Fighting Back   

Barbara Cochran takes over as president of RTNDA

After directing coverage of the Persian Gulf War, two presidential administrations and the 1994 Republican Revolution, Barbara Cochran is taking on what may be her toughest assignment yet: defending the First Amendment.

As the new president of the Radio-Television News Directors Association, Cochran, 51, will represent 4,000 electronic journalists on issues affecting broadcast media. Cochran, who succeeds David Bartlett, plans to use her new position as a platform for strengthening public trust in the broadcast media, upholding professional standards and, in her view most important, fighting against threats to the First Amendment rights of journalists.

"RTNDA is the only organization that speaks for television and radio news managers as a whole," says Cochran, who most recently was CBS News' executive producer for politics and previously served as CBS Washington bureau chief, executive producer of "Meet the Press," vice president of news at National Public Radio and managing editor of the late Washington Star. "Being its president is a unique opportunity to be an advocate."

Cochran, a native of Akron, Ohio, is concerned but not deterred by growing threats to journalists' freedom and reputations. Recent verdicts that have punished "PrimeTime Live" and the Wall Street Journal are definitely "disturbing," Cochran says, but they don't necessarily mean investigative reporters are an endangered species.

Another issue Cochran plans to tackle is the proliferation of soft news--described by Cochran as "programming that looks like news but may not adhere to the same standards." She says she is concerned that such programming has created both intense competition and slipshod reporting. "When the public defines news as everything from Don Imus in the morning to Jay Leno at night," she says, the line between information and entertainment gets awfully muddled.