by Brendan Pedersen
When I asked Tom Bettag how he would describe the role of “producer” in a newsroom, he — like many great executive producers before him — talked about unclogging toilets in Somalia.
It was the mid-1990s, and the American military was leading a “humanitarian effort” with the United Nations against the backdrop of the Somali Civil War. Bettag and his team from Nightline, the ABC nightly news program anchored by Ted Koppel, were reporting on the ground. They were holed up in a shack on the outskirts of town, apparently abandoned before the team rolled in. The water was not running. The toilet was clogged. The smell was not improving.
So Bettag took care of it — “because that’s what the producer does,” he says. From writing the night’s lead to scooping poop in the Somali heat, the executive producer’s responsibilities are as they have always been: diverse.
That may sound demeaning to the profession, and maybe it is. But Bettag has always taken the grittier parts of his job in stride. “If you aren’t willing to serve,” he says, “you aren’t fit to lead.”
Bettag has been leading national newsrooms for a long time: he worked at CBS for over two decades, ultimately as Dan Rather’s executive producer for CBS Evening News from 1986 through 1991. Then he made his way to ABC, where he was executive producer for Nightline and This Week with George Stephanopoulos from 1991 until 2006. He has also worked for CNN and NBC and, to date, he has been awarded at least 30 Emmy Awards. Chris Bury, senior journalist in residence at DePaul University and a longtime Nightline correspondent, described his boss of 14 years as “among the all-time best producers in network news.”
Bettag says he doesn’t do much professional broadcast work these days. Instead, he’s teaching at the University of Maryland as the Eleanor Merrill Distinguished Visiting Fellow. When I asked why he made the jump to teaching, he said it wasn’t so much a leap as another step.
“Producing is writing, reporting, managing, editing — a bit of everything,” he says. “Teaching is a natural extension of that, and I always wanted to get there and do it eventually.”
His students at UMD, he says, “really look like America.” Bettag taught for a brief time at the University of Notre Dame (where he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in history), and students there didn’t quite bring the same magnitude of diversity (Notre Dame’s study body is 73 percent white while DePaul’s, for comparison, is 55 percent). But in Maryland, where in-state tuition for the state’s elite flagship university hovers around $10,000 a year, he sees the future of his country and, by extension, journalism.
Along with the diversity of experience, Bettag is also a passionate advocate for a diversity of expertise. While he believes there is some value in teaching journalism as its own degree, he said it was best paired with a more specific area of study: political science, economics or even a science.
“When I see a job applicant with ‘journalism’ as their educational background, I have a lot of questions,” he says. “When I see ‘communications,’ I have a lot more questions.”
Bettag usually works with students towards the ends of their academic career, preparing them for the jobs they’re about to dive headfirst into. But beyond their portfolios, educational backgrounds and internships, Bettag wants his students to know how to operate as part of a team — something integral to all newsrooms and broadcast newsrooms in particular. He pointed to the trajectory of another journalist — The Center’s Carol Marin — to illustrate the bridge between teamwork and teaching.
“Carol was always looking out for people in the newsroom,” Bettag says. “It’s just what she does, always did. It doesn’t surprise me at all that she wound up teaching. It’s about giving — that’s what teaching is.”
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