Tom Bettag graduated from the University of Notre Dame intent on being a newspaperman and holding a print person's contempt for television. Forty years later, he looks back on a career that includes five years as executive producer of the CBS Evening News With Dan Rather and 14 years as executive producer of ABC News Nightline With Ted Koppel.
Bettag credits Fred Friendly, his professor at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, with "seducing" him into broadcast news. Friendly, Edward R. Murrow's executive producer and a former president of CBS News, taught Bettag that television is a public service that is essential to a functioning American democracy.
One Murrow maxim in particular still resonates with Bettag: "This instrument can teach, it can illuminate, yes, it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise, it is merely lights and wires in a box."
Over the years Bettag says he has seen much of this potential for good squandered as television programmers treat viewers more as consumers than citizens, but still he maintains faith in television's ability to prompt serious national discourse. He sees Discovery Channel as a place where curious viewers can come to learn more about their world and how it works. "It's a privilege to have an opportunity to cover the most interesting stories, to share them with others, and to help answer the viewers' question, 'Why should I care?'"
Bettag is the recipient of six duPont-Columbia University Silver Batons, three Overseas Press Club Awards and 30 Emmys. In 2004, he was awarded Quinnipiac University's Fred Friendly Award, which honors journalists who have shown courage and forthrightness in preserving the rights set forth in the First Amendment.
Bettag is a native of Rockford, Mich., and resides in Washington, D.C. He and his wife Claire have two sons, Carl and Andrew.
