated me, and I walked in one day and said, “I want to help out with the campaign.” There wasn’t really a political agenda involved that I recall. I couldn’t tell you why I walked in other than I thought the sign was really cool.

MR: I had the same thing happen with me as a kid in New York with Andrew Stein. I had no idea what his political affiliation was but I knew I wanted to work for him.

AM: I know, it’s so funny. I loved political campaigns as a kid. I loved being part of them, I loved the hoopla, I loved the bumper stickers and buttons and all of that. I just loved them. From the time I was eight until I got into college almost every time I was off from school I’d be working on a political campaign somewhere. In seventh and eighth grade in the summers there was a guy who ran for state assembly and I used to campaign with him at subway stops every morning and every afternoon. I was really into politics. I always loved television as a kid, I had my own imaginary TV station, I literally gridded out the entire programming schedule in a school notebook, I stole all my favorite shows from the other networks and then made up my own. Everything I did was being televised in my head, if I was playing a basketball game with a Nerf ball off my closet I was doing play-by-plays and picking camera angles, I was just always like that. In high school I was the editor of the paper and in college I was the features editor of the paper, so I was always into all that stuff–although when I came home, I’ll be honest with you, I moved in with my dad in New York when I got out of Georgetown and I had no idea what I was going to do. I had no plans or anything and dad looked at me one day about two weeks after I’d moved back in with him–I hadn’t lived with him since my parents got divorced when I was like six–and he just looked at me and said, “So what are you planning to do with the rest of your life?” I said, “I’m going to write a novel,” and he looked at me and said, “not in this house, you’re not.” He, God bless him, had sort of realized over the years that I’d always had a TV camera running in my head and that’s probably where I should go. My cousin had gone to Memphis and was the anchor at the TV station, so he sent me down there to meet with them. One thing led to another and the company that hired my cousin ended up hiring me at Tulsa. That’s how I got started.

MR: Did it ever become a mission of sorts?

AM: No, you know how it is. You’re always trying to grow somehow–at least I always am. I’m always trying to get better. I’ve always been very detail-oriented. Television, for me, is as much about the making of television as it is about the journalism. CBS is a very story- and piece-driven network. It’s unlike cable where you’re just trying to constantly spit out news and keep moving. CBS has always been a show-driven network which focuses on pieces, like 60 Minutes, like CBS Sunday Morning with Charles Osgood, or evening news in a smaller format. The craft of making pieces and the detail in those pieces is something that I always liked anyway to begin with, but it’s something that has always been paramount at CBS and probably the main reason why I’ve never left. I’m the kind of guy who will sit in the editing room working onSunday Morning… pieces and it’s not unusual for me to be there until one o’clock on a Sunday morning making sure every little damn thing that I have in my head and want to be in that story is there.

Particularly with music pieces, I don’t know what it is but I feel a duty to the artist that I’m involved with, that I get the details of it right and the tone of it right. I try to make the pieces feel like the musician if you know the musician at all. It’s very daunting, as you probably know, to do a piece on somebody like Springsteen or any major artist for that matter, because they have an enormous fan base and if you screw it up and are not fair or get the details wrong, they’re going to rain holy hell down on you in social media or anywhere else for that matter. It’s not that I’m scared of that reaction but when you’re telling a story about somebody, you’re talking not only to that fan base but also to people who really don’t know anything about them, so you have to tell two stories in one. You have to actually offer something up to the people who are huge fans, but you also have to offer up a story that introduces other people to this artist.

It’s very challenging but it’s very interesting as well. That was the part that I found most intimidating in the beginning. I had never been a big interviewer and had never really tested myself that way. In fact, had largely spent the first twenty years of my career at CBS trying to write myself out of every story so that all you saw was the character in it and you didn’t really see me, but I realized that if you’re going to do an interviewing segment you have to be part of that in some way, you have to have a personality, but you don’t want that personality to overwhelm the story you’re doing, so how do you develop an interviewing technique that has its own personality without that personality becoming the focus, which I see people do often and I don’t like.

MR: Do you have any examples?

AM: God, that’s tough. It’s hard for me to judge because I judge by a different scale. I’m really picky about a lot of little things. But we did a piece with Van Morrison forCBS Sunday Morning… early on and I had heard a lot of things from a lot of different people in the music business about how incredibly difficult he could be and how much he doesn’t like to talk. It was among the more enjoyable days I’ve spent doing this, because we had a really good time talking. He obviously was reticent to talk but for some reason, he did talk that day. It was one of those moments where I remember sitting across from somebody and thinking, “My God, I’ve been listening to your music my whole life and I don’t think I’ve ever seen you speak.” It was really stunning because there aren’t many people who are well known like that who you’ve never seen in any kind of lengthy conversation. Even going back, looking at old clips of him, there aren’t that many. There’s very little of Van Morrison actually being interviewed anywhere.

I’m always trying to make the artist relax and understand that I appreciate their craftsmanship, because I do. I’m not an in-your-face kind of interviewer; I’m a draw-you-out kind of interviewer. I try to leave the space open and let them come fill it. I find particularly with musicians that’s what they want. They don’t want to talk to a fan. That kind of scares them, actually. I don’t go in asking them, “Why did you do this on the third track of your fourth album?” The obsessiveness of some fans kind of scares them. I talk to them like they’re people like me. The tone I’m always trying to take is to create an environment where if I’m sitting on the sofa with the artist, the viewer is sitting on the arm of the sofa just listening in. It’s not an interview, it’s just a conversation about certain episodes in this person’s life.

MR: What do you think is behind the big success of CBS morning shows?

AM: I think on all of the shows in the morning now, from Sunday to the weekday show to our Saturday show, my view is that the audience is much more intelligent than a lot of TV people give them credit for and that you can find an interesting, smart and entertaining approach to almost anything if you really work at it. That’s always been my philosophy about storytelling. I feel like if I find something interesting I can make it interesting to anyone. One of the approaches we’ve taken with Saturday, somebody on the weekday show who was a big music fan said to me, “You know there’s a maxim in morning TV that music doesn’t rate.” I said, “That’s ridiculous. Music doesn’t rate if you just throw it out there and you put a band up there and say, ‘Here’s whatever band it is.'” I said, “If you introduce people to that band and you invest in them who they are in some fashion they’ll listen. If you just say, ‘Here’s Lake Street Dive’ and they come play they’ll give them about five seconds and if they don’t like the beat of the song, they’ll go make a cup of coffee.”

Two weeks ago, we did a two and a half minute piece introducing Lake Street Dive and then they played two songs. My whole philosophy was people are interested in people. If they find you interesting as a person then they’ll be interested in what you’re doing. That’s kind of the pathway that I’ve taken with music. If you look at the Sunday morning pieces I do–I always tell the artists, because they’re always trying to promote an album, I say, “We don’t do stories on albums. We do stories on people.” An album may be part of that story in some fashion. One of my favorite pieces we did earlier this year was on Rosanne Cash, an album that came out of a return to her own roots and her father’s beginning, they were redoing her father’s boyhood home in Arkansas. That’s what we focused on, her whole trip back to the south, which she’d kind of run from her whole life.

That’s a case where I was like, “Okay, this sounds interesting.” They told us what she’s done and I said, “If she can take us back to all those places, then we can make something work.” It turned out we never really did a sit-down interview with her. The whole interview was pretty much conducted as we were driving or as we were walking to these places. It’s probably my favorite piece of television that I’ve done over the last five years. It just flows like a river, that whole story. Whenever I’m talking to kids who write TV, I say, “You want to try to hide the seams. You don’t want people to see that this is a television construct. Then they forget the story and start looking at what it’s made of.” When Rosanne came on the Saturday show we used a stretch of that material of her visiting her father’s house by way of introducing it. I think the weekday show knows what it’s about, it knows what it’s trying to do and it does it really well. I think that’s certainly true of Sunday Morning and that’s what, in the last year and a half, we’ve really been trying to do with the Saturday show which has drifted between identities for a number of years and was sort of lost in its direction due to its many management changes.

I think the success of any show is about a point of view, and I don’t mean that in a political sense or an ideological sense or anything like that. You’re trying to create a certain tone and a certain mood and this is what we’re about. If you can create that atmosphere and are consistent with it and deliver week in and week out on what you’re doing–the Saturday show has been known for years for having really good chefs on it and when I took over the show, I’m not a foodie at all but I said, “Look, this is the one place on Saturday mornings where we actually get rock stars, we get the best chefs in the world on this show because we’ve created an identity and a place, but we need to do that across more places,” and that’s when Brian Applegate–who’s the senior producer of CBS This Morning and who’s maybe an even bigger music fan than me–we both said, “We want music every week again.”

That’s how the show used to do it some years ago, but it stopped. We don’t want just anybody who’s passing through town, we want the best musicians we can get and when we can we want to tell their stories as well as have them perform. We had Norah Jones in taping with Puss ‘N’ Boots who are her two friends Sasha [Dobson] and Catherine [Popper]. Jackson Browne is coming in, Tori Amos is coming in, John Hiatt is coming in, we’ve set a bar high for ourselves and said, “We want really talented people, we want them to know that we’re serious about putting good music on television and we want to do it every week and we want to build a reputation for that.” It started last year after I’d done a piece on Aaron Neville on Sunday and I’m like, “I want to get Aaron Neville” on the Saturday show. It took us about four or five months but we made it happen, he came on right before Christmas. When Brian saw we did that he suddenly reached out to get The National. I was like, “Wow, that’s a reach,” but we got them for Grammy week and we were like, “Okay, we’ve got something going here.” We’ve kind of been on a roll ever since, musically. We’re booked now all the way into September with the names I just told you. I’m a big believer that you can be serious but have fun at the same time. You can be smart but laugh and on a Saturday morning that’s what people want. They want you to treat them seriously. They don’t want you to throw junk at them just to fill two hours of TV. We’re not doing that. We don’t have a big staff but we think really hard about everything we do.

MR: Where is the show ultimately heading?

AM: A two-hour television show is a monstrous beast. I was kind of terrified of it when they asked me to do the Saturday show. I was an English major in college, I strove to write stories with a beginning, a middle and an end and construct them in a way that they held up all the way through. I’m the kind of guy who if he goes to the movie he wants to stay to the end because I want to see how it’s made. The few times I’d subbed on the show in years earlier it was frankly kind of a mess. You’d be in the middle of it and you’d go, “What is this show about?” We’ve got fashion segments, we’ve got cooking segments, we’ve got a couple of guys helping you rebuild your house, I don’t know what this show is about. It’s trying to be about so many different things to different people but you can’t tell at the heart of it what it really is. I think more than anything you have got to find what that is and you’ve got to try to stay true to it every week.

You’re not always going to hit it. Some weeks are going to be better than others and you’re always going to ask yourself, “Why did this show work better than that show?” but we are trying to build out, segment by segment, a definition. We’re off and running with music, we’ve got food, we want to continue that to film, we want to do some different things with film and movies other than just having a list of something every week. I’m not sure what that is yet but we’re trying some things and working on that. We also have a commitment to technology and science, again, having fun with it and making it accessible to everybody. We have this guy Jeffrey Kluger from Time, he’s their science writer who is terrific and can make anything scientific interesting. Jeffrey’s on once a month and I love him, he’s great. When I first started understanding what made two hours of television work it was the week Jeffrey was on and he was talking about Mars. We had him on, we had Thomas Keller, the great chef, and we had a really fun band called The Piano Guys who just were great TV.

MR: The Piano Guys can be lots of fun.

AM: To be honest with you I was somewhat skeptical but they were great television that week and we had a really fun show where you left feeling smart, you had a great time, and I was like, “This is what I want to do every week.” You build a show across certain templates that you try to hit. Most people aren’t going to stay for two hours and can’t, but I still want to build a show that if you stay from beginning to end has a story arc to it and a flow to it and a feeling to it so if you are there for a whole thing it was worth it. That’s way more than you’ve ever wanted to know about this show, but…

MR: No, I really enjoy the passion and appreciation you have for all that goes into the process. I think you’ve made it apparent what your mission is–to explore music and artists in the best way you possibly can.

AM: I love and admire musicians in part because I am utterly unmusical myself, I can’t hit a note to save my life. My daugther will tell you I couldn’t sing if my life depended on it.

MR: Nope, you’re just being modest. If you can talk, you can sing.

AM: That’s absolutely true. And I’ve always considered the pieces I do, particularly for Sunday Morning, as my songs. There are a lot of similarities in the way a song is constructed and the way a piece of television is constructed, which is why I totally relate to songwriting and I love having conversations with musicians about the way things get built. I did have this one producer in our London bureau who’s in a band and when I said that to him he said, “You know, you’re not wrong. It actually makes sense.” A story has a rhythm to it, it has a visual rhythm, it has an audio rhythm. I’ve always heard all of that in the way a story feels. That’s why I spend as much time working on them as I do.

[Note: Anthony Mason co-hosts CBS This Morning: Saturday with Vinita Nair. Its senior broadcast producer is Brian Applegate with Chris Licht executive producing.]

Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne