By Arman Rahman
Most of the world knew nothing of a particular past President’s private pastime. After releasing a book of his oil paintings, the retired George W. Bush revealed “I paint because it’s an outlet, it’s a sense of creativity I never really had before.”
I expected this type of glance into the soul when I asked former producer Bruce Rheins what he thinks most people don’t know about him. Instead I got a much different answer. “I think that most people may not know that I am still very interested in the state of journalism these days even though I am retired.”
“It has never been at a point where a prevailing viewpoint among a significant percentage of people is that we are simply making things up and are bias to a degree that we’re trying to influence a particular viewpoint one way or another.” He resentfully concluded: “it’s something that I’m really concerned about for my former colleagues and the rest of the nation.”
It is a passionate, seasoned concern that marks Rheins’ voice. His 34 years as a producer began alongside the barrier-breaking ABC World News Tonight anchor Max Robinson in Chicago. He then transitioned to CBS, where he led coverage from the Columbine school massacre, to Hurricane Katrina, to the Iraq War, to the Royal Wedding of Prince Harry and Kate Middleton in London. Yet Chicago, during the Harold Washington years, stands out among the rest.
“It was the city of characters. I’ve often told people it’s the biggest small town in the world,” he reminisces.
Despite his love for our Windy City, his single favorite experience took him to even colder places. He led teams in Antarctica, the South Pole, and the North Pole, covering scientific topics such as climate change. Issues which he knew “hadn’t really taken hold by that time” in 1999. Rather than “doing it before it was cool,” Rheins covered hot topics before the country knew how hot they were.
Upon his return to the South Pole in 2008, concern for the topics of global warming and climate change had grown. After the influx of coverage, he now fears much of the public has begun to tune that issue out.
Yet an issue unfortunately fresh on the country’s mind is another “first” in reporting for Rheins: school shootings. He covered the first glaring, deadly U.S. school shooting: the Columbine massacre.
“There was no template to cover school shootings,” he said. “Unfortunately, there is kind of a template because we have gone through so many of those things today.”
Covering such a chaotic and grief-filled event caused Rheins to empathetically change gears in his reporting. “We sometimes found in our interviews,” he said “that it was too raw and too painful. And we certainly gave people the option of not talking to us or walking away if things were too raw and painful for them.”
A respectful courtesy which Rheins thinks is disappearing with social media-driven competition.
“Especially with the pressure to tweet and to post and to make snapchat videos to lure younger people to watch the story, I think that sometimes that infringes upon taking a thoughtful look at what you’re doing.” He added, “when you’ve got the ‘hot sweet interview with the crying person,’ y’know the inclination nowadays to post that and beat the competition is much more prevalent today than it was back then.”
Rheins disagrees with the web-centric evolution of news, despite being among the pioneers of certain types of news coverage. Reflecting on the self-esteem issues which plagued Max Robinson throughout his career, Rheins believes social media exacerbates that for all in the business.
“Everybody likes to be liked, right? Everyone wants to be acknowledged as doing a good job,” he began. “When they [journalists] are constantly slagged on social media and that social media gets reported on other social media or on other news or non-news websites, y’know it just becomes this echo chamber that becomes, I think, a little bit on the edge of being unbearable.”
Perhaps, to be as ahead of the times as Bruce Rheins has been, we need to take a step back.